Chapter 328: Can I start tomorrow?
Something shifted in Sebastian’s face. A small thing, barely visible, the way light changes just before clouds cover it.
He was looking down at the pavement, at the small crack running through it near his right shoe, and he kept his eyes there because the pavement asked nothing of him, and the two men in front of him were asking for more than he knew how to give right now.
"He is going through a hard time, yes, and...," Demian continued. "He was stubborn. I know that. He was proud, and at the time, none of us handled it well. But he didn’t... " He paused, choosing his words the way you choose your footing on unsteady ground. "He didn’t mean to cut us off the way he did."
King made a sound in his throat. Not quite a word, not quite a laugh. Something in between.
"He was your friend," King said, turning to look fully at Demian now, his voice taking on a different texture. Harder. Flatter. "Not mine. He was never my friend, Demian. Not really." He looked back at Sebastian.
"A friend does not treat you the way he treated me. A friend does not look through you like you are furniture in a room he owns. A friend does not make you feel like dirt because you wanted something he had decided was his."
He put his hands back in his pockets.
"But I am not angry," King said, and somehow that was the most chilling thing he had said yet, because he said it calmly, like a man who has moved far beyond anger into something cooler and more settled.
"Why would I be angry? Look at how the tables have turned all on their own. I didn’t have to do a single thing."
Sebastian’s eyes stayed on the crack in the pavement.
There are moments in a person’s life when the only dignified option is to say nothing. When the mouth knows that anything it produces any defence, any explanation, any anger will only make the wound bleed faster.
Sebastian had always been a man of words when he had power behind him. Words had come easily then, the way everything comes easily when the ground beneath you is solid.
The ground was not solid anymore.
And so he said nothing.
The silence stretched between the three of them, wide and uncomfortable, like a river none of them was willing to wade across first.
Then Demian spoke again.
"If you’re looking for work," he said, his voice shifting into something more practical now, something gentle in the way that practical things can be gentle when they are offered with care, "you could join us." He glanced briefly at King, then back to Sebastian.
"It’s a new company. We’ve been running for three years. It’s nothing like Creed Tech not on that scale. Not yet." A small pause. "But we’re growing. And we could use someone with your experience. With what you know."
Sebastian finally looked up.
He looked at Demian’s face and found, to his great discomfort, no cruelty in it. No mockery waiting behind the offer. Just a man who had once sat at the same tables as him and had not forgotten what sat across from him, even after everything that had been lost.
That almost made it harder.
King shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He had been listening to Demian’s offer with his head slightly turned away, as if the words were not worth the full attention of his face. But now he looked back, and the corner of his mouth had found that particular angle again, the one that meant something cutting was coming.
"I don’t mind," he said slowly, the words dropping one at a time like stones into still water. "He can join. As long as he knows his place." He looked at Sebastian directly, making sure the next words landed exactly where he intended them to land.
"He would just be an employee. Our employee." The pause that followed was deliberate. Surgical. "Not the man at the top. Not the CEO. Not Sebastian Creed, whose name use to be on buildings." He smiled. "Just a man who works for us."
Demian ignored him so thoroughly it was almost its own statement. He did not sigh, did not shake his head, did not look at King with frustration.
He simply continued looking at Sebastian as if King had not spoken at all, which was, Sebastian thought distantly, perhaps the most effective way to handle a man like King.
"What do you say, Seb?" Demian asked again, his voice patient. "Would you like to join K & D Tech?"
Sebastian stood very still.
Inside him, something very old and very stubborn rose up for a moment the part of him that had built a company from a single rented office and three staff members, the part of him that had walked into rooms full of doubt and walked out with the deal signed and in his hand.
That part of him wanted to say no. Wanted to say it clearly and walk away with his folder and his worn shoes and what was left of his dignity, and find something on his own, build something on his own, because that was what Sebastian Creed did.
But then he thought of Seren.
Seb thought of Seren’s face at the door each evening. The way she tried to keep her expression neutral so as not to put pressure on him, but the hope was there anyway, it lived in the slight lift of her eyebrows, in the way she held herself still while she waited for him to speak.
He thought of how many times he had come home with nothing, no news, no offer, not even the small mercy of a callback, and watched that hope fold inward quietly, the way a flower folds at night, and how she would smile anyway and say it’s okay, Dad, something will come. Her voice is always steady. Always kinder to him than he deserved.
He could not go home tonight and fold her hope again.
He could not.
"Of course," Sebastian said.
His voice came out steadier than he had expected. He was grateful for that, at least.
"Of course I’ll join," he said again. Quieter this time. "I don’t mind."
The words cost him something. Anyone paying close attention would have seen it pass across his face in the half-second after he said them, a brief flicker, like a candle in a draft. The loss of something. The surrendering of a picture he had held of himself for so long, it had started to feel like the truth.
"Good." Demian nodded, and his nod was not triumphant. It was just a nod. Simple. Clean. The nod of a man closing a straightforward agreement. "It’s settled then."
"We’re going to dinner," he added. "You should join us. Catch up properly."
King’s laugh came before Sebastian could even process the invitation. It arrived quickly, like a reflex like King had been saving it, holding it ready the moment dinner was mentioned.
"Dinner." He said the word with a kind of theatrical wonder, as if Demian had suggested something faintly absurd.
"At our old spot?" He turned to Sebastian with an expression of exaggerated concern, the face of a man pretending to be helpful while doing the opposite.
"Can you still afford that place, Seb? Because I’m only asking. I’m just looking out for you." He tilted his head. "One meal there, one meal might cost more than what your monthly salary is going to be." He let that land, