NOAH
The world didn’t end when Cyan’s fist hit my brother’s face, but for a second, it felt like the physics of the universe had just been rewritten.
My brain perford a full, stuttering system reboot. I stared at the spot where the punch had landed, then down at Nick on the pavent, then back at Cyan.
Nick. On the ground. Because soone hit him.
It was a sequence of events that shouldn’t have been possible. In our shared lifeti, Nick had never been on the receiving end of anything but praise, invitations, and the soft, reflexive yielding of every room he entered. People didn’t strike Nick Bennett; they accommodated him. They moved out of his way like water around a stone.
I looked at Cyan. He was adjusting his sunglasses with the mild, airy satisfaction of soone who had just checked a minor errand off a to-do list.
He wasn’t breathing hard. He wasn’t shaking.
He was just... done.
I stood between them, a silent, vibrating wire of disbelief, my entire understanding of reality currently undergoing a forced update
Nick didn’t stay down. He didn’t erupt in a rage, and he didn’t try to swing back. That was the truly terrifying part. He rose slowly, his movents so deliberate they felt choreographed.
He dusted off his trousers, straightened his suit jacket, and reassembled his composure piece by piece, as if he were putting on a fresh shirt.
The smirk arrived last. It was confident, clinical, and utterly unsettling, the look of a man who had decided that this mont didn’t touch his dignity, only confird his superiority.
"I can’t say I’m surprised," Nick said, his voice as smooth as if we were still in the middle of a polite conversation. He looked at Cyan with a chilling, detached curiosity. "When words prove insufficient, people of your... caliber... typically default to the most primitive response available. It’s a fascinating, if predictable, lack of evolution."
The Implication was a physical weight: You are a brute. You are a spectacle. You have just proven that I am better than you.
Then he turned his gaze to . The smile stayed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. "Be careful, Noah. The company you keep is a very loud confession of who you’ve beco. I’ll be sure to ntion this little display to father. I’m sure he’ll find your ’friend’ as charming as I did."
Cyan didn’t flinch. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head, his expression shifting from bored to genuinely interested, as if he were listening to a lecture on a topic he found mildly amusing.
"You can say whatever you like about , you little shit," Cyan said, his voice unhurried and almost pleasant. He adjusted a silver ring on his thumb, his gaze steady. "I’ve been called worse things by people much more interesting than you. My feelings aren’t that fragile."
He paused. His eyes moved to , soft for a fraction of a second, before snapping back to Nick with a sudden, sharp clarity. "But when you start talking about him, when you use that tone to describe soone who has ten tis the heart you’ll ever have, I mind that. Very much."
There was no shout, no snarl. Just a simple, direct statent of fact. It was more threatening than the punch.
Nick looked between us, his ntal gears grinding. He was a man who sorted the world into neat, manageable categories, and Cyan was a glitch in the system.
He couldn’t compute the relationship, the loyalty, or the utter lack of fear. For the first ti in my life, I saw my brother look slightly... stupid. He didn’t know how to handle soone who was this fundantally unbothered by him.
I filed that satisfaction away in a quiet corner of my heart.
The sound reached before the car did, the specific, low-frequency purr of a high-performance engine that I’d learned to identify in my sleep. I looked up, and there it was.
Cassian stepped out before the car had even fully co to a halt.
The weekend of silence vanished in a single heartbeat. The two days of staring at my phone, telling myself I didn’t care, telling myself I was fine with the nothingness, it all collapsed the second he stood on the pavent.
My chest did sothing dically inadvisable. It was a violent surge of relief first, he was here. He was real... and then the thing underneath it. The ache I’d been trying not to na.
The way the entire street, the crowd, and even the throbbing pain in my head from Nick’s voice seed to dim, leaving only Cassian in high relief. My body responded to him like a compass to North, a reflexive, humiliating pull that I had no idea how to stop.
Cassian’s eyes moved across the scene with the speed of a combat computer. He saw first, his gaze lingering for a fraction of a second, before sliding to Nick, then finally to Cyan, who was still practically attached to my side. His expression shifted, a complicated flicker of recognition, irritation, and sothing I couldn’t quite read.
"CASSIE!" Cyan shrieked, his delight unreserved. He waved a hand frantically, as if Cassian might have missed the six-foot tall man in the neon colors.
Cassian approached us, his face a hard, unreadable mask. "What are you doing here," he said. It wasn’t a question. It was a demand for an explanation for the chaos currently occupying his sidewalk.
