Chapter 346: Absurdity

NOAH

The heavy door of the recovery room clicked shut, a final, definitive sound that left me standing alone in the sterile white corridor.

My brother had a way of closing doors that felt less like an action and more like a personal verdict.

The conversation was over because Nick had decided it was over, regardless of the fact that I was still standing there with a dozen unanswered questions burning in my throat.

"Okay," I muttered to the empty hallway, rubbing the back of my neck. "That’s fine. That’s completely fine."

Except it wasn’t. Nothing about the last twenty minutes had been remotely fine.

I leaned against the cool wall, trying to make the pieces fit together, but the math refused to work.

First, there was Nick, lying in a hospital bed with a face that looked like it had been run through a meat grinder, stubbornly refusing to explain a single bruise.

Then there was the way he had lied to the police officers... smooth, practiced, and entirely unbothered, as if he had rehearsed the entire script long before I ever set foot in the building. He had known he would need a cover story.

And then, worst of all, there was Cyan.

Cyan hadn’t just been visiting; he had been sitting right in the center of Nick’s bed, looking so comfortable and entirely at ease that he might as well have owned the mattress.

It made absolutely no sense. Cyan belonged to Cassian’s world. His best friend and probably partner in crime. He didn’t know Nick personally. He had no reason to even tolerate Nick.

Yet, those severe dark purple bruises on my brother’s jaw hadn’t come from a clumsy fall down the stairs.

They looked exactly like the work of someone who knew precisely how to throw a punch.

And the look on Nick’s face when Cyan walked in... the sudden, sharp fracture in his usual icy composure hadn’t been the reaction of a man looking at a stranger.

Beneath the his usual practiced blankness, something entirely new had flared in my brother’s eyes.

Something I had never seen there in my entire life.

Shaking my head, I started down the long corridor, my mind spinning in circles as I tried to organize the data.

When my brain got like this, overloaded with too many fragments and no clear picture, all I could do was move them around, hoping two edges would finally click together.

The ordinary traffic of the hospital moved past me in a blur, nurses wheeling medication carts, tired visitors staring at their phones, the quiet hum of a building that had witnessed every shade of human misery and no longer reacted to any of it.

I thought about the sheer weight of the last month.

Cassian getting shot. The endless, agonizing weeks of him lying unconscious while I practically lived in that stiff vinyl hospital chair until it felt like a second home.

The stolen photograph I’d found.

The name Julian slipping from Cassian’s dry lips while he was trapped in a fever dream.

And then Nick’s sudden collapse, the frantic rush to his bedside, and now Cyan sitting in that room with the door shut tightly behind them.

But beneath the thick layer of confusion, the baseline of pure, unadulterated relief was still there, holding me steady.

Cassian was awake.

He was here, on the private wing, and when he had called me back from the lobby earlier, his voice had sounded like the real thing... deep, rough, and alive, not just a ghost haunting my memories.

As the elevator doors slid open, I stepped inside and let out a long, ragged exhale.

The bell chimed, and I stepped out onto the secure floor. I knew the guards by their shifts now.

The two new men stationed at the end of the hall simply gave me a quiet nod and let me pass. It was a small, subtle shift, but it made my chest feel strangely warm.

I reached Cassian’s door, gave a light, brief knock, and pushed it open.

Whatever speech I had been preparing entirely dissolved the second I stepped into the room.

Cassian was standing by the window. He was wearing nothing but a pair of loose gray hospital trousers, his bare back turned completely toward me.

My brain scrambled, entirely unprepared for the sight.

He had both arms raised above his head, twisting his torso in a slow, deep stretch that looked like a morning routine he hadn’t missed a single day of in fifteen years.

It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was in a recovery ward, or that he had survived seven distinct entry wounds less than a month ago.

I had seen his tattoos before, but in the sharp morning light filtering through the glass, they looked completely different.

The dark ink curled over the heavy muscle of his shoulders, woven tightly through a complex map of scars... some old and faded, others jagged and pink from his recent brush with a grave.

It was a visible, permanent record of everything his body had managed to survive, and it was considerable.

His shoulders seemed even broader than I remembered, his waist leaner from the weeks of forced rest.

He had lost weight, the lines of his ribs and hips showing more prominently beneath his pale skin, but he still possessed that undeniable, heavy physical presence that always seemed to occupy far more space than his actual dimensions should allow.

I stopped dead in the doorway, my fingers locking tight around the wooden frame.

This is just gratitude, I told myself, my heart doing a strange, frantic flip against my ribs.

You are just feeling incredibly grateful because he’s alive. That is all this is. He’s standing up. He’s breathing on his own. He’s...

He is also entirely too attractive, and it has been a month, and this is absolutely not the time to be having these thoughts.

"if you’re going to keep staring," Cassian said, his voice a low, gravelly vibration. He didn’t even turn around. "At least close the door."

I cleared my throat, trying to pull my eyes away from the line of his spine. "I just got here."

