NICK

The grocery bags hit the floor. I did not place them down with my usual care.

I simply opened my hands and let them go.

The sound of plastic hitting the wood was dull and final. I stood there in the center of the room, my own room, which looked exactly the same as it had forty-eight hours ago. It was ordered. It was quiet. It was mine.

My mind tried to fix the image in front of me. I looked at the couch and expected to see a flash of pink against the gray fabric.

He is here, I told myself. He has to be here. You missed him in the dark. Look again.

I looked again. I walked into the kitchen and then the bathroom. I saw the empty space where a person had been living.

The checking was done, and the result was the same as it had been five minutes ago.

He was gone.

Something inside me fractured. The irritation that had been a low hum in my blood all day suddenly sharpened into something else.

It was cold and fast. It was no longer a feeling I could manage with deep breaths or logic.

I ran a hand through my hair, pacing the length of the rug once, twice, and then I stopped. I hit the invisible wall of my own apartment.

I do not do panic. Panic is for people who lack the tools to handle their environment.

I am a surgeon. I solve problems. But as I stood there, my jaw tightened until it ached.

Cyan would not just leave. Not like this. He was barely holding himself together.

He was a person who moved as if he were underwater, slow and heavy with the weight of everything he had lost. He wouldn’t just walk out into the night without—

I stopped the thought.

What?

My permission?

Without a word?

That was the part that cut the deepest.

It wasn’t the fact that he was gone; it was the absence of a note, a message, or even a messy scrawl on a napkin.

He had occupied my life for two days, and he had left as if those forty-eight hours meant absolutely nothing.

He had left without acknowledging that he had been somewhere that mattered.

I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I grabbed my keys from the counter and walked out.

The door shut behind me with a loud, heavy crack that echoed down the empty hallway.

The corridor felt too narrow. I have lived in this building for years and never noticed the walls, but tonight they seemed to be pressing in on me.

I walked toward the elevator, my heart thumping a rhythm against my ribs that I didn’t recognize.

The elevator was a torture device.

I watched the numbers on the display descend. Six. Five. Four. It moved at its usual speed, but that speed was no longer enough. It was insufficient for the pressure building in my chest.

When the doors opened at the lobby, I moved past the security desk toward the street. The air outside was cool and damp. It should have grounded me.

It should have reminded me that I was a rational man performing a rational search. It did nothing.

I scanned the pavement. I saw normal people moving in normal directions. None of them had hair that looked like a neon warning sign.

None of them moved with that strange, arrogant grace of someone who had decided the entire world belonged to them.

I turned back and approached the security desk. The guard looked up, his eyes widening when he saw the look on my face.

"Did you see someone leave?" I asked. I didn’t use his name. I didn’t use a greeting. I just threw the question at him like a punch. "My height. Pink hair. You would have noticed him."

The guard blinked, his mouth opening and closing. "Sir, I think—"

"Think carefully," I snapped. My patience was gone. It had stayed behind in the apartment with the grocery bags.

The man straightened his posture. "No, sir. I didn’t notice anyone like that leaving tonight. I’ve been here since six. I’m sorry."

I didn’t wait for him to finish. I was already back out the door, my eyes sweeping the street again.

I looked at every face under the streetlights. I looked down the alleyways and into the windows of the late-night shops.

There were too many directions. Too many ways for a person to disappear into a city that doesn’t care about anyone.

A new sensation tightened in my chest. It was the feeling of losing track of something important.

I have never lost track of anything in my life.

I know where every instrument is in an operating theater. I know where every file is on my computer. I am a man of lists and order.

"He doesn’t know this area," I said quietly. I was talking to the pavement now. "He doesn’t know anyone here. Where would he go?"

Then the memory arrived. It was sharp and clear. I remembered the hospital room. I remembered the bet.

I remembered the exact words I had said to him while he sat on that couch, looking at me with those wide, haunted eyes.

Forty-eight hours.

I had told him that Cassian would wake up. I had told him that was the timeline.

I narrowed my eyes at the street. "Of course," I muttered. "Of course that’s where he went."

I thought back to the hospital corridor earlier that afternoon. I saw that flash of pink hair again in my mind.

I had told myself it was a hallucination caused by a lack of sleep. I had told myself my brain was just providing the image I had been thinking about all day.

I was wrong. It wasn’t my brain failing me. It was my eyes telling the truth. He was already there. I had caught a glimpse of him while I was pretending to look at a chart.

I ran to my car. I didn’t care about the grocery bags or the light I had left on. I just needed to get to the hospital.

I drove faster than I ever had. I am a man who understands exactly what a high-speed collision does to the human frame.

I have seen the results on the table. I know how skin tears and how bone shatters.

Because of that, I usually drove with a heavy layer of caution.

Tonight, that caution was gone.

My mind was already at the hospital, running ahead of the car. I kept replaying the last two days. I saw Cyan on my couch, wrapped in that blanket.

I pictured him eating the chocolate I had bought for myself. I saw him watching those mindless cartoons because the bright colors were the only thing that could cut through the fog in his head.

And then he was gone. Just gone.