The way he peeled her was like lifting the edge of an old photograph—faded, delicate, cracked at the corners. Layer by layer, he unwrapped her without force, only precision. A surgeon of shame. A connoisseur of quiet collapse. The horror wasn't just in what he said.
It was in how easily he knew where to cut.
"Still think I need a job?" He murmured, stepping closer—not like a hunter, but like an archivist, examining her expression the way someone might study a page in a sacred, ruined text.
And then the clown returned.
The grin reappeared slowly, smeared across his painted face with all the irreverent grace of graffiti on a tombstone. Garish. Unapologetic. Timed.
"You and I—we're not so different, Fatiba Darvish," he said, his tone slipping into something cold and soft, like a knife beneath a pillow. "You hide your insecurities behind silk and caresses. Behind virtue-signaling causes and curated guilt. I wear mine loud. In laughter. In teeth. In fire."
He tilted his head like a bird dissecting a worm, gaze narrowing as his voice dropped.
"But we both know what we are. Cursed. Spoiled from the inside. You grew up in a palace pretending you were a prisoner. I grew up in a prison pretending I could make it a circus."
A breath passed. Heavy and humid.
"No god. No savior. No, Shotaro Mugyiwara is going to fix that."
She didn't speak. Her jaw was locked, her fists trembling not from fear, but fury—aimless, cold fury with nowhere to go. She didn't scream or lash out.
She just looked down.
The hijab lay on the alley's grimy floor, a streak of modest blue soaked through like a forgotten flag. dirt-stained. Trampled by no one but time.
She stared at it like it was an animal struck by a car—still warm, still shaped like the memory of something sacred, but unmistakably lifeless. Her hijab lay there, limp and dirt-soaked, no longer a banner or shield or home. Just cloth. Just something that had meant something once, now discarded in the filth like a chapter torn from scripture. She didn't reach for it. Not yet. Her eyes locked on the edge of its fabric, her shoulders drawn tight, trembling not with rage or fear but the quiet collapse that comes when pride is stripped layer by layer and shame is allowed to breathe.
Her lips parted slightly, barely more than a twitch. She wasn't speaking to him—not really. Maybe it was a prayer to a god she wasn't sure was still listening. Maybe it was a curse, muttered to the bones of ancestors who never prepared her for alleys like this. Whatever it was, it was small and private. A word made of breath and pain. And as it slipped from her, the world compressed until nothing remained but the rot-stained concrete beneath her knees, the echo of a monster's laugh, and the weight of being seventeen with no protection except the memory of who you used to be before the world took notice of your softness.
The alley closed in around them. It smelled of old piss and engine oil and burnt-out neon, like every forgotten place in the city trying to scream at once. No sky. No stars. No Shotaro flinging metaphysical nonsense like grenades. Just her, bareheaded and bruised, and him—the Jester. The blade-smile. The man who saw people as puzzles, as mirrors, as things to break open so he could see what made the pieces twitch.
She crawled toward the scarf. Her body moved with the pitiful grace of something not quite broken but so very close. Her shoulder led, then her knees, then her hand, trembling and outstretched—not to claim it, but to cover herself, to hide the pale scar carved like a crescent moon into the center of her forehead. That mark—earned, not born—felt loud and exposed in the city's damp breath. She didn't want to be seen. Not like this. Not without it.
And then came the sound, sharp and sudden: the heel of his boot slamming down on her wrist with the precision of cruelty rehearsed a thousand times. The crack wasn't cinematic—it was real, wet, almost muted—but it thundered through her bones like a betrayal. Her whole body seized, spasmed. She bit her lip hard enough to taste metal. Her voice didn't scream; it crumpled inward, the sound caught behind clenched teeth and a closed throat.
The jester laughed. Not from joy. Not from madness. But from familiarity. "Oh, you bite your lip too," he crooned, his head tilting like a bird admiring a reflection in broken glass. "Just like him. Just like dear Shotaro. Gods, you people are predictable—so much pain and nowhere to put it but your own mouths."
The laughter came harder now, choked with delight, like a child discovering a hidden lever in a cruel toy. His painted grin stretched wider, as though he could feel her heartbeat thudding beneath his boot. He didn't press harder. He didn't need to. The damage had been done, and worse—it had been understood.
