Free Web NovelChapter 335: Painful secrets
NICK
The heavy steel fire door groaned as I shoved it open, and the wind hit us before we even cleared the threshold.
It wasn’t a gentle breeze; it was that raw, high-altitude rush that lives at the top of a concrete building, smelling faintly of damp pavement and the open sky.
I stepped out onto the gray gravel of the rooftop, the low hum of the hospital’s ventilation units vibrating through the soles of my boots.
Behind me, the click of the door shutting cut off the sterile, muffled noise of the third-floor corridor.
Suddenly, there were no more paging systems, no squeaking sneakers, and no nurses watching me with worried eyes.
There was only the massive, empty stretch of the sky and the city sprawling out below us.
The clouds had been thickening since noon, but up here, they looked entirely different.
They were a heavy, bruised charcoal color, hanging so low and dense that the middle of the afternoon felt like the dead of evening.
It was the kind of dark that didn’t just happen; it was a weather system that had made up its mind and was currently rolling in to finish what it started.
I turned around to face the edge of the roof, and as I did, the reality of what I had just done hit me right in the center of my chest.
Now that the narrow hallway was behind us and there was no way to look busy or pretend I had a chart to sign, the internal reckoning arrived.
What exactly did I just do? ƒrēewebnovel.com
The answer wasn’t there. I had told him I wanted to talk, but looking at the gray expanse around us, I didn’t have a single sentence ready.
I had used a name like a blunt object just to make his boots stop moving on the linoleum.
I had followed a boy through a crowded medical lobby like someone who had lost every single bit of their own sense of direction.
Remarkable, my thoughts muttered, the old habit of sarcasm trying to shield me from how unsettled I actually felt.
You really decided that the best way to handle three weeks of staring at your own ceiling was to corner the problem on a roof during a storm. Brilliant work, Nicholas. Truly.
But there was one thing I couldn’t ignore, no matter how hard I tried to intellectualize it. My left hand, which had been twitching and shaking against my coat for the last twelve hours, was perfectly still.
The tremor had completely vanished the exact second I spotted that flash of pink hair in the lobby crowd, and it hadn’t come back since.
I walked over to the concrete ledge that bordered the roof, leaning my forearms against the rough, cold stone.
Below us, the city lights were already starting to blink on through the gloom, looking small and distant.
The wind caught the lapels of my white coat, snapping the fabric against my ribs as the clouds moved fast overhead.
I reached into my inside pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and clicked my lighter.
The small orange flame flared between my palms, a brief pocket of heat before the wind tore the first wisp of smoke away.
It was a cheap trick to buy myself thirty seconds of silence, a way to keep my mouth busy while I tried to find my footing.
Cyan was standing a few feet back, watching me with a look that arrived long before he spoke. His eyes were narrowed, assessing the cigarette with a quiet sort of disbelief.
"I thought surgeons weren’t supposed to do that," he said, his voice easily cutting through the rush of the wind.
I took a slow drag, letting the smoke settle in my lungs before I exhaled it into the gray air.
"You’d be surprised how many of us don’t care." I leaned a little heavier against the concrete. "The body keeps score whether you’re careful or not."
I took another small breath. "I don’t make a habit of it. Just occasionally. When the alternative is worse."
Cyan didn’t answer. Instead, he moved forward, crossing the gravel until he reached the opposite ledge.
He didn’t look at the view; he leaned his back against the stone, facing me directly.
The wind was doing what it wanted with his hair, making the bright, ridiculous pink stand out violently against the dark, threatening sky.
It looked entirely out of place in a city full of gray buildings, and yet, looking at him there, it felt exactly right.
For the first time since I had spotted him downstairs, I actually looked at him. Really looked at him.
This face had been a ghost in my apartment for twenty-three days.
It had been hovering in my peripheral vision while I tried to buy groceries, while I walked through the hospital corridors, and while I lay awake in the dark of my bedroom.
Now he was real, standing ten feet away from me. The small silver studs in his ears caught what little gray light was left in the sky.
Those purple eyes were fixed on me, returning my stare without a single flinch, and without an ounce of warmth.
I was the one who looked away first. The city below was a much safer thing to look at.
The silence grew between us, thick and heavy, filled only by the rising whistle of the wind.
"You wanted to talk," Cyan said. It wasn’t an invitation. It sounded like an invoice being handed over, a demand for payment. "So. Talk."
I kept my eyes on the distant streets, my throat dry. I didn’t say anything.
Cyan let out a short, rough breath.
When he spoke again, the casual indifference he had been using down in the hallway was entirely gone.
Something sharp and hard had taken its place. "Guess I’ll start, then. How do you know that name?"
I let the cigarette burn down to the filter, then crushed it out against the top of the concrete ledge, leaving a small black smudge on the gray stone.
"Do you remember the day you hit me?" I asked, still looking out at the buildings. "Outside XUM." frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
"So what?" Cyan snapped back immediately. He said it with that specific, flat tone of someone who put absolutely zero weight on the fact that he was violent in an alleyway.
"Something caught my attention," I said, turning my head to look at him now, meeting those cold eyes. "I made it a point to find out what it was. I collect information about people who interest me. It’s useful. I’ve found."
Cyan looked at me, his gaze moving down my coat and back up to my face, slow and deliberate.
"So I punched you," he said, a tiny, mocking twist appearing at the corner of his mouth. It was the look of someone watching a very predictable, very boring magic trick.
"And now you’ve been looking me up. Fascinating. I seem to have woken something in you. With my fist. Of all things."
He paused, his head tilting just an inch. "Does that happen often for you?"
I didn’t let the provocation touch me. I just offered him a small smile that didn’t reach my eyes, ignoring the bait entirely.
"I also found," I continued, taking a step closer to where he stood, "that the son of a sitting Prime Minister shouldn’t look like you."
I let my eyes wander over him... the bright pink hair, the silver metal in his ears, the restless, dangerous energy that seemed to vibrate off his shoulders.
"The colorful hair. The piercings. The... particular lifestyle. Someone went through a massive amount of trouble to make sure there is no record of you anywhere in the public archives. Which is very unusual for a head of state’s child. Unless, of course, the child is meant to not exist."
I said it cleanly, my voice flat and even, without any performance of cruelty. And because it sounded so matter-of-fact, it was much crueler.
Cyan didn’t move. His face stayed perfectly still, maintaining that empty mask he carried so well, but his eyes told an entirely different story.
Something was shifting deep behind those purple irises, a sudden, dark ripple beneath the surface.
Seeing that tiny crack in his armor did something to me. It wasn’t satisfaction, not exactly, but it was something far more complicated and much harder to defend.
It felt like finding a loose thread and wanting to pull it just to see the whole fabric come apart.
So I kept going. Because continuing was what I did when I found the weak spot in a structure.
"Your mother," I said, choosing the words with a slow, deliberate care.
"She wasn’t the wife. She came before her. Or during, depending on which record you look at. Either way, she isn’t part of the official biography. And neither are you. Which means your father has spent what... twenty-something years pretending you never actually happened."
I saw his jaw tighten. It was a tiny, fractions-of-a-millimeter movement, but it was there.
I pressed harder. It was the same skill I used in the theater... finding exactly where the tissue was thinnest, where the blade would go in without resistance.
"And you went to prison. Which must have been incredibly convenient for him. His biggest problem, suddenly relocated and officially made someone else’s responsibility."
I paused, letting the wind carry the silence for a second. "I found your degrees, by the way. Forensic psychology. Criminology. It’s interesting for someone who then turned around and became exactly the kind of person those degrees are designed to study. What does that make you, Lucien? An experiment? Or just the result?"
Cyan was entirely motionless now. The coldness in his eyes had burned away, replaced by something I hadn’t seen there before.
It was a look that had been lit from within, a quiet, dark spark that was currently deciding whether or not to become a massive fire.
I saw it, and I didn’t stop. My ego was still lying in pieces on the floor of the private wing downstairs, and some irrational part of my brain had decided that this exposure was the only leverage I had left to use against him.
"And then," I said, leaning in just a fraction more, "there’s that strange timing. When you disappeared, which I found very interesting. Especially given the specific circumstances of how she—"
Cyan moved.
Thwack!
There was no warning. He didn’t shift his weight, he didn’t pull his shoulders back, and he didn’t announce it. The distance between where he was standing and where I was standing simply vanished in the time it took for my eyelids to blink.
