Chapter 205: A park

NOAH

He reached out and caught my wrist. He didn’t hold my hand; he gripped my wrist with a firm, unhurried pressure that meant come. It wasn’t a request.

The driver was waiting at the car, but Cassian stopped ten feet short. He said something to the man, quiet instructions, and the driver nodded, handed over the keys, and vanished into a waiting car.

“Sit next to me,” Cassian said, climbing into the driver’s seat.

I got in. I didn’t even think to argue. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

The engine purred to life, and we pulled away from the Metropolitan Club, leaving the ghosts of the evening in the rearview mirror.

The silence in the car wasn’t the heavy, suffocating kind I’d shared with my father. It was the silence of two people who had seen each other’s worst parts and decided to keep driving anyway.

I watched the city lights blur past the window, feeling the hollowness in my chest start to fill with a strange, cautious curiosity.

As we moved uptown, the scenery changed. The tall, glass-and-steel boxes gave way to the sprawling darkness of the park. And then, I saw the lights.

Strings of incandescent bulbs were draped through the trees. I could hear the distant, muffled sound of a calliope and the roar of a crowd. It was loud, ordinary, and beautiful.

“Are you serious?” I asked, staring at the park entrance.

Cassian Wolfe and a city park carnival. The two things didn’t belong in the same solar system.

“I read in the papers this morning that a carnival was being held tonight,” Cassian said, his voice flat. He glanced at me, and for a split second, I saw a flicker of genuine offense. “Do you hate it?”

“No,” I said, a laugh bubbling up in my throat despite myself. “No, I just… I can’t picture you here. Do you even know how to eat a corn dog?”

“I am capable of consuming food on a stick, Noah.”

I looked at the park again. Something loosened in my chest. He had done this for me. He had looked at me on that pavement and thought: park.

He’d chosen the most un-Wolfe-like environment on the planet because he knew I needed to be somewhere where no one cared about “legacy” or “synergy.”

“Since we’re here,” I said, trying to suppress a smile and failing, “we might as well enjoy it.”

Within ninety seconds of walking through the gates, it became vibrantly clear that Cassian Wolfe had absolutely no idea how to function at a carnival.

He walked like he owned the place—that part was normal. But he stood in front of the park map with the focused, intense expression he usually reserved for failing subsidiaries.

He approached a fried dough cart and stared at the menu with the stillness of a man trying to compute the structural integrity of a funnel cake.

“Okay, come on,” I said, taking charge. It felt natural. For once, I was the one who knew the rules. “You’re overthinking it. It’s sugar and grease, Mr. Wolfe. There’s no subtext.”

He followed me. That was the most remarkable part. The man who dictated the fate of thousands of employees was following me past a tilt-a-whirl because I’d told him to.

We stopped at a ring toss stall. The barker was shouting, the music was blaring, and the air smelled like popcorn and diesel.

“The goal,” I explained, leaning against the counter, “is to get the plastic ring on the bottle. It looks easy. It is not. The rings are designed to bounce.”

Cassian listened like it was a mission briefing. He paid for a bucket of rings and stepped up to the line with a terrifying level of seriousness. He didn’t just toss them; he calculated the trajectory. He adjusted for wind resistance. He was so focused it was actually hilarious.

I started to laugh. A real, honest-to-god laugh that didn’t feel like a performance.

“You’re doing it wrong,” I wheezed as his fourth ring bounced off a bottle and hit a stuffed panda. “You have to have soul, Cassian. You’re trying to out-math the carnival. The carnival always wins at math.”

“I do not accept that,” he muttered, reaching for another ring.

People were starting to look. Cassian didn’t blend. He was too tall, too well-dressed, and his face was the kind of handsome that stopped traffic even without the Wolfe name attached to it. A small crowd began to gather, watching the man in the five-thousand-dollar suit try to win a cheap plastic whistle.

As the crowd pressed in, families, teenagers, couples, the space between us started to vanish. A group of rowdy kids pushed past, and I was suddenly shoved three feet away from him.

I looked back. The crowd was a sea of moving bodies, and for a second, I felt that old, cold spike of panic. I didn’t want to be lost here. I didn’t want to be alone in the middle of all this noise.

I moved back toward him, my heart doing a frantic dance. I opened my mouth to say something casual, but the words got stuck.

“Can I—” I started, then closed my mouth. I tried again. “I mean, should we… so we don’t get separated…”

The courage it took to finish the sentence was more than I’d needed for the entire dinner with the Governor. My face felt like it was on fire.

“Should we hold hands?” I blurted out.

I said it too fast. I said it with the grace of a falling piano. I could feel a few people nearby looking at us, their eyes curious. I wanted the pavement to open up and swallow me whole.

Cassian didn’t hesitate. He didn’t give me a knowing look. He didn’t make a joke about my sudden need for contact.

He just reached out.

His hand found mine. His fingers laced through mine in a grip that was unhurried and certain. His palm was warm, solid, and real.

“Lead the way,” he said.

I turned forward, focusing very hard on the path ahead. I focused on the bright lights of the Ferris wheel, the smell of the air, the sound of the crowd, anything to keep from thinking about the way his hand felt in mine.

The heat of his grip was doing something to my chest that I absolutely refused to examine. It felt like a tether. It felt like a promise. It felt like the only thing in the world that was actually holding me together.

I led him toward the next stall, trying very hard not to visibly combust, while the “wrong” Bennett walked through the dark, holding the hand of the man who had decided, for tonight, that I was the only thing worth watching.

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