Fatiba didn't cry. Her eyes watered, sure, but that was biology. What she felt went deeper than tears. Deeper than pain. It lived somewhere in the hollow space beneath her ribs, where something fragile had finally snapped in the wind—too soft to echo, too sacred to scream.
And still, she didn't look up. Not fully. Her good hand still hovered near the hijab, fingers twitching, aching for it—not just as cover, not as modesty, but as memory. As armor. As something that had once stood between her and a world that now had teeth.
The city outside the alley didn't know. Couldn't. Somewhere, bells rang for morning traffic. Someone argued over a parking space. A child dropped their sandwich. But here, in this narrow corridor where meaning went to rot, a girl knelt broken beneath a man dressed as a joke, and the joke had claws.
And somewhere beyond that, fate turned the page.
....
Somewhere in Singapore, a pair of glass doors whispered shut behind them, silencing the boardroom's clinical arguments and perfumed diplomacy. Rashid Darvish loosened his tie with the practiced indifference of a man who hadn't felt anything in years. Beside him, Mariham walked like a sculpture in motion—graceful, expensive, emotionally unreachable. They both moved like clockwork: elegant, synchronized, tired of pretending.
The heat outside was polite in this part of the city. Even the humidity here knew better than to cling too close to the powerful. Their car—a sleek black European thing that looked more like a shadow than a vehicle—waited silently by the curb, engine already humming, cooled from within like the belly of a yacht. They slid inside without a word. The interior smelled faintly of bergamot and leather polish. Not lived-in. Just... maintained.
They didn't ask each other how they were. That kind of softness had long ago been filed under "inefficient." Instead, as the car pulled away from the curb with a purr, they did what they always did—they resumed their negotiations. Not with contracts this time, but with each other.
"I'm telling you, Rashid, we need to reconsider the expansion into Istanbul," Mariham said, scrolling through projected numbers on her phone. Her voice was steady, cold, precise. "There's too much political noise, and our logistics partners aren't secured."
Rashid glanced out the window, watching the Singapore skyline blur past—skyscrapers like high priests of capital, bowing to no god but the quarterly report. "I've already greased the customs angle. With our name? We walk through any door we want. Always have."
"That's exactly the problem," she replied. "We've been walking through too many doors. One of them's going to close while we're still inside."
Their conversation was a swordfight dulled by repetition. There were no surprises between them anymore. No affection, no spark. Just polite detente, the kind reserved for diplomats who no longer believe in the country they represent.
For a moment, Rashid sighed and leaned back, pressing two fingers to his temple like a man massaging away a migraine he'd married. "You know," he said finally, his voice softer but no warmer, "Fatiba's been unusually quiet in the group chat. Not even her usual little rebellions."
Mariham didn't look up. She was still scrolling. "She's seventeen, Rashid. She's always quiet. Unless she's yelling."
"Still," he said, looking down at his Rolex. "Feels off."
Mariham blinked. Not concerned—calculating. Then: "You're worried?"
"No," he said, too quickly, then corrected, "Just noticing."
"She'll be fine. She always is. She has our blood, and that counts for something."
Rashid made a small sound in his throat, somewhere between agreement and doubt. They lapsed into silence again as the car merged onto the highway. Outside, the world passed like an expensive screensaver—clean roads, tidy trees, other cars that never seemed to honk.
Inside, the Darvishes sat like two statues carved from the same stone. They were not lovers. They were not even adversaries. They were co-owners of a legacy dressed up as a family. And their daughter? She was a product. A future ambassador of the brand. A line item on the estate. Someone to mold. Not someone to know.
"I heard from the academy," Mariham said after a while, her tone neutral as tax paperwork. "She skipped her last session. The professor called it 'philosophical unrest.' Whatever that means."
Rashid smirked faintly, almost fond. "That does sound like her."
"She needs discipline. And direction. She's been allowed too much freedom, too much... passion."
"She's not like us."
"No," Mariham said, as though tasting something unpleasant. "She's still under the illusion that she can choose who she becomes."
They both nodded, unspoken agreement settling between them like old dust. Their daughter was a deviation in the data. A variable. And in time, she'd either be recalibrated—or replaced.
Outside, the city glimmered like a perfect lie. Inside, two titans of industry floated above consequence, unaware that in another country, in another alley, their child was bleeding from the wrist—humiliated, cornered, stripped of everything she thought protected her. And yet they never called. Never reached. Never imagined that something so human could be happening to someone who bore their name.
