Chapter 213: Saturday

NOAH

The car didn’t turn toward the glass-and-steel monolith of the office. It didn’t merge into the lane that led toward the familiar, high-altitude silence of Cassian’s world.

Instead, the driver took a smooth, practiced turn into a neighborhood that felt jarringly domestic.

I watched the street signs blur past, familiar corners, the deli with the flickering sign, the laundromat. “Why are we going to my place?”

Cassian didn’t look up from his tablet. “It’s Saturday.”

He said it as if it were a fundamental law of physics, like the rotation of the earth or the pull of the tide. He spoke as if I should have been tracking the days with the same meticulous rigor he used to track market fluctuations.

I blinked, processing the word.

Saturday.

The week had ended. I genuinely hadn’t noticed. I had been so completely absorbed in the orbit of Cassian’s schedule, his office, his apartment, his history, the way his hand felt in my hair—that the calendar had become an irrelevant document. My life had been subsumed by his.

“Oh,” I said. Then, “Right.” A beat passed. “What are you going to do?”

“Work,” he replied. “As normal. If I need anything, I’ll call you.” He paused, finally looking at me, and his voice softened by a fraction of a decibel… the Cassian version of a gesture. “Rest, Noah. The week was long.”

It sounded like a logistics update, but in the strange, private language we had developed over the last forty-eight hours, it functioned like something much warmer. It was a permission.

The car pulled to a stop outside my building.

I didn’t move immediately. I looked at the brick façade, the chipped paint on the front gate, and then back at Cassian. Something heavy and unspoken sat in my chest.

I didn’t want to get out.

That was the truth of it. My apartment was waiting for me upstairs… my own space, my own quiet, the life I had fought so hard to build for myself… and suddenly, it felt like a cage. It felt lonely before I’d even crossed the threshold.

I didn’t finish the thought. I couldn’t. I just forced a nod, got out of the car, and stood on the pavement. I watched the black sedan pull away, disappearing into the Saturday morning traffic.

The street was ordinary around me, full of people walking dogs and carrying grocery bags. My building was exactly as I’d left it, yet everything felt fundamentally different.

The lift ride was slow, the mechanical hum sounding louder than usual in the silence. My corridor smelled faintly of someone’s breakfast and floor cleaner. By the time I reached my door, my keys were already trembling in my hand.

Before the key could find the lock, my phone began to vibrate.

I didn’t even have to look at the screen to know who it was. My mother. This was the third call this week, the seventh this month. I had been counting the attempts without meaning to, a tally of the pressure building on the other side of the line.

I stood there, staring at her name on the screen. The hallway felt too narrow. I could ignore it, or I could end it. I took a breath, hit the green button, and pushed open my door.

“Noah? Noah, is that you?”

She started immediately, not even waiting for a hello. I could hear the specific cadence of her voice… the one she used when she had been holding a grievance for too long and was finally letting the pressure valve pop.

“Why have you been ignoring my calls? Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? Your father, your brother… everyone is asking where you are. A son who doesn’t call his mother back, who disappears for weeks? Noah, how do you think that looks to people?”

I walked into my apartment and kicked the door shut. The space felt small, stiflingly small after the sprawling heights of Cassian’s penthouse. My one plant in the corner was still dying, its leaves curled and brown.

I’d forgotten to water it again.

I let her talk. I leaned against the kitchen counter and listened to the familiar litany of my failures.

Everything was my fault, my behavior, my choices, my “inexplicable” distance. She spoke about the ingratitude of it all, after everything they had done for me.

“Do you have any idea how worried sick your brother has been about you?” She mentioned. “He said you’ve been ignoring his calls and text messages as well.”

At the mention of Nick’s worry, a sound started in my throat that was supposed to be a laugh but ended up sounding like a choked sob.

Nick, worried. Nick, who had looked at me across the Metropolitan Club lobby with the focused contempt of a predator watching a wounded animal. Nick, who had told me to crawl home. Nick, who had called me a worm.

“And your father,” she continued, her voice pivoting with practiced ease. “He mentioned he saw you at the governor’s event. Working for the Wolfe family. Noah, why didn’t you tell us? We had to find out from your father seeing you there?”

A flush of pure, cold exhaustion washed over me. “I did tell you,” I said quietly, though I knew she wasn’t listening.

I had told them.

At the birthday dinner months ago, I had tried to explain my new job, and they had given me a look that said I had to be making things up to look important.

They hadn’t believed me.

And now of course my father… my father had conveniently left out the part where he’d watched security drag me out of a lobby while Nick laughed at my “delusions.”

They had decided I was a liar then, and now it was my fault they hadn’t believed the truth.

“Come home, Noah,” she said, her voice softening into that manipulative, honeyed tone she used when she wanted to play peacemaker.

“Just come for dinner. Apologize to your father. Let things go back to normal. Your father isn’t angry, darling; he just needs to see that you’re taking your life seriously. He needs to know you aren’t just playing at being a businessman.”

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