THE BROTHER
1083 Words
His name was Theodore. Theo. He would have been thirty-one.
She didn’t sleep after finding it. She kept pulling threads because that was what she did, because stopping felt worse than knowing.
Margin welfare logs. Historical documentation. The kind of records that existed because systems needed to prove they were tracking things, even when the tracking was the cruelest part. She went through it all, slowly, in the blue quiet of four in the morning.
Damon filed the report at seventeen. His own brother. Theo was moved to margin housing within the week, the process quick and clean the way it always was when someone at the top of the chain wanted it done. The welfare logs tracked him for eight months after that. Case worker visits, routine notations, the language of care written by people who were paid to write it and nothing more.
Theo died at sixteen.
A treatable infection. The record gave it two lines.
Sera sat back and looked at her window, the sky still fully dark, and waited for the feeling she’d expected.
She’d thought she would feel vindicated. She’d thought she would find the clean ugly story, the one that explained everything, that made Damon Reeves into a simple thing she could hold at the right distance.
She didn’t get that.
She got a seventeen-year-old boy who had been handed a catastrophic choice by a system that specialized in handing those to people too young to understand the weight of them. And then she got fifteen years of that boy becoming the system’s sharpest tool, every report filed correctly, every remand processed without visible hesitation, as if precision could eventually add up to something that looked like being okay.
She knew that architecture. She’d watched her father build a quieter version of it. After Drey disappeared Edmund had thrown himself into the pack, volunteered for everything, smiled more at gatherings, as if being useful enough could reach back through time and fix something already broken.
Damon had done the same thing but harder, and with more damage on the other end.
She understood it.
That was the part that sat worst. Understanding someone’s wound didn’t make the damage they’d caused smaller. It just meant you couldn’t hate them cleanly, and clean hate was so much easier to carry.
How many wolves had he remanded. How many reports had he filed with Theo’s name somewhere in the back of his mind. Had it felt like penance. Had penance felt close enough to justice that he kept going back to it.
She wanted to ask him all of it, out loud, without cushioning any of it.
She wouldn’t. Not yet.
She closed her laptop and slept three hours on the couch, which was the most her body would give her.
Work moved around her the way it did on bad days, present but slightly removed, like watching something through glass.
She logged her hours, got through the morning briefing, answered what needed answering. Her pharmaceutical project was in the analysis phase, compound derivatives cross-referenced against efficacy data. Her hands knew the work well enough to do it while her mind ran elsewhere.
She was moving through the sourcing documentation when something caught.
Two botanical compounds in the new research batch. The supplier entry was standard language, third-party agricultural partner, the kind of notation she would normally move past without stopping. But the compound names were familiar in a way her pharmaceutical training didn’t account for. She knew them from her own handwritten notes. From two years of learning to work with herbs that most pack members had never heard of.
She looked at the entry for a long moment.
Then she closed the document and moved on. She didn’t have the capacity to follow that thread today. She marked it in her memory and left it there.
Nora was already at the table when Sera got to the dining hall, her cheeks flushed, phone face-down in a way that was just slightly too deliberate. She’d had this glow for weeks now, warm and private, and she put it away when Sera sat down the way you covered something you weren’t ready to share.
“You look awful,” Nora said, which from Nora meant she was worried.
“Didn’t sleep.”
“At all?”
“Barely.”
Nora waited to see if there was more. Sera picked up her fork. There wasn’t more. After a beat Nora let it go and started talking about the communal garden meeting, which had apparently turned into an argument about soil drainage that someone had taken personally.
Sera listened. She made the right sounds. She was aware somewhere underneath it all that Nora was still carrying her private warm thing, still being evasive in the particular way of someone happy about something they weren’t ready to name. Normally Sera would be building a picture of it quietly, turning it over.
Today she had nothing left for it. She filed it away for later, told herself she’d pay closer attention soon, and let Nora’s voice fill the space between them while her mind sat somewhere else entirely.
That evening she sat at her kitchen table with a blank notebook and started mapping what a synthesis route for the compound might look like using materials available through the pharmaceutical lab.
It was theoretically possible. Her background was enough to get her there. The problem was time, and equipment access, and the fact that a single miscalculation in the process would produce something that worked against her instead of for her. She needed to be careful and she needed to be fast and those two things did not naturally sit together.
She was three pages into her notes when her phone buzzed.
A pack notification. Community gathering, tomorrow evening, attendance required for all mid-rank members. Elder Bryce hosting. A welcome event for a newly arrived pack member, a young woman named Lena Cross, transferring in from the Dunmore Pack.
Sera read it once.
Then again.
Then a third time.
The Dunmore Pack ran stricter doctrine than Ashveil. Everyone in the region knew that. Wolves didn’t leave Dunmore for ordinary reasons. They left because something had gone wrong, or because something was about to.
She set her phone down on top of her notebook.
Then she picked it back up, opened her calendar, and set three alarms for tomorrow evening.
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