The car eased to a halt with the soft hiss of hydraulics, the door opened, and they stepped out like royalty descending from a closed, air-conditioned realm into a humid slice of someone else's dream. Rashid adjusted his cuffs absently, and Mariham took a moment to check her reflection in the glass of the car before turning to face the lionfish statue glinting at the plaza's center.
It stood proud—artificial, flamboyant, oddly regal. Water cascaded from its fanged mouth into a rippling fountain below, where koi moved like liquid brushstrokes through chlorinated turquoise. Around it swirled life. Real life.
Families leaned together for photos, their hands brushing without awkwardness. Children sloppily ate melting ice cream, parents with soft tired eyes looked on, and couples—young, old, exhausted, giddy—stood under the bright Singaporean sky, trying to capture a moment that felt fleeting enough to matter. A mother gently wiped curry off her toddler's chin. A teenager shyly touched her boyfriend's pinky, not quite holding hands but nearly there. There were faces flushed with sun and conversation, voices soft and loud, accents layered with years and origin stories.
All of it—too vivid, too fragile—was something neither Rashid nor Mariham quite knew how to enter.
But they walked through it like ghosts in tailored suits. This wasn't a date. It never was. It was a scheduled meeting, a convenience of proximity, a public setting meant to buffer whatever still lingered in the quiet between them.
Mariham was the first to notice the small crowd near the base of the statue, all clustered around the fountain's edge. Some were tossing in coins—old women, tourists, young children held up by their mothers, couples with fingers entwined. The coin made a soft plink against the water, followed by a quiet murmur of something half-whispered, half-wished.
Rashid's brow lifted faintly, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth—dry, sardonic. "Superstition," he said, in the tone of a man who lived in skyscrapers and spreadsheets, whose gods were figures preceded by dollar signs.
Mariham didn't respond, but her gaze lingered on a couple nearby—barefoot, laughing as they tried to time their coin toss together. They missed. They tried again. They missed again. They didn't seem to care. Their joy was not in getting it right, but in getting it wrong together.
There was a pause, long and almost embarrassing. Then, for once—for reasons they didn't entirely understand—they found themselves walking forward.
They stood before the fountain, staring into the rippling reflection of themselves: a man and a woman, beautiful, rich, influential... and utterly hollow. They had built empires but forgotten how to build a moment.
"I suppose we should wish for a good quarter," Mariham said, almost joking.
"I suppose we should wish for less volatility in logistics," Rashid said, almost serious.
Then—without ceremony—he pulled out a ten-cent coin. She didn't stop him. He didn't speak. And in the strangest moment of shared absurdity, they both hurled it in.
It struck the water, rippled out, disappeared.
They didn't close their eyes. They didn't make a wish. But something in the gesture—mechanical, small, even silly—carried a kind of aching intimacy neither of them would ever name. For a flicker of time, they were no longer Rashid and Mariham Darvish of Darvish Family Co. They were simply two people near a fountain, surrounded by the sounds of children's laughter and the scent of wet stone and street food. They were pretending, yes—but together.
Behind them, the plaza buzzed on with the soft music of ordinary life. And somewhere across the ocean, their daughter bled in silence. Her name never left their lips. Her pain never reached their hearts.
But the coin—vanished into the pool like a prayer they didn't believe in—still fell.
The Coin, nor the fountain did cared about their beilives.
The harmonium breathed like a living thing beneath Abbas's fingers, wheezing out long, trembling notes that swelled and curled through the marble corridors of the Darvish estate. His voice, aged but unwavering, carried the ancient syllables of prayer not as mere recitation, but as offering—woven with love, memory, and grief unspoken. The room was open to the garden, and the morning breeze carried the scent of rosewater and neem, mingling with the sound like a hymn whispered through sunlight.
Servants halted where they stood. The gardener froze mid-trim, the maids with folded linen paused mid-step, and even the old cook put down his ladle, letting the broth bubble unattended. None dared interrupt. Abbas's music had that strange, sacred gravity—the kind only an old man with a clean heart and a thousand regrets could create. Each note seemed to acknowledge the suffering of life and still kiss it with gentleness.
And yet, in the midst of the swelling devotion, his hand faltered. A sour chill crept up his spine like a whisper from another world. His voice stopped mid-verse, and a silence, raw and sudden, took its place. His chest seized, not with the pain of age or illness, but with the unmistakable, unseen ache of a grandfather's instinct. Something was wrong. Something with her.
