NICK
That wasn’t a trick, the voice inside my head said, the clinical detachnt completely gone for once.
There was no sarcasm left, no small, witty remarks. Just the hard, heavy thud of my pulse against my ribs as I started to run.
He’s here.
The elevator indicator light was already climbing toward three. I didn’t wait. I slamd my shoulder against the heavy fire door of the stairwell, my lungs screaming as I took the concrete steps three at a ti, ignoring the hot, liquid pain in my knees.
"Dr. Bennett!" a voice barked as I burst onto the second-floor landing. It was one of the orthopedics residents, a thick folder of charts clutched against his ribs. "Mr. Park’s post-op lab results just ca down from the pavilion. We need your signature on the—"
"Send it to my tablet," I snarled, not even slowing my pace as I reached for the next door handle. "I’ll look at it within the hour."
"But doctor, the family is waiting—"
I stopped for exactly three seconds, turning a look on him that made him step back until his spine hit the brick wall. "One hour, Doctor. You know the protocol for the drainage without ."
I didn’t wait to see his nod. I hit the third floor, my shoes making a sharp, tearing sound against the green linoleum as I rounded the corner into the private wing.
The two guards outside the corner suite saw and imdiately stepped back, clearing the path without a word.
I slowed down. Not because my legs were failing , but because my eyes found him before my brain had even processed that we were standing in the sa hallway.
Cyan was standing at the very end of the corridor, his fingers hovering an inch away from the wood of Cassian Wolfe’s door.
He wasn’t opening it. His gaze was pinned straight ahead towards the glass pane, his shoulders hunched forward as if he were trying to disappear into the oak.
I stopped twenty feet away.
For three weeks, I had built dozens of versions of this exact mont in my head while I lay awake in my apartnt, trying to figure out what I would say to him.
Finding him now, real and solid in the gray light of the ward, felt ten tis worse and fifty tis better than anything I had imagined.
The pink hair was real. It wasn’t a balloon or a piece of silk. It was him.
The sharp, tall lines of his shoulders, the specific way he leaned his weight against his heels things I had apparently morized without ever asking myself for permission.
But the line of his back was entirely wrong.
It carried a heavy, broken look, the unmistakable posture of soone who had just looked through a window and received a blow that went all the way to the bone.
I didn’t move. I didn’t say his na. I just stood in the quiet and watched him drop his hand from the handle, taking one slow, dragging step backward, then another.
Then he turned around.
Our eyes t across the empty space.
What happened in my chest in that single second was a dical problem I would have to analyze later, in a dark room with an appropriate amount of distance.
Right then, the three weeks of his absence hit my stomach all at once, heavy and cold, like a debt that had been collecting massive interest while I wasn’t looking.
Cyan’s face was wide open for about two seconds.
He looked completely shattered, his features carrying the raw, unprotected look of soone who had just watched his whole life get dismantled through a pane of glass.
Then, before I could even take a step toward him, the look vanished. His face closed up completely, the skin turning flat and empty, the way an eye shuts against a blinding light.
He began to walk. He didn’t walk toward ; he walked toward the exit, his boots hitting the linoleum with a steady, unhurried rhythm.
I watched him shorten the distance, a strange, wild anticipation building behind my ribs.
He ca closer, his chin lifted, his eyes looking straight through the center of my forehead as if I were nothing but a coat rack left in the hall.
He categorized as furniture and kept moving.
My mouth opened, but for the first ti in my professional life, absolutely nothing ca out.
Nick Bennett had nothing to say.
He brushed past my left shoulder, close enough that the air changed temperature against my cheek, and then he was behind .
He was heading for the exit without a single glance back.
It wasn’t anger that hit first.
I would tell myself it was anger later, when I was sitting alone in my car, because anger was a clean, respectable thing for a surgeon to feel.
But right then, it was just pure, unadulterated hurt. I had spent twenty days making this boy the center of every single thought in my head, and I had just discovered that I wasn’t even a landmark on his map.
Then, the heat ca. Because in a man like , hurt always converts into anger within the space of a heartbeat.
I spun around on my heel. "Have you really forgotten that quickly?" I said to his back.
My voice was quiet, controlled, but the edge was entirely wrong.