He turned slowly, and the front of him proved to be an even greater threat to my remaining composure.

Cassian Wolfe was built in a way that felt genuinely inconsiderate to other people’s peace of mind.

"You’ve been staring," he said, one dark eyebrow arching in a way that told me he knew exactly what he was doing to my pulse. "For thirty seconds."

"I was not staring," I lied, my cheeks growing instantly hot. "I was assessing you. From a medical standpoint. I was concerned about your exertion."

Cassian looked at me, his dark eyes filled with a quiet, knowing look that required no words at all to call me out. "Medically."

"Yes."

"Right." He reached down, grabbing a soft cotton shirt from the edge of the bed. The simple, fluid movement of his arms flexing as he pulled the fabric over his shoulders didn’t do anything to help my breathing.

"How is Nick?"

I felt a wave of profound thankfulness for the sudden change of subject.

"Awake," I said, quickly crossing the room to sit in the armchair that had practically molded to the shape of my body over the last few weeks.

"Being incredibly difficult. The usual. By the way, you shouldn’t be doing that."

He began buttoning the shirt, using one hand with the kind of effortless ease that always irritated me.

Physical capability just seemed to be a basic law of nature for him. "I’m fine."

"You were unconscious for three weeks, Cassian."

"And now I’m not," he replied smoothly, finishing the middle buttons. "I’ve been stuck in a bed for a month. My body needs to move."

"Your body needs to recover," I corrected, leaning forward with my hands on my knees.

"There’s a massive difference. Have you even run these movements past the chief of medicine?"

"I know what I feel."

"Feeling fine isn’t the same as actually being fine—"

Cassian sat down on the edge of the mattress, leaning his elbows on his knees as he leveled me with a steady look. "I know my own limits, Noah."

"I know you think you do," I countered, my voice softening slightly as I looked at the slight strain around his eyes. "I’m just saying your body might be lying to you about what it can handle right now. You could easily tear one of the healing incisions."

"I won’t tear anything."

"You don’t know that for sure."

"Noah."

"I’m only trying to—"

"I know what you’re doing," he interrupted. His expression shifted, the hard, stubborn line of his mouth giving way to something distinctly warm beneath the surface. "I’ll be careful. I promise."

I looked at him, the heavy tide of gratitude rushing back over me, washing away the silly argument.

He was sitting there, fully dressed now... which helped my focus immensely and he was looking at me as if I were the only thing in the room worth attention.

It did something strange to the center of my chest, a tight, achey feeling that I still hadn’t found the right words for.

Needing a distraction, I got up from the chair and walked over to the small electric kettle and the tea tray one of the staffs had meticulously arranged on the side counter.

"Has Cyan visited?" I asked as casually as possible, keeping my back turned toward him as I filled the basin with water.

"Two days ago," Cassian answered. "You missed him. But he said he’d be back today."

"Oh." I kept my voice entirely neutral, watching the water begin to bubble. Inside, my mind was racing through the options.

I couldn’t decide whether to tell him what I had just witnessed downstairs.

The image of Cyan sitting on Nick’s bed, the heavy silence of that closed door, and the bizarre tension between them kept flashing in my mind.

But Cassian didn’t know anything about whatever connection they had, and more importantly, Cassian despised Nick.

Their relationship was best described as a state of permanent mutual contempt, with me probably stuck trying to maintain the peace in the middle.

By the time the kettle clicked off, I had made my choice. Not yet. I didn’t have enough facts, and I had no desire to start a fire I didn’t know how to put out.

"Are you going back down there?" Cassian asked, breaking the silence. "To see Nick while your parents are visiting?"

"No," I said simply, lifting the tray. "He’s not my problem right now. He has a full team of doctors and my mother to fuss over him. That’s more than sufficient."

I brought the tea over, handing him his cup.

As Cassian took the ceramic mug, his warm fingers brushed against mine for a brief, lingering second.

His eyes stayed fixed on my face. "Good," he said softly.

I sat down on the edge of the bed beside him, close enough that the mattress dipped under our combined weight.

"Did Cyan mention a specific time he was coming back today?" I asked, staring down at the dark amber liquid in my cup.

"He said he’d drop by before the discharge paperwork went through," Cassian replied, casting a brief, curious glance my way. "Why do you ask?"

"Just wondering," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the steam rising from the tea. "If he does... when he does, I’d like to be in the room."

Cassian didn’t press me on it. He simply nodded, his trust absolute. "He’ll be here. He always shows up."

I nodded back, but my mind refused to quiet down. He always shows up for Cassian, I thought. That’s the rule. That’s how it’s always been.

And yet, an hour ago, Cyan had been in my brother’s room with the door shut, causing Nick’s unshakeable mask to slip completely.

A cold, nagging unease settled at the base of my stomach, like a low, discordant note held too long beneath a song that sounded perfectly pleasant on the surface. It felt like the very beginning of a recipe, and I had no idea what kind of disaster it was going to create.