Chapter 378: The extra brother

Noah

The words landed somewhere deep and unexpected in my chest, knocking the breath out of me for a second.

I had spent so much time viewing Cyan as an extension of Cassian’s world, someone glamorous and distant who only existed in orbit around the Wolfe family that I hadn’t realized how much space he had taken up in my own life over the last few hours.

"Yeah," I said quietly, a real, unburdened smile touching my lips as I closed my eyes. "I think we actually are."

Cyan didn’t say anything more after that, which was somehow the perfect response. He just closed his eye again, letting the quiet warmth of the room take over.

By the time we finally left the hotel, the sun had gone down completely, leaving the city streets cool and dark.

Cyan’s arms were full of his own shopping bags, and my hands were full of mine as we walked back toward the orange sports car parked near the curb. I felt remarkably human, my skin warm from the spa and my chest lighter than it had been in months.

"Oh," Cyan said suddenly as we entered the car. He turned around to face me, his pink hair catching the yellow glow of the streetlamp outside the car.

"What?" I asked, pulling the seatbelt across. "Did you forget your keys?"

"No, I almost forgot something else," he said, his brow furrowing slightly as his expression shifted into something curious and intense. "I wanted to ask you one last thing before I drop you off."

I let out a soft huff, the cool night air catching my breath. "Cyan, you’ve asked me approximately forty unhinged questions today. I think my brain is full."

"This one is different," he said, his voice dropping into a completely casual, breezy tone that didn’t match the sharp focus in his eyes at all. He leaned against the hood of the car, crossing his arms. "What do you think of Nick?"

I stopped dead on the concrete, the shopping bags dragging against my legs.

"...What?" I whispered.

I sat completely frozen in the passenger seat, my mind entirely jammed by the question he had just thrown at me out of nowhere.

My hands gripped the handles of the paper shopping bags resting against my knees, the crisp sound of the paper loud in the small space. I took a slow, shaky breath, trying to pull myself together before I answered.

"Before I answer your question," I started, my voice sounding a little smaller than I wanted it to against the low rumble of the engine, "can I ask you something first?"

Cyan didn’t look over immediately, keeping his eyes on the road as he started the car and drove into the highway. "Feel free."

I swallowed down the tightness in my throat, staring straight ahead at the windshield. "Is there something going on between you and Nick?"

The car crawled forward another three inches. Cyan didn’t answer right away. He let the silence hang between us for a long moment before he finally turned his head to look at me.

A slow smile crawled up his face, not his usual loud, laughing grin, but the teasing, quiet version he used when he knew he had the upper hand.

"What do you think, darling?"

My cheeks flared up instantly, the familiar heat rushing straight to my ears. I shifted uncomfortably in the low leather seat, my fingers twisting the paper handles.

"I’m not... I’m not trying to police who you see or anything like that. It’s really none of my business, and I don’t mean to pry. It’s just, it’s not that."

Cyan’s smile faded just a little, his eyes narrowing as he tracked the nervous movement of my hands.

"Tell me why it matters so much to you."

"Because Nick is—" I broke off, the name catching in my throat like a piece of glass. I forced myself to take another breath and restarted the sentence, keeping my voice as flat and honest as I could.

"He’s not a good person, Cyan. Like, actually. He isn’t."

The remaining trace of amusement left Cyan’s face entirely. His expression shifted into something much more attentive, his posture straightening as he leaned a little closer to the center console.

"Oh," he murmured softly. "Tell me more about that."

I turned my head toward the side window, watching the pedestrians blur past on the sidewalk. The traffic had come to a complete standstill now, a long line of metal trapped under the dark evening sky.

"I’ve never really told anyone the whole story," I said, my voice barely louder than a whisper. "Except Cassian. A little bit of it, anyway. When things got really bad."

Cyan stayed completely quiet, waiting for me to continue without dropping an ounce of pressure on me to hurry up.

"Because he’s my twin, people always assumed we were close," I muttered, my fingers digging into the fabric of my trousers.

"They thought we shared secrets or looked out for each other. We didn’t. We never did." I took a short, shallow breath.

"Growing up, everything our father valued in a son, Nick had it. He had it naturally, without even trying. He was loud, he was confident, he was popular. And I was just... there. I was just the extra one."

I paused, staring at the blurred reflection of my own face in the dark glass. I hadn’t planned on digging all of this up today, but the weight of the afternoon and the quiet safety of the car felt like a heavy hand pushing the words out of me.

Our father, George Bennett, was the kind of man who measured everything. He had a strict, cold standard for how his sons should behave, how we should talk, and what we should achieve.

He never actually sat us down to explain the rules, but he made them perfectly clear every single day by the way he looked at us. Or, more accurately, by the way he looked at me.

Nick met that standard without breaking a sweat. He excelled at sports, he got the right grades when he cared to try, and he could make an entire room of adults laugh with a single smile.

At school, the hallways practically belonged to him. He was the charismatic bad boy that the teachers quietly forgave because he had charm, and the other students completely admired him. He was everything I wasn’t.

I was invisible. Or worse, I was visible for all the wrong reasons. I was the awkward twin, the quiet one who stuttered when the pressure got too high, the one the teachers pitied and the other kids just ignored.

And Nick didn’t just let it happen. His cruelty wasn’t passive. He didn’t just stand by and watch me struggle; he actively used my weakness to make himself look better.

It started during the fall semester of our senior year. One evening, we were in our shared bathroom at home, and Nick looked over at me while he was fixing his hair.

He said it casually, like it didn’t matter at all, like he was just being a good brother. "You should hang around Ethan’s group," he told me. "They’re decent guys. They’d probably let you tag along."

I remember feeling a sudden, pathetic jolt of shock in my chest. Nick had noticed me. He was giving me advice. I felt so incredibly grateful that he was finally throwing me a bone that I didn’t stop to think about why.

What I didn’t find out until much later was that Nick had already approached them. He had literally paid for their cooperation, turning my entire social life into a scripted joke.

Every welcome they gave me over the next few months, every smile from Ethan, every weekend invitation.. it was all rehearsed.