71__Scarred

Cyrus rushed for the door.

With a gasp, Natalia yanked him back by his arm. “Are you crazy? He’ll kill you in an instant!”

Startled, he looked at her, puzzlement written all over his face.

The door shook with another loud knock. “Don’t make me ask twice.”

Cyrus stared in open-mouthed realization.

Oh, God. Raiden was alive.

Slowly understanding, he took a slow step away from the shaking door. If Raiden was alive, that mean…

A huge slam shook the doors.

Cyrus jolted. If Raiden was alive, that meant Cyrus was so dead!

The doors burst open.

With an expression of deceptive calm hiding his anger, Raiden stalked in. “Open the fucking door when I say open it!”

“Okay, wait! Raiden… hold on!” Natalia was saying, hands held up.

Raiden didn’t stop walking and the closer he came, the more steps Cyrus took back. He was so dead, he was so dead!

“Raiden!” Natalia was struggling to keep him away, wrapping both arms around his middle only to get dragged along as he walked furiously across the room.

“Stay out of this, Natalia.”

Slightly panicking, Cyrus ran to the very end of the room, diving behind Raiden’s desk.

When Raiden reached the table, Natalia watched him reach for it and gasped before jumping away from him. In seconds, the entire desk was thrown across the room, slamming into the left wall.

Left unhidden where he sat on the floor, Cyrus stared at the shattered table and then returned his wide-eyed gaze to his brother’s face.

“Did you have fun?” Raiden questioned furiously. “Plotting behind my back? Being a fucking traitor!”

Cyrus jolted at the raised voice. Snarling, Raiden reached for him.

Natalia immediately leapt across the space between them, grabbing Raiden’s arm away.

His eyes fell closed with rage. “I swear to heaven, Natalia....”

“Think this through!” she told him, balancing on the tip of one foot to keep a hold on his arm. “He’s your only brother!”

His silver eyes glared at Cyrus as he and Natalia physically struggled against each other. “My brother?! No. He said he didn’t have a brother! Am I right, Cyrus? Then I don’t have one either! All I can see is a traitorous bastard who tried to kill me and my Queen. I don’t see my Beta, I don’t see my brother! Let me get my fucking hands on you, you’re dead!”

Gritting her teeth, Natalia wrapped a leg around his thigh and locked it behind his calf so he couldn’t walk. “Calm down! You can’t kill your sibling!”

Clenching his jaw, Cyrus lowered his gaze, his joy over Raiden being alive now iced over by guilt. What had he expected?

Raiden was generous, but after everything, there was no way he’d let this slide.

“First off, he didn’t do it,” Natalia hissed, annoyed by her aching thigh muscle. “I told you it was that straw-haired vulture who did it, so stop terrorizing him!”

Raiden glared at her. “Whose side are you on? We nearly died!”

“I know, I was there!”

“Act like it!”

Scoffing at him, she shook her head in disapproval. “You and your *temper* !”

“I let it go for so long,” said Raiden, looking at Cyrus. “Didn’t I? Didn’t I fucking let you have your temper tantrums and let you curse at me and say whatever the hell you wanted? In the end, that’s what you do to me?! Huh?!”

His shouting was so loud, even Natalia flinched.

Cyrus was tense all over, his muscles clenching so tightly, his hands were shaking.

“Answer me,” Raiden hissed furiously. “Speak up! I know I wasn’t the best brother after Mother died, but really?! I had so much shit on my shoulders, Cyrus! I had to protect the throne, protect our home, I needed to raise Nicki, take care of a whole fucking kingdom, I wanted to fucking die! You think you’re the only one who had it hard? You’re my Beta! We were supposed to get through it together, but you left me. You left me to deal with it and crawled into your little self-pity corner.”

“I didn’t want to!’ Cyrus suddenly yelled.

Jolting with shock, Natalia looked at him with wide eyes. Oh, no. If they both got riled up, how would she control them?!

“Y-you think I wanted to be like that?” Cyrus asked, shooting to his feet. “I was… I was dysfunctional!”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!”

“I was… I was…” Frustrated, he stuttered, searching his head for the words. “I don’t know! I was broken, I couldn’t function!”

Raiden’s teeth clenched. “I swear… you have the darnest ways of making yourself the victim! Every time!”

“I was the victim!” Cyrus told him, his green eyes bloodshot as they shed tears down his face. “I was!”

“A victim of what?!” Raiden shouted, getting even more pissed. “Your entitlement mentality?!”

The words had a visible effect on Cyrus, his face going still, but his eyes filling with pain. More pain than he’d ever thought Raiden could make him feel. Entitlement? Thick tear drops streamed down his face and he slowly shook his head. “N-no… of… of your alphas…”

Raiden scoffed. “What the fuck are you talking—”

“Why don’t you ask them?!” screamed Cyrus, unable to stop talking even with both Natalia and Raiden staring at him. “They’re way closer to you than I am, aren’t they? You’re talking about how I was never there? I didn’t play my role of Beta? I didn’t support you?” With a soft exhale, he shook his head from side to side. “What about you? Where were *you* ?!”

“Cyrus—”

“No!” Shaking his head, he grabbed his messy hair for a moment before looking at Raiden again. “Where were *you*, Raiden? If you wanted me to be your Beta so bad, why didn’t you come looking for me? Did you think I ran away from home? When I stopped coming to see you, when I stopped coming to the main castle, I stopped showing up, I stopped coming by, I didn’t even come to see Nicki… when I stopped smiling… why didn’t you come looking for me? I was down and I couldn’t get back up again. Not without help. And I thought you knew that.”