With Fatiba.
The air shifted. Not in the room, but in his blood.
He pressed his wrinkled hand to his chest as if to calm the thunder beneath, then slowly looked upward—not at the ornate ceiling with its painted vines and chandelier, but through it, through the walls, through stone and sky and distance, past reason and time, into the unknowable.
His voice, when it returned, was low. Barely above a breath.
"Fatiba... dear," he said, like a man tasting the name of someone he loved before she was born. "She is in a problem…"
Then he did something that startled the gathered servants more than anything else he could've said. He stood up, shakily but with purpose, and spread his arms wide—his palms turned skyward, his spine bent slightly, not from age, but reverence.
"Oh Almighty God," he said, in the old tongue that had cradled his faith since boyhood, "if this servant's voice still finds a place in Your wondrous, ever-watching kingdom—if my broken hymns still echo in any corner of Your realm—then hear me."
His voice cracked, but he did not stop.
"Please, I beg of You. Send a soldier, a miracle of light. Send forward Your most greatest angel. The quiet one. The unseen one. The one who walks where no man looks. Send them to her. If she is in danger... protect her. Let her not walk this shadowed path alone."
He stood there, open, fragile, exposed, like a tree stripped bare in the wind. For a long moment, no one moved. No one spoke.
The harmonium sat in silence, its keys cold now under the morning light. But its last note—somewhere deep in the hearts of those who heard—lingered. It did not fade. It waited, just like Abbas did, for some answer carried not by voice but by fate itself.
And though the old man did not know it yet, the sky had, in its own mysterious way, already started to listen.
The street was quiet, except for the rustle of paper and wind-swept sand. Nobody looked up as two tall men in grey overcoats passed by. They looked like retired soldiers—battle-worn, broad-shouldered, too still to be human. Their steps made no sound, yet the pigeons scattered ahead of them, and stray dogs refused to cross their path.
"You hear that, brother?" Gabriel asked, his voice deep and restrained, a rumble in his throat like thunder behind glass.
Michael did not glance at him, his eyes fixed ahead—eyes that once witnessed the birth of suns and the fall of cities. His face was carved from severity: stern brow, a jaw of stone, and a white streak cutting through his black hair like lightning through ash. His coat swayed with silent grace.
"Yes," Michael said at last, his voice like a blade drawn in a cathedral. "I did."
From a little way behind, a third figure chuckled. Ramail. Loose tie, golden shirt, and half-unbuttoned coat over jeans that didn't quite fit. He chewed a toothpick like a man who had seen the inside of a prison and smiled like he had charmed his way out. He twirled a coin between his fingers, the same kind mortals wished upon. "That's some desperate prayer, I might add. Old man practically offered up his soul just asking."
"It was sincere," Gabriel said, folding his wings beneath the bones of his back like folded steel under skin. His eyes were soft, like embers remembering the fire they came from. His presence was calming—a walking psalm.
"Tender," Ramail muttered, flipping the coin into a drain. "Too tender."
....
Uriel came next—tall, composed, with eyes like liquid mercury and a posture so still it frightened birds from trees. He spoke rarely, but when he did, it was always the final word.
Zadkiel, broad and laughing, wore a red jacket and steel boots. His fists were wrapped like a boxer's. "You know," he said to no one in particular, "I kinda miss this old world. Cigarette smoke, roadside chai, the whole dust and asphalt package."
Sariel, by contrast, barely cast a shadow. She was pale and ghostlike, lips sewn shut with divine thread—penance for a judgment once made too hastily. Her eyes glowed gold, not warm, but watchful.
Jegudiel came heavy with books strapped to his chest and chains on his wrists, like the keeper of divine debts. His fingers were ink-stained and trembling, but his presence? Unshakeable.
Selaphiel, face scarred in the shape of a cross, came next. He didn't speak. He never had. But he bowed his head in silent prayer every three minutes, as though keeping count of time in heaven.
Barachiel, robed in lightning-colored silks, had too many rings and a voice like honey—and made sure everyone heard it. He snapped selfies with mortals when he could, "to keep up with the age," he claimed. But his touch could still ignite repentance in sinners.
Raguel, short-tempered and bald, slammed his foot against the ground just to watch the ants scatter. "Let's just smite something already," he growled. His laugh was like grinding stone.
