Chapter 52: Angel

NOAH

Am I being held hostage right now?

The thought was so surreal it nearly slipped past panic and landed somewhere close to laughter. A brittle, hysterical laugh that pressed against my teeth and begged to escape.

Almost.

“I… I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said, the words tripping over one another as they left my mouth. My voice sounded thin to my own ears, like it belonged to someone younger. Smaller. “I’m just an assistant—”

“You work for them!” he shouted, jerking his head violently toward the door, as if the very walls were complicit. “Wolfe. Hendrix. All of you!” His eyes burned with something wild and fevered. “You don’t care who you destroy as long as you get richer.”

“I don’t— I’m not—” I tried, uselessly.

“My family lived on that land for three generations!” His voice cracked, splintering mid-sentence. The sound of it hit me harder than the shouting.

“Three. Generations. And now it’s gone. Bulldozed. Erased. For what? Luxury condos? Hotels? So rich people can have a view?!”

My thoughts scattered like startled birds.

What do I do?

What the fuck do I do?

Outside the room, voices rose… angry, panicked, overlapping. Footsteps pounded somewhere nearby, close enough that my pulse synced with them.

….

The first thing I noticed was that this was, objectively, a stupid way to die.

Not heroic.

Not poetic.

Not even dramatic in a cool, headline-worthy way.

Just… Tuesday. In a commercial wing. Next to a brochure stand that advertised “Sustainable Living Spaces” with a stock photo of a family that looked too happy to be real.

The man holding me smelled faintly of sweat, cheap cologne, and despair… a combination I… was now intimately familiar with. The weapon… was that a gun? Knife? Something sharp enough that I was choosing not to investigate too closely… pressed into my side with the intimacy of an unwanted coworker who stands too close at the coffee machine.

My brain did the thing it always does when faced with danger:

Stage One: Denial

This was not happening.

This was a misunderstanding.

This was a drill.

This was a very aggressive brand activation for… something. Insurance? Security systems? A new energy drink called “Adrenaline Nightmare”?

Any second now, someone would clap and say “Surprise! Social experiment!” and I’d laugh weakly and demand compensation and therapy.

The man shouted something about being ignored. About lies. About stolen land and falsified reports.

I nodded automatically.

Right. Sure. Yes. Ignored. That tracked. Everyone’s always ignored until they start waving weapons around and making executive decisions about other people’s mortality.

Still. Not happening. This was fine.

Everything was fine.

Stage Two: Bargaining

Okay, if this was happening…

If the universe insisted on doing this to me, specifically, on a day when I already woke up looking like I’d been mauled by a very territorial vampire…

Then maybe:

Cassian would notice I was gone immediately. (Unlikely. He was probably already three meetings deep and hadn’t thought about me once.)

Or Luca would scream loud enough to crack glass. (More likely. That man’s baseline was “one minor inconvenience away from a breakdown.”)

Or Alex would descend from the ceiling like a well-dressed archangel with a calming voice and a plan. (Most likely. He seemed like the kind of guy who had plans. Plural. Laminated.)

I promised, internally, to a God I wasn’t sure was listening:

Never complain about my job again.

Answer emails faster.

Stop mentally ranking billionaires by emotional damage.

I would even forgive Cassian for the bruises.

(Okay. Maybe not forgive. But I’d stop thinking about them every thirty seconds and spiraling into a crisis about my sexuality and what it meant that I’d enjoyed being…

Nope. Not the time.)

The next stage came. I didn’t even know what to call it.

Everything was too loud.

The man’s breathing… ragged, uneven, like he’d been running for miles.

The echo of shouting outside the door… muffled but frantic.

The buzz of fluorescent lights that suddenly felt personal, like they were judging me for every bad decision that led to this moment.

My heart was trying to break out of my ribs like it had an appointment elsewhere and was running late.

My hands were shaking. I hoped the man thought it was fear and not the intense urge to pass out dramatically and let someone else deal with this.

I tried to talk. Carefully.

“I… I’m not mocking you,” I said, because apparently this was the sentence my mouth had chosen. “I just… I’m listening. I swear.”

The man snapped at me to shut up.

Great. Excellent rapport. Five stars. Would get held hostage again.

I was listening, though. That was the horrible part. The desperation in the man’s voice wasn’t theatrical. It wasn’t rehearsed. It was raw. Fractured. Like someone who ran out of options three bad decisions ago and kept going anyway.

I’d never been this close to that kind of need before.

It terrified me more than the weapon.

Last was my slow acceptance of this situation I’d only imagined myself in when watching movies.

Oh.

This might actually be how I died.

Not in a bed.

Not old.

Not after doing anything particularly impressive.

Not after figuring out whether I was gay, bi, or just Cassian-sexual, which felt like important information to have settled before shuffling off this mortal coil.

I thought, absurdly, of a restaurant Cassian once refused to go to because the lighting was “offensive to human eyes and basic decency.”

I never tried the signature dish.

I thought of unfinished emails.

Unsent messages.

Shoes I bought on sale and never wore because they “needed the right occasion.”

I thought: Wow. I didn’t even figure out my life properly. That feels unfair.

My eyes stung.

Okay. If this was it…

Could it at least not be embarrassing?

Could my last words be something better than “I’m listening, I swear”?

Could I not die in a maintenance annex next to a mop bucket?

The man’s grip tightened.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Please. Please. Please.

Then…

The door opened.

I didn’t look at first.

I just knew.

For half a heartbeat, I was certain it was Cassian.

I prepared myself for:

Violence.

Shouting.

The room catching fire out of sheer force of personality.

Instead…

“Hi,” said a calm, warm voice. Gentle. Measured. Human. “My name is Alex. I’m here to talk.”

I opened my eyes.

It wasn’t the devil.

It was the angel.

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