"I wanted to surprise you both!" Cyan bead, still holding onto my arm. "Surprise!"
Cassian’s eyes flickered to Nick, then back to . "What happened here."
Nick stepped forward before I could even draw breath. He used his "Doctor Bennett" voice, asured, reasonable, and laced with just enough injured dignity to make a lie sound like a dical report.
"I was here on legitimate business, Mr. Wolfe," Nick said, his tone perfectly calibrated. "Charles Wolfe arranged for to et with you regarding the pediatric facility. I ca to find you, and I was greeted with... this. I was assaulted, unprovoked, by your assistant’s associate."
He made It sound so clean. He was the victim, the professional, the wronged party. He didn’t ntion the poison he’d been spitting, or the way he’d been deconstructing my soul for ten minutes. He just assembled the available facts into a shape that suited him.
"It seems I’m not welco here today," Nick added, a thin, sharp smile touching his lips. "I’ll have to report back to your father. I’m sure he’ll want to know why his appointnts are being t with physical violence in the XUM entrance. There should probably be... consequences."
Cassian looked at Nick. He didn’t look impressed, and he didn’t look concerned. He gave Nick the sa look he’d given him at the dinner table, the one that said he saw the rot underneath the suit and found it boring.
"Be my guest," Cassian said, his voice a cold, level vibration. He acknowledged the reason for Nick’s presence without acknowledging a single word of his framing.
He didn’t apologize. He didn’t offer a platitude. He just made it clear that the performance had been received, assessed, and found irrelevant.
Nick read the dismissal for what it was. He realized the ground here didn’t belong to him, not today. He gave one last, lingering smirk, a promise of future pain, and turned on his heel, walking away with the rigid composure of soone who was choosing to leave rather than being forced out.
I finally exhaled, a long, shuddering breath I’d been holding since the lobby incident a week ago.
The three of us made our way inside, the silence of the elevator a stark contrast to Cyan’s non-stop chatter. He talked about the flight, the weather, and the specific shade of chartreuse he’d chosen for his "triumphant return."
Once we were inside the executive office, Cassian slamd the door shut. He turned to Cyan, his irritation controlled but visible in the hard line of his shoulders. He didn’t say a word, just gave him a look that demanded an imdiate, thorough explanation.
Cyan was entirely unintimidated. He settled into the plush leather chair across from Cassian’s desk as if he held a deed to the building. "I wanted to see you! Both of you! And I had business in the city anyway. Reginald said I was becoming a ’tropical nace’ at the beach house and that it was ti I ca ho before I did sothing inadvisable. He was probably right."
"You could have called," Cassian said, his voice tight.
"I could have," Cyan chirped, flashing a grin. "But then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, would it?"
I watched them. The dynamic between them was... effortless. Cassian was clearly annoyed, but it was a different kind of annoyance, an old, familiar one that lacked the jagged edge he used with everyone else.
Cyan moved through Cassian’s space with a casual, inherited belonging that made my chest ache. He knew which drawer held the good pens. He knew how Cassian liked his coffee.
"I’ll be around for a while," Cyan added, checking his nails. "Things to attend to. You both clearly need around, and I think the city has beco far too gray since I’ve been gone."
I was happy he was back. Truly. The punch alone made him a hero in my book. But the "a while" part sat heavily in my stomach. I saw the way Cyan looked at Cassian, with a history I didn’t have a right to, and the way Cassian’s face softened, just a fraction, when Cyan laughed.
It was a small, sharp prick of jealousy, unwelco and petty. I filed it under none of your business and stared at my shoes.
Cyan didn’t stay long. He had "appointnts" and a car waiting downstairs. He stood up, grabbed my face in both hands one last ti, and squeezed.
"I’ll see you very soon, squishy," he promised, planting a loud kiss on my cheek before I could even blink. He gave Cassian a long, silent look, the kind of look that contained a thousand words of a conversation they’d been having for years, blew a kiss and then he was gone.
The office felt suddenly, deafeningly quiet.
It was the first ti we’d been alone since Saturday morning. The ghost of the sofa, the telenovela, and the words until I t him seed to manifest in the air between us. Cassian stood by his desk, his silhouette dark against the city skyline.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"I’m fine," I said automatically. Then, I stopped. I was tired of being automatic. I was tired of the silence. "Yeah. I’m okay."
I took a breath, my heart hamring against my ribs. The question that had been rotting in my head for forty-eight hours finally forced its way out.
"Where have you been?" I asked quietly.
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