Chapter 362: Past

CASSIAN

I stood up, walking to the small refrigerator to pull out a cold bottle of water, my back turned to him. "He knows he’s my next target. Which means I have to be better than careful. I have to be three steps ahead of his patience."

Cyan considered this for a long moment, the silence stretching out between the tall cabinets. "Beat the old man at his own game," he said softly.

"Something like that."

Cyan’s grin returned, slow and sharp around the edges as he went back to his fruit plate. "I like it. Old men absolutely hate losing to people who are younger than their own resentments."

He reached for a strawberry, but as he lifted his eyes to look at me, his gaze hooked on the collar of my tshirt. The skin of my throat was fully visible under the white kitchen lights.

The grin on Cyan’s face froze, then widened into something delighted and entirely wicked.

"Oh," he purred, leaning his chin into his palm. "Oh, wow. It seems you two have been having a very productive two days."

I felt the heat hit my ears before I could stop it... a brief, sudden flush that I couldn’t mask fast enough.

It was an incredibly rare slip, but it was present, and that half-second of red was all Cyan needed to see.

He let out a loud, dramatic gasp, his hand flying to his chest. "I knew it! I was right! Cassian Wolfe is actually blushing. I need this recorded. I need to write this down in the family ledger immediately."

I tightened my jaw, pulling my mask back over my face, though it was already too late to save my pride. "It’s nothing."

"It is absolutely everything," Cyan laughed, pointing his fork at me. "You should let the poor boy breathe, Cassian. Seriously. You’re going to break him like an expensive toy you forgot has actual limits."

"I let him rest," I muttered, taking a slow drink of the water. "Sometimes..."

Cyan raised an eye. "Do you really?"

"Yes."

Cyan gave me a long, steady look, his smile fading into something dry and entirely unconvinced.

"Mm. If you say so." He tapped his fingers against the porcelain, letting the teasing drop for the moment, though his eyes remained sharp.

He set his fork down completely, the shift in his posture so subtle that most people wouldn’t have noticed the sudden drop in his energy.

The air in the kitchen grew heavy, the playful light leaving his face as he looked across the marble counter at me.

"When are you going to tell him?" Cyan asked quietly.

I kept my hand steady on the water bottle. "Tell him what."

"Do you really need me to spell the name out for you, Cassian?"

The kitchen went dead silent. The faint sound of the wind against the high glass windows felt distant, isolated. My jaw tightened, the muscle locking hard enough that it hurt.

I knew exactly who he meant. Instantly. Completely.

The dreams were still too close, lingering behind my eyelids every time I closed them in the dark.

For nearly a month, while my body lay rotting in that hospital bed, my brain had kept me locked inside the past, forcing me to live through Julian’s face, Julian’s voice, and the sound of that single bullet over and over again until the grief felt as fresh as the day it happened.

The coma had dragged up everything I had spent years trying to bury under stone and ink.

"It won’t be necessary," I said, my voice flat, cold, and final. I closed the subject the way I closed every door I didn’t want someone looking through.

But Cyan didn’t back down. He didn’t blink.

"You know he’s going to ask you, Cassian. Eventually. The boy practically lived beside your bed for a month. You said he sat there in that miserable plastic chair, watching you dream and sweat through nightmares about someone you’ve never once mentioned to him. Noah isn’t stupid. He’s going to want to know who is buried in your head."

"He doesn’t need to know anything more than what is necessary for his work," I said, my voice rising just enough to carry a warning.

"And what exactly is necessary?" Cyan pushed, his voice dropping into something dangerous.

"Nothing," I shot back, the word landing harder and louder than I had intended, echoing off the high tiles.

I took a breath, forcing my voice back into that cold, calculated space where I could control the edges of it. "Whatever this is... between me and Noah... it has an end. It was never built to be a permanent thing."

Cyan didn’t move. He just watched me.

"Our arrangement has an expiration date," I continued, the words sounding perfectly detached, exactly the way I needed them to sound to believe them myself.

"He’ll leave eventually. Or I’ll be the one who has to pull away when the work changes. Either way, the ending doesn’t change. He has his life to go back to. I have mine. There’s no reason to give him pieces of my past that he doesn’t need for the time he has left here."

Cyan stared at me across the island.

His expression was a complicated, dark thing... not quite disbelief, and not quite pity, but something much closer to recognition.

He looked at me the way you look at someone who is lying to themselves so thoroughly that it’s pointless to argue.

The silence sat between us like a physical weight, my own words hanging in the air.

For some reason, saying them aloud felt worse than the heat of the bullet that had put me in the dirt a month ago. They sounded less convincing than they ever had.

Cyan let out a short, quiet breath, leaning back in his stool. "If you say so, Cassian."

He didn’t push further, which somehow made the weight in my chest feel twice as heavy as if he had started screaming.

I looked down at my hands, my fingers locked around the plastic bottle, while upstairs, the house remained completely still.

Cyan shook his head, a tiny, dry laugh leaving his throat as he picked up a small honey cake. "You really are an idiot."