Haniel, genderless and radiant, wore eyeliner like a punk rocker and always smelled of incense and blood. Their laughter was contagious and their hands always carried either a dagger or a daffodil.
Jophiel, the youngest in appearance, dressed like a monk but quoted Kafka. Quietly poetic, often scribbling on napkins or leaves, he was the closest thing to empathy made flesh.
"God's greatest angel?" asked Jophiel.
"Damn so which one should we send?" He asked the angels in their coms [They are talking telepathically from around the city]
"Idiots" he told his siblings "you heard, we heard"
"God's greatest angel"
"& we all know"
"He is already there" he said.
....
Fatiba bit down hard—grit, blood, the bitterness of street asphalt. The pain in her wrist screamed upward into her shoulder, setting her whole body alight with a sick heat. But she didn't cry out. She bit the ground. She clutched dust with trembling fingers, lips pressed to filthy concrete like a prayer written in agony.
The Jester laughed.
A long, sharp, theatrical laugh. Too rehearsed to be spontaneous. Too sincere to be fake. It echoed between the alley walls like a bottle smashing over and over and over again.
She raised her heel and stomped again.
And again.
And again.
Bones shifted. Something popped. Fatiba felt it in her throat, the scream she didn't allow herself to release.
"Oh, God bless Mugyiwara," the Jester hissed, voice like glittering glass, "for giving the world such a fragile little friend. It makes their courage so deliciously tragic."
She leaned down, eye to eye with Fatiba, her painted smile twisting into something too personal. "I live for the despair on your face. You humans—you're so soft when you're breaking."
Fatiba, still on the floor, turned her face slowly. Her eyes—wide, wet, half-feral—locked onto the Jester's. Her rage wasn't loud. It pulsed like a second heartbeat.
"You."
Just that. One syllable. No frills. No pleasantries. Just raw contempt.
The Jester saw it—felt it. Her breath hitched. Her eyes widened with something close to hunger. "Oh… Did you just feel that? That spike in your chest? That darkness?" She cooed the word like a lullaby. "That's it, my darling. That's the truth of you. Not your scarves, or your expensive school, or your rich little last name. That. That hatred."
She began to circle her like a vulture, arms outstretched in mock rapture. "Embrace it, dear. Let it bloom. Let it spill. Tear me down. Piss on my bits. Bite me, stab me, dance on my corpse—whatever makes you feel real again."
Fatiba's breath grew louder. But then—then—something passed through her eyes like a cloud over the sun.
'The Incident.'
She saw it again.
Her body folded in on itself.
She groveled.
She pressed her forehead to the ground. Ashamed. Shaking. The Jester tilted her head like a confused cat. And then she laughed again—harder this time. Crueler.
"Oh, you saw it again, didn't you? The one thing that breaks you every time." She squatted beside her, whispering so close it made the air shiver. "That guilt. That shame. That little flame you spend your whole life trying to keep buried. You'll never be saved, sweetheart."
She licked her lips.
"Let it flood. Let the dam break. Let your hatred baptize you. You're not a victim. You're not a saint. You're not even good. You're just like the rest of us. You're human."
She raised her boot one last time.
"Beco—"
A blur of silver cut through the alley.
She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't even see the foot until it landed—hard, clean, and absurdly casual—right on her lower back.
The impact was so sudden, so decisive, that her body shot forward like a puppet thrown from the gods. She crashed into the far end of the alley wall, hit the dumpster, and tumbled with the grace of garbage. The air whooshed from her lungs as she slumped like a broken marionette.
A breeze followed.
Cold. Gentle. Shifting the trash. Stirring the silence.
Then came the voice.
"Peek-a-boo."
Low. Bored. And utterly unafraid.
Fatiba, her good eye barely able to focus, looked up from the dirt.
And there he stood.
Mugyiwara Shotaro.
His silhouette was backlit by the pale fluorescent light of a flickering streetlamp, turning his silver hair into a divine halo and casting his shadow down the alley like an angel's wing stretched across time.
His blazer flared with the wind as if even the air knew who had arrived.
Time didn't stop, but it staggered. The world hiccupped around Fatiba as she watched him bend—not with urgency, not with drama, just a small, deliberate bend at the waist as he picked up the hijab from the ground where it had fallen earlier. The fabric, now smudged with alley grime and the residue of a soul-scarring encounter, drooped from his fingers like a flag retrieved after a lost war. He held it up to the faint streetlight, turned it in his hand like an artifact, then gave it a few half-hearted dust-offs against the back of his sleeve before letting it fall gently, clumsily, back onto Fatiba's head. His hands never touched her directly, but his intention was loud.