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous!” Raiden muttered with a deep frown. He had no idea what Cyrus was going on about and it was starting to piss him off.

Those words seemed to ignite a fire in Cyrus’s eyes and he narrowed them at Raiden. “Ridiculous? I’m being ridiculous?” His words were little more than a whisper, but they carried such depth that Natalia couldn’t even look away from his face. In the next instant, Cyrus grabbed the collar of his wrinkled shirt and ripped it apart.

The tearing sound was loud in the silent room, making Natalia gasp as she unwrapped herself from Raiden.

Grunting desperately, Cyrus tore the material until he was free of it and then he flung it to the floor. “Look at me! Does this look… ridiculous to you?!”

Both Natalia and Raiden looked at him, glancing at his body. Cyrus saw the exact moment that they both froze, not a thought moving in their minds.

Nothing but shock and speechlessness gripped them.

A quiet gasp opened Natalia’s mouth, her eyes going wide as she stared at his body.

Gritting his teeth to stop himself from covering the skin he hated to show, Cyrus stood there, open for them to see. In the light of the morning, it was all clear, every scar that marked his skin was exposed for them to see.

“My body…” he whispered. “…will always remind me of what they did.” At the absolute shock and horror that filled Raiden’s eyes as he stared, Cyrus felt prompted to go on. “It’s an eternal reminder of who I am. Only a Beta. I never knew—” He paused, swallowing hard as his throat clogged with tears and heartbreak. “I never knew that it was such a huge *sin* to be born a Beta…. b-but… your alphas put me in my place. I guess they were loyal enough to you that they saw me as a threat and made sure I would never challenge you.”

Raising a trembling hand, he tried to wipe his tears. “It went on for a year. The year after Mother passed. All I had was you but suddenly I didn’t even have that. Because you’re an Alpha, one of them. For a year, beatings... I was… I was starved… beaten until I was nearly dead… humiliated in ways I will *never* forget, oh, God! The immoral shit th-they did to me! They call Devil and Shadow fallen, but they’re all just as sadistic and monstrous as those two! They’d leave me chained, naked in the cold. They made me recite that I… that I’m a Beta—”

“Stop…” Raiden’s face had gone white, his gaze unable to turn away from the ghastly scars marking his brother’s skin.

“I never understood why,” Cyrus said, shaking his head, tears streaming endlessly down his face, so much that they even dripped onto his bare torso. “I didn’t know what I did wrong to them, why they’d treat me that way. I cried for help, I needed you!! They said… they said it was for you. Mother told them to do it. She ordered them to… to abuse me—”

“Oh, God…” Raiden staggered back, staring at Cyrus. Raising a hand, he covered his mouth, gripping it tighter than he’d meant.

“You were always on their side…” Cyrus whispered. “I understood that. I *hated* you. Not just because you didn’t help me, but because I was sure you knew what they did to me and because it was your fault I was so goddamn confident in myself. Despite being overlooked by our parents for being a fair-haired Beta, I trained from a young age. You remember? I was strong, I was confident! Why?” A scoff puffed out of him. “Because my Alpha brother would never ever let me look down on myself.”

Raiden met his gaze, his silver eyes cold with shock and blurry with tears.

Cyrus nodded. “You’d be damned if I ever thought little of myself. You built me up, taught me everything I knew, you were like a god to me.” He shook his head. “Only for you to let them break me… and take it all away!”

“Cyrus…”

“What was the point of loving me as much as you did when we were kids, Raiden? If you’d ignored me, I wouldn’t have been a cocky Beta then and I wouldn’t be an abused Beta now!”

Horrified out of his mind, Raiden couldn’t say a word. He only stared at his brother.

Cyrus took a deep breath, filling his lungs. It felt like he was breathing for the first time ever. “All these years… you asked me why I hated you, you asked me what happened. At first, I didn’t want to say anything because I believed you wouldn’t help me, you wouldn’t care. Now, I realize, I was afraid. I didn’t want to reveal it to you. You were the only person who ever believed in me and told me I was strong, I didn’t want to show you that, in reality… I was weak. Well… now you know…”

The room was filled with a thick, deep silence for a moment.

“What’s going on?” a quiet voice asked.

Natalia looked over her shoulder. “Oh… Veronica. Nothing much, w-what’s… what’s up?”

Nicki frowned at the odd vibe in the room, glancing at the shattered table before looking at Raiden’s back and Cyrus who she could barely see with Raiden in the way. “Uhm… the alphas are here. They’re in the den. Bye!”

Wanting to escape the horrid atmosphere, she dashed away to join Milana downstairs where the kitchen staff were preparing a feast. If her brothers were fighting, it was good, she reckoned. At least they were talking to each other.

Natalia turned back around to face Cyrus, her head spinning with everything she’d just witnessed.

That had been a lot. Far more than she had ever imagined. Staring at him, she felt her heart twist with sadness. The alphas hadn’t bullied him. They’d abused him. Oh, heavens have mercy.

Slowly, she slipped her cloak off her shoulders and took it off. Walking quietly to him, she reached around and draped it onto his bare shoulders.

With a sigh, he put his arms through and wore it, grateful to be able to cover his scars again. “...Thank you…”

She desperately wanted to hug him, but held back, not wanting to make him uncomfortable.

With a deep sigh, a big exhale that sounded like relief, he plopped down into Raiden’s office chair.

“You should probably go, Natalia.”

She blinked, wiping away her tears. “Hm?”

Cyrus looked up at her, smiled sadly. “Raiden. He’s gone to the den. If you don’t go now, he’ll kill every single one of them.”