Chapter 40 The Things We Don't Say

Chapter 40 The Things We Don't Say
Rafael's POV

My father pushed his chair back so hard it scraped across the stone floor like a growl.

He stood up, and I could see the anger sitting stiff in his shoulders and tight in his jaw. He was a proud man. 

He had always been a proud man. Being told no, especially by his own son, in his own packhouse was something he had never learned to swallow gracefully.

"I am still the elder Alpha of this pack," my father said, his voice clipped and hard. 

"My word still carries weight in this house. Whether you like it or not, Alessandro."

"I know it does, Father," Alessandro said. He hadn't moved from his chair. His voice was calm. 

"And I respect that. But not tonight. Not with this."

My father looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at me. I met his eyes and didn't look away. 

Something shifted in his face. 

Disappointment.

He straightened his jacket, lifted his chin, and walked out without another word. The dining hall doors shut behind him with a dull, heavy thud.

The three of us sat in the silence he left behind. Aurora looked down at her hands. A candle on the table flickered in the draft from the closed door.

Then Alessandro turned to me.

He didn't say anything straight away. He just looked at me with that expression I had known my whole life, the one that meant he was choosing his words carefully because the ones coming naturally to him were too loud for the room.

"Rafael," he said finally.

"Alessandro-"

"No." He shook his head once. 

"Let me talk first."

I closed my mouth.

Alessandro leaned forward, resting both arms on the table, and looked at me directly. 

Not as the Alpha. As my brother.

"What is going on with you?" he asked. 

"And I mean that seriously. What is actually going on? 

Because I'm standing here trying to make sense of what I just walked into tonight and none of it is adding up."

I said nothing.

"I remember," Alessandro continued, his voice steady and even, "a very specific conversation. 

You and me. About eight months ago. During my wedding, you told me very clearly that you were not ready to settle down and that you love your freedom and don't want to be tamed by a bond.

Those were your exact words. You said the mate bond felt like a trap and you weren't going to let it run your life." 

He tilted his head slightly. 

"Does any of that sound familiar?"

"Yes," I said quietly.

"Good. So then help me understand," Alessandro said, spreading his hands open on the table, "how we went from that conversation to tonight. 

Because tonight I walked in and found you sitting at a dinner table that was clearly set up for a marriage discussion, with a woman from another pack sitting in our dining hall being waited on like a queen, treating our pack members like servants— 
" 

He stopped himself. His jaw tightened. "And you said nothing. You sat there and you said nothing, Rafael. 

You told Zara to clean the woman's boots."

Aurora stood up quietly. She looked at Alessandro, then at me, and then she touched Alessandro's shoulder briefly.

"I'll check on the kitchen," she said softly. 

"Give you two some space."

Alessandro nodded without looking away from me. Aurora left, closing the door gently behind her. Nothing like the way my father had left.

Now it was just the two of us.

"Talk," 

I pushed my chair back and stood up. I couldn't have this conversation sitting still. I walked to the window at the far side of the room and looked out at the dark grounds. 

The torches along the outer walls were burning low. The forest beyond the gates was just a dark shape against a darker sky.

"I know how it looked." 

"I don't care how it looked," Alessandro said. "I care about what it was. There's a difference."

I pressed my hand against the cold stone of the window frame.

"Father set it up," I said. "He told me two days ago. He didn't ask me. He just told me. 

Alpha Silas was coming, Elena was coming, and the expectation was that I would go along with it."

"And you did," Alessandro said. Not accusing. Just stating it.

"I sat at the table," I said. "That's all I did."

"You told Zara to clean Elena's boots, Rafael."

I turned around and looked at him. His face was tired and straight. He wasn't going to let me soften this into something easier.

"I know," 

"That's not sitting at a table," he said. 

"That's participating. That's something else entirely." He leaned back and crossed his arms. 

"So here is my question. And I want an honest answer. Not a deflection, not a clever answer. Honest." 

He looked at me hard. "Are you actually considering going through with this? Marrying Elena?"

The silence stretched.

"No," I said finally.

"Then why didn't you just say that to Father from the beginning? 

Why did you let it get this far? Why did you let that woman sit in our home and treat Zara like that and not say a single word? "

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again.
Alessandro watched me struggle with it. His eyes narrowed slightly.

"There's something you're not saying." 

"Alessandro—"

"There's something you're not telling me." He uncrossed his arms and sat forward. "I know you, Rafael. I have known you your entire life. 

You are a lot of things, but you are not cruel. What happened in this room tonight was not you. 

Something is going on, and you are standing there carrying it by yourself for some reason, and I want to know what it is."

The fire in the hearth crackled.

I thought about the seer's words. 

I thought about how I had walked back to the pack house in the early gray morning feeling like something cold had been poured into my chest and left to sit.

I couldn't tell Alessandro any of that.

I couldn't tell him about the curse. I couldn't tell him what the seer had said. Because if I told Alessandro, he would try to find another way. 

He would pull in every resource he had, call in favors from every pack and elder and scholar he knew, and spend months chasing a different answer. 

I had already done that. I had already asked the seer if there was another way. Three times. Her answer had not changed.

And I could not tell Alessandro to watch me deliberately break my mate’s heart on purpose, because he would never allow it. 

He would stop me. He loved me enough to stop me from doing the one thing that might actually save us both.

So I said the only thing I could say.

"I'm handling it." 

Alessandro stared at me. 

The fire popped in the silence.

"You're handling it," he repeated slowly.

"Yes."

"That is genuinely the least satisfying answer you have ever given me in your entire life," Alessandro said, "and you once told me you lost my hunting knife, and your answer was things go missing sometimes."

Despite everything, something almost like a laugh moved through my chest. It didn't make it out.

"I just need some time," I said. "I'm not marrying Elena. I was never going to marry Elena. 

Father can be angry about that. That's fine. But I need you to trust me on the rest of it."

Alessandro looked at me for a long, long moment. The kind of look that went all the way through a person and checked every corner.

"Does this have anything to do with Zara?" he asked quietly.

My jaw tightened. I looked back at the window.

"Rafael."

"I told you," I said. "I'm handling it."

Alessandro was quiet for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. Gentler.

"Don't do to her what Leonardo did," he said. "Whatever you're doing, whatever you think you have to do. Don't become the thing she can't recover from."

I said nothing. I kept my eyes on the dark forest outside the window and said absolutely nothing, because there was nothing I could say that wasn't a lie.