It was trying to sound like pride, trying to sound like a man who was simply amused, but it ca out sharp and thin.
Cyan stopped. He stayed still for a mont, his spine rigid, before he turned his head halfway back to look over his shoulder.
His face was perfectly empty now, that professional, practiced nothingness that takes years to learn.
"You’re Noah’s brother," he said. His voice had no inflection at all. It wasn’t a question; it was just a label. He had put into the correct folder, shut the drawer, and set it aside.
It was remarkable how much that burned. I had never been filed away in my entire life.
"I’d like to speak with you," I said, my jaw tightening until the bone click was audible in my ears.
I was trying to reassemble my own dignity in real ti, right in front of him. "Sowhere that isn’t this corridor."
Cyan turned his full body around now, regarding with the flat, distant assessnt of soone whose mind was currently three miles away.
"Is this about the expenses?"
"What?" I said, the word slipping out before I could stop it.
"The two nights," he said, already shifting his weight back toward the exit as if the conversation had already ended.
"Reggie will contact you by the end of the week. Forward the numbers to him. He’ll settle it."
He spoke with the casual, easy indifference of a wealthy man dismissing a dry-cleaning vendor at the end of a transaction.
He was already walking away again, gone in every single way that actually mattered.
My pride didn’t just break; it shattered into powder. The only thing keeping from shouting after him was the absolute, iron refusal to make a scene in a hallway where three separate nurses were already watching my pale face.
Are you serious? my internal voice hissed, genuinely stunned by the weight of it. Are you actually serious right now?
He was ten feet from the door.
That obnoxiously pink hair... the color I had been hunting through every crowd for nearly a month was moving away from for the second ti, completely calm, completely unbothered.
"Lucien," I called out. I didn’t shout it; I spoke the na clearly, letting it hang in the quiet air of the wing.
Cyan froze.
It wasn’t a gradual slowdown. His boots stopped instantly, his entire body going rigid as if a wire had been yanked behind his coat.
It was the specific, terrible stillness of a person hearing a na they hadn’t allowed a stranger to speak in a very long ti.
The silence in the corridor beca absolute.
"Lucien Devereaux," I said, placing each syllable deliberately on the linoleum between us. "Your father is a Pri Minister. Which makes your presence here under a different na... interesting."
He turned around slowly.
And this ti, the empty face was entirely gone. There was no professional nothingness left in his eyes.
What was looking back at now was sothing old, cold, and genuinely dangerous... the glare of a creature that had learned early in life that certain nas in the wrong mouths ant a threat to everything he was trying to keep alive.
He looked at like a soldier asuring the distance for a clean strike. Like I was a target he was going to kill.
I t his gaze without flinching. I had a 38.9 fever, my three weeks of waiting had just been reduced to dust on the floor, and my hands were shaking so hard I had to force them into my pant pockets to keep him from seeing it. I had absolutely nothing left to protect today.
I began to close the distance between us, my steps slow and even.
"How do you know that na?" Cyan asked. His voice was very quiet, very low, but it had the weight of a heavy stone dropping into a well.
I let a small, sharp smile touch my lips... a smile that cost a massive amount of agony to maintain against the look he was giving .
"Wouldn’t you like to know?" I murmured. It was a performance of confidence, partly real and partly the very last card I had left in my hand. "Wouldn’t you?"
I didn’t wait for his reply. I walked straight past him, using the only move available when your ego has been completely leveled and you need to take one single piece of the room back before you leave.
I headed for the stairs, counting the clicks of my heels against the floor. One. Two. Three.
"Fine," Cyan said to my back.
The word landed differently than I expected.
There was no anger in it, no cold fury. It was just the sound of a decision being locked into place.
"You want to talk? Then we’ll talk. Where?"
I stopped, my back still turned to him. The fever was burning hot against my neck, the headache was pulsing behind my eyes, and the weight of the last three weeks was sitting on my shoulders like lead.
I turned around slowly, my features assembled back into the polite, professional mask I knew how to work with.
Cyan was standing down the hall, his eyes still carrying that sharp, dangerous edge, but there was sothing else shifting beneath the surface now... sothing dark and unreadable that I couldn’t categorize yet. But I would.
"Follow ."
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