"Wash it when you get home," he muttered without looking at her, the gravel in his voice softened by familiarity, like someone returning a lost umbrella without asking who it belonged to. "It's kind of filthy now."
For a brief moment, that absurdly mundane line hit harder than any miracle Fatiba had prayed for.
But before the silence could settle into comfort, a voice crackled from the rubble—sarcastic, nasal, wounded, but impossibly chipper.
"How's my big bubbly butt?" the Jester groaned with theatrical indignation, one eye twitching as she rubbed the scorched crescent where Shotaro's foot had blessed her lower spine. Smoke drifted from her coat like a failed magician's curtain call. "That kick had emotional trauma in it. I swear I felt it in my childhood."
Then, with a hop and a pouting leap, she lifted a finger in exaggerated accusation. "That's it! I'm cutting you off. No more butt stuff. Not even for anniversaries."
Shotaro didn't even blink. He exhaled through his nose like someone dealing with a raccoon that had learned how to open the fridge. "You're making it sound like we're some hyper-sexual, co-dependent war couple," he muttered, tone dry and terminally annoyed.
"Well," she replied with a shrug, blood dripping off her chin like jam off a spoon, "this whole war-dance we do? This thing? It's just our philosophical sex. You're the thesis, I'm the counterpoint. We climax through conflict."
He grimaced, rubbing the bridge of his nose like he could physically pinch the stupid out of the conversation. "Dear God, you're the biggest fuckup in your gang."
Jester licked a streak of red from her knuckle and raised an eyebrow with mock innocence. "Thinking about it… what did happen to the rest of them?"
....
In a crater three blocks away, Smasher was buried head-first into cracked pavement, his tree-trunk legs twitching slightly above the surface like a Looney Tunes character after falling from orbit. A small dog wandered over, sniffed thoughtfully, then lifted its leg and pissed on the back of his neck.
....
Elsewhere in a scorched botanical garden, Dr. Gardener—or what remained of him—dangled from a twisted, half-burnt vine. His leafy face twitched weakly as his charred wooden limbs drooped like molted branches. "The humans came after the trees," he rasped with a throat full of smoke, "we were here firsssst…"
....
In a flooded alley four blocks over, Raven Black lay face-up in a shallow puddle, her eyes closed, fangs cracked, one arm missing entirely and a gaping hole through her torso. Her one remaining leg twitched as she cursed in old Hungarian. She would live. She always did. Dhampir regeneration was stubborn like that. Still, she whispered to the void, "Sometimes I wonder who amongst us...is the monster."
....
A dozen rooftops away, Icececilia was sprawled out across melting concrete. A jagged icicle jutted clean through her chest, evaporating slowly under the heat. Her eyes flickered open weakly, voice a croaked whisper to no one but herself. "It was just for my son… Just for him... I'm still a good mother, aren't I?"
....
In a shattered marketplace, The Dreadful Knight lay in pieces. His obsidian armor had been superheated to slag, cyborg implants liquefied where they fused with organic muscle. Steam hissed from joints that no longer moved. A single exposed eye stared upward at the sky in silence, unmoving, unscreaming.
....
Back in the alley, Jester tilted her head, chewing on her lip thoughtfully as if counting invisible cards. "So I'm guessing I'm the last one?"
"Your Fielding's set now," Shotaro said without much effort, his tone casual as he took one step forward and buried his fist into her abdomen like he was flicking a switch.
The punch landed with a dull, meaty thud that folded her mid-sentence and sent her flying into the wall with the grace of a ragdoll shot from a cannon. The brick cracked where her spine met it. Paint peeled. Something nearby fell over. She slid down the wall slowly, leaving a smeared red trail behind like a paintbrush dragged by a dying god.
Fatiba, still crouched with her hijab cradled loosely over her brow, watched him—this boy, this celestial idiot, this walking contradiction of sarcasm and divinity—as he stood there like it was just another Tuesday.
She wasn't sure what moved her more: the fact that he came, or the way he made it look like he always would.
And somewhere above them, high beyond smog and stars, thirteen angels stood on the edge of heaven, arms crossed, halos flickering, saying nothing.
Because sometimes, when God's greatest angel moves—no trumpets sound.
Only consequences.