NOAH
The walk back through Hospital San Rafael felt like moving through a dream where the gravity was twice as strong as it should be.
The bright, clinical white of the walls pressed in on me, and the smell of antiseptic... once just a scent... now felt like it was coating my lungs. Alex walked beside me, his pace steady, his presence a quiet anchor in a world that was still spinning out of control.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Not the Cassian who had just dismissed me, but the Cassian from thirty minutes prior. The one sitting on that bed with blood staining his collar and cuts marking his beautiful, arrogant face.
I kept replaying the way he'd walked away. The cold, mechanical efficiency of his gait. The way his shoulder had clipped mine... not as an assault, but as if I were a physical obstacle in his path, like a chair or a pillar.
I didn't exist to him anymore.
