I sat in the silence of the smaller conference room long after the click of the lock had echoed against the walls. I sat there, paralyzed, my mind a jagged loop of the last ten minutes.
I replayed it over and over, the way the air seed to flee the room when I ntioned the word prison. I saw the way Cassian’s jaw had tightened, the bone nearly popping beneath the skin of his cheek. I saw that blank, impenetrable Wolfe expression, but for the first ti, I saw what it was trying to bury.
He looked hurt.
My chest felt tight, as if an invisible wire were being wound around my ribs, cinching tighter with every shallow breath I took. This should have been the mont of my greatest triumph. I had won. I had stood up to the titan, I had bitten the hand that owned , and I had secured the very thing I’d been praying for since that night I punched him.
Freedom. I was out of the contract. I was away from Cassian’s suffocating, rcurial control. The debt was dead.
So why did it feel like I had just lost sothing irreplaceable? Why did my stomach feel like a hollowed-out cavern, and why was there this dull, thudding ache spreading through my chest that I couldn’t even put a na to? It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t the sweet satisfaction of justice served. It wasn’t even the remnants of the anger that had fueled my outburst.
It was sothing heavier. Sothing darker. It was a cocktail of dread and regret, seasoned with a truth I wasn’t brave enough to look at too closely.
This is what I wanted, I told myself, the words sounding like a lie even in the privacy of my own head. This is good. You should be celebrating. You should be calling Mason and telling him about the nightmare that is over.
But I wasn’t happy. I felt worse. I felt infinitely worse than I had when I was "property." And the terrifying part was that I didn’t understand why.
I finally forced myself to push out of the chair. My legs were shaky, nearly buckling as I stood, and my hands were still trembling with the aftershocks of the adrenaline. My entire body felt heavy, as if the very atoms of my being had turned to lead. I felt like I was trying to drag myself through waist-deep water, every step requiring a conscious, agonizing effort of will.
I just wanted to curl up sowhere, sowhere dark and quiet where the world couldn’t reach . I wanted to disappear into the upholstery, to sleep until this suffocating feeling went away, or to simply stop existing for a while. That unexplainable sadness was growing, spreading through my chest like a drop of black ink in a glass of clear water, turning everything murky and wrong.
I walked down the hallway, through the glass-and-steel arteries of the building. Each step was chanical, automatic. I was a ghost inhabiting a well-dressed corpse.
When I stepped outside the venue, the diterranean sun was too bright. It felt aggressive, exposing the raw nerves I was trying to hide. The air felt too open, too vast. Without the weight of the contract, I felt like I was floating away into a sky that didn’t want .
And there he was. Alex.
He was leaning against the sleek door of a car, the picture of relaxed, effortless success. He straightened up and smiled when he saw , a warm, genuine expression that should have been a comfort.
"Hey! Ready to go?" he asked.
I forced a smile. It was the sa one I had perfected over years of pretending everything was fine back ho, a mask I wore to keep the world at arm’s length. "Yeah," I said, my voice sounding thin.
Alex’s smile faltered. He frowned slightly and stepped closer, his eyes scanning my face with a disconcerting intensity. "You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost."
"I’m fine," I lied.
"Noah, "
"Really. It’s nothing. Just the heat and the stress of the eting," I said, keeping the fake smile fixed in place until my cheeks ached.
Alex paused, studying for a few more seconds. He clearly didn’t believe a word of it, but he was a gentleman, or at least, he played one well. He nodded slowly and didn’t push. "Alright. If you’re sure. Let’s get so food in you."
"I’m sure."
In the car, Alex talked. He talked about the project, about the upcoming tilines, the deliverables, and the investors’ reactions. I nodded in the right places. I made the appropriate sounds of agreent. I was a world-class actor in a one-man play.
"Oh, by the way," Alex said, glancing at his phone as we sat in traffic. "Cassian ntioned he’s taking over the financial projections section entirely. Said he’ll handle all the analysis and reporting for that part himself." He looked over at . "Did he tell you about that?"
My stomach twisted into a hard, cold knot.
"No," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "I... I didn’t know about that."
"Hmm. I figured he’d loop you in since you’re his right hand." Alex shrugged, turning his attention back to the road. "Well, either way, it ans we’ll have less to worry about on our end. Less for you to juggle."
"Right," I echoed, the words tasting like ash. "Less to worry about."
He’s already cutting out. He didn’t even wait until we leave Spain. I’m sitting right here, and he’s already acting like I don’t exist. Like I’m already gone.
The ink in the water spread further. The dread got heavier.
The restaurant was beautiful, a terrace overlooking the water, filled with people in expensive suits clinking wine glasses and talking about millions. I sat there, and I was perfect. I smiled. I nodded. I contributed to the conversation when it was expected of . I even laughed at a joke one of the investors made.
On the outside, I was the image of a professional, engaged young man. On the inside, I was trapped in a relentless replay loop.
"Only one of you went to prison."
The look on his face. "You’re fired."
The food tasted like nothing. It could have been sawdust or silk; I wouldn’t have known the difference. I ate it anyway, forcing the bites down my throat because that was what you were supposed to do. You eat, you breathe, you survive.
Alex kept glancing at , his concern etched in the corners of his eyes, but he kept his promise not to push. I was good at this, the faking, the pretending, the art of making everyone believe the building wasn’t on fire while I stood in the center of the flas.
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