Chapter 17 - Byron

Numbly, I flip through the Rosecreek surveillance cameras, watching Zane and Olivia as they leave the bakery with Linnea. She's talking the whole time, bubbly and over-the-top, as usual, and leads them to the pack center. I watch as they give Zane a full tour, acting like he's going to be sticking around.

I know for a fact that he won't. It's not exactly one of his strong suits.

Which should be evident to Olivia and Linnea. I'm not sure why they're wasting their time on him—it's not exactly easy to shake your pack's scent and take on a rogue scent like Zane has done. It required a very careful strategy, including him leaving when he turned eighteen and never staying in one place for too long.

Our family hadn't been particularly wealthy. Our dad worked for the town Alpha, and our mom was a part-time dental hygienist. We may not have had all the newest video games or clothes, but we were happy.

I swallow down a lump in my throat when I think of climbing trees with Zane, swimming in the creek together, whooping and hollering as we took our bikes down the biggest hill in the neighborhood. He was always betting on things—that he could go faster, higher, quicker than someone else.

Two years older than me, Zane had every opportunity to be an asshole to his little brother, but he wasn't. He always watched out for me, scared off the bullies. Everyone knew that you'd have Zane to deal with if you messed with me.

He was an asshole to everyone else, including our parents. Doing dumb shit on the weekends, like knocking down mailboxes, lighting dumpsters on fire, and scaring the local humans by shifting and chasing them through the woods.

My parents were at their wits ends with him, just before they died. I thought that the grief of losing them might have made him clean up his act, and realize that he'd been putting a lot of stress on our dad before he died, but, if anything, their deaths only made him worse.

He'd go missing for days at a time, come home smelling of weed. He was supposed to be working at a factory that took sixteen-year-olds under the table, but I never saw one of those paychecks. I had to adapt, and fast. And that's why I learned how to code.

Through the screen, I watch as Zane puts his hand on the small of Olivia's back, and I want to reach through the camera to rip his arm off. As they go throughout town, the little touches continue—his fingers around her wrist, a little tap on the top of her head, telling her to hold still so he can rescue an imaginary bug.

The worst part is that Olivia giggles through all of it. Like this is some random flirtation, and not my brother .

The longer I watch, the angrier I get. At one point, I even swear to the Gods that the motherfucker winks at one of the cameras, like he knows I'm watching.

I try to tell myself that it shouldn't matter—that I have no claim over Olivia, but logic doesn't help to soothe the rage coursing me.

What right does Zane have to show up here after all these years, breaking into my apartment, touching my—touching Olivia.

My mind flashes back to the day he left, like it always does, the anger and bitterness rising in my chest.

It was the day after my sixteenth birthday. When our parents died, I led Zane through the process of emancipation, then used my income from coding online to support us. From the time I was fourteen years old, I did everything—from paying the bills to buying the groceries to scheduling an appointment for Zane to get his fucking braces off.

I hadn't planned on celebrating my birthday until Zane showed up with a cake from the grocery store and a single can of beer. Honestly, I was shocked that he remembered. Shocked that he could take time away from smoking and hanging out with his shitty friends to care about something like my birthday.

"You're a man now," he'd said, placing them in front of me.

"Isn't this for when I turn twenty-one?" I laughed, as I took a bite of the cake. It was the first time since our parents' deaths that things had felt even close to normal. That Zane had felt closer to the brother I once knew, instead of a ghost floating through the house, coming home to shower and sleep for a few hours before disappearing again.

"I'd argue that you earned that beer," Zane said, quietly, before quickly challenging me to a battle on Mario Kart. We stayed up all night, playing video games and laughing, pushing each other and trying to sabotage the other's chance of winning.

It was one of the best birthdays of my life.

Then, I woke up the next morning on the living room floor, wrapped in blankets, the controller still blinking, and it needed reconnecting. Our game paused at the moment I fell asleep.

When I walked into the kitchen, saying his name, all I saw was a hastily scribbled note on the counter. I'd sat, hard, on a kitchen stool, a cold feeling of loneliness like nothing I'd ever experienced before descending over me.

I was different than all the other kids at school, working forty hours a week, barely sleeping, filing taxes. The teachers pitied me, but didn't make an effort to connect with me. The Alpha never even reached out to make sure I was okay.

After Zane left, I waited a year, then got guardianship of myself. I worked hard so I could graduate a year early, with the class above me, which made me feel even more alone. They were all staring at this scrawny kid who had just dyed his hair blue, wondering what the hell I was doing amongst them, wearing my cap and gown.

I was walking across the stage when I glanced up and saw Zane, standing at the back of the room, up against the padding on the walls behind the basketball hoops. I had no idea how he even knew I was graduating—I hadn't sent him notice or taken a picture with the class. I just wanted to get in and get out, and the only reason I was at the ceremony was for extra credit from my government teacher.

"Trust me," she'd said, pacing in front of the classroom. "Someday, you're going to look back on these moments and be glad you took the time to recognize them."

By the time the ceremony was done, my brother was nowhere to be seen. I had nobody to take pictures with, so I just left, driving back to my parents' house, and nobody even noticed I was gone.

It took two months to sell the house, and I subleased in Massachusetts until my dorm was ready. College was easier because the other people in my program were like me—quiet, drive, and technology-obsessed. We were all too busy with our heads in our computers to care about parties and social hierarchies.

During my senior year of high school, a recruiter from the agency came. He said my tech skills were amazing, but if I wanted to be on a special ops team, I would need to get strong. So, I trained every day until I was no longer the typical scrawny computer guy.

I could bench press enough to shock other people at the gym. I got good at throwing knives. I learned how to incapacitate people, shifters, and other paranormals in hand-to-hand combat.

Then, after graduating at the top of my class at MIT, I entered the agency and joined Aris's force. At first, I held back from that team, thinking that everyone in life leaves you. After years of having each other's backs, I started opening up to them. A drunken conversation with Linnea on St. Patrick's Day had me revealing more than I ever meant to.

Now, I'm a part of this family, part of the Rosecreek pack, but nobody relies on me. If I left—or died—tomorrow, they could go one, unlike Zane and I when our parents died. Once they were gone, we had nobody.

On the screen, Bigby is slapping Zane on the back, chatting with him easily. It's not my friends' fault—I've never told any of them how Zane left me, the extent to which that's affected my social life—but it still hurts to watch him get in easily, just off the fact that he's my brother, when he's spent most of his life pretending that's not true.