Property
444 Words
The morning after Madam Evelyn was buried, the Blackthorn estate felt colder than winter.
The candles in the hall had burned out. The flowers left by guests were already beginning to wilt. Even the servants moved quietly, as if kindness itself had been buried with the old woman.
Ezra stood alone outside his grandmother’s bedroom door, clutching the silver key she had always worn around her neck. It was the only thing he had been allowed to keep.
He pushed the door open slowly.
The room was empty now.
No warm tea waiting by the window. No soft humming from the rocking chair. No gentle voice calling him moonlight. The blankets had been stripped from the bed, the portraits removed from the walls, the shelves cleared as though she had never existed.
His chest tightened painfully.
They had erased her overnight.
Ezra crossed the room on shaking legs and dropped to his knees where her bed had once stood. For the first time since the funeral, tears spilled freely down his face.
“She loved this room,” he whispered into the silence. “How could they do this to you?”
No answer came.
Only the sound of footsteps behind him.
His eldest brother leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. “Finished mourning?”
Ezra rose quickly, wiping his face. “Why did you empty her room?”
“Because she’s dead,” Damian said flatly. “And dead people no longer need space.”
Rage flickered through Ezra’s grief. “She was your grandmother too.”
Damian shrugged. “She wasted too much affection on you to be anything to me.”
Ezra’s breath shook. “You have no heart.”
“And you have no value.”
The words struck harder than any slap.
Downstairs, their father was waiting in his office. Ezra was summoned like a servant, forced to stand while the alpha of the house signed papers without looking at him.
“At your age, you’ve contributed nothing,” his father said. “Your grandmother’s protection is gone. So is your place here.”
Ezra stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” his mother said from the sofa, not bothering to hide her boredom, “you should be grateful someone agreed to take you.”
His stomach dropped.
A contract was slid across the desk.
An arrangement.
A sale.
“You cannot do this,” Ezra whispered.
His father finally looked up. “I already have.”
His brothers smirked from the doorway as guards stepped forward.
Ezra realized then that with his grandmother gone, he was no longer family.
He was property.
- Writer
