Chapter 219: Freight Train

NOAH

I felt the heat rise in my neck, a searing, prickly burn. I kept my face still. I didn’t blink. This was bait. This was exactly what he wanted… for me to stammer, to defend myself, to prove that I was just as pathetic as he remembered.

“I know Cassian’s reputation,” Nick continued, his voice low and conspiratorial. “He’s a man with impossible standards. He doesn’t hire charity cases. And yet, here you are. A month ago you were a low-level clerk in the records department, and now you’re his right hand? After the way you’ve always been?”

He didn’t say it directly. Nick never did. He worked in the architecture of the unsaid, in the spaces between words. The implication was a foul, heavy thing in the air: Someone like you doesn’t get to someone like him without taking a shortcut. Someone like you sells themselves because you have nothing else to offer.

“I’m not doing this,” I said, turning away. My heart was thudding against my ribs, a panicked, frantic rhythm. “I’m going back inside.”

I started walking toward the revolving doors, but Nick didn’t let go. He didn’t grab my arm, he didn’t have to. His voice followed me, hooking into my back like a barb.

“Running away? That’s interesting,” he called out, his voice conversational enough that passersby wouldn’t think twice. “If you had nothing to be embarrassed about, you’d just say it. You’d tell me how you earned it.”

I stopped. I didn’t turn around yet, but my jaw set so hard I thought my teeth might crack.

“You can tell me, Noah,” Nick said, and now he was right behind me. I could hear the performed warmth in his tone, that fake, honeyed sincerity he saved for the cameras and the boardrooms.

“I’m your brother. We’re family. After everything that’s happened… I just want to understand my little brother’s ’success’.”

The word family felt like a slur coming from his mouth. He used it like a weapon, as if he hadn’t spent our entire lives making sure I never felt like I belonged to one. As if he hadn’t been the one to tell our father that I was “broken” when I couldn’t handle the pressure of the academy.

I turned around, the anger finally bubbling over, hot and jagged. “What do you actually want to know, Nick? Say it directly for once in your life. Stop the Performance.”

Nick’s face shifted into a mask of wounded innocence, his eyebrows knitting together in a way that would have been convincing if I hadn’t seen him do it to our mother a thousand times.

“I’m just curious how you got there,” he said. “That’s all. Because I know you, Noah. I know exactly what you’re capable of. And I know what you’re not.”

The full sentence echoed under the one he spoke. You didn’t earn this. You never earn anything. You take shortcuts because you’re a coward.

Nick tilted his head, his eyes scanning my reaction with a clinical detachment. “Some people just have a pattern, don’t they? They find ways around the things they can’t do legitimately. I remember high school. I remember that mess with the finals. I remember the principal’s office, and the way Dad had to… fix things. It’s a character trait, isn’t it? Finding a man to hide behind when things get too hard.”

The high school reference landed like a grenade. Suddenly, I wasn’t standing in front of XUM; I was sixteen again, sitting in a plastic chair in a hallway that smelled of floor wax, listening to my father’s disappointed, icy voice tell me I was a liability. The panic attack from Saturday… the one Cassian had held me through… threatened to surge back up, the pressure building right behind my sternum.

I felt the edge. The moment before something snaps. My hands were shaking at my sides, and the city noise felt like it was screaming. Don’t, I told myself. Not here. Not where people are watching. Don’t let him see you break.

“NOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

The sound cut through the ringing in my ears like a lightning strike. It was high, excited, and stretched into a gleeful, melodic shout.

I didn’t even have time to turn before I was hit with the force of a freight train.

Cyan arrived like a natural disaster. He didn’t just hug me; he tackled me, his arms locking around my torso and lifting my feet clear off the pavement. The air left my lungs in a sudden oof, the world spinning for a second as he squeezed the life out of me.

“Noah! I found you! I was going to call but then I saw you and you looked so serious and I just had to—”

He was a blur of bright energy and warmth, his grip crushing and genuine. I was lifted about a foot off the ground, my arms flailing uselessly for a second before I instinctively grabbed his shoulders to keep from toppling over.

“Ehh? Wait a min—”

The anger that had been vibrating in my bones just a second ago was short-circuited.

My brain didn’t know what to do with the sudden, overwhelming warmth of being grabbed by someone who was actually, undeniably happy to see me.

After the weekend of silence, after the last ten minutes of Nick’s poison, Cyan felt like a sun going off in the middle of a blizzard.

He finally set me down, though he didn’t let go of my shoulders, his face beaming with a frantic, messy sort of joy.

“You’re here! You’re actually at work! Look at you in a tie!”

I blinked, my chest still heaving, trying to find my voice. “Cyan… what are you—”

I stopped, remembering who was standing behind me.

I turned my head slightly. Nick was standing three feet away, his arms crossed, his professional mask gone. In its place was a look of pure, unadulterated confusion.

He was staring at Cyan… at the bright clothes, the wild energy, the way he was still holding onto me… trying to figure out how this fit into the narrative of the pathetic, lonely little brother he’d built.

Nick looked at Cyan, then back at me, his eyes searching for the “shortcut.” But Cyan wasn’t a shortcut. He was just a person who liked me. And for the first time in my life, I saw Nick look at me and not have a single clue what he was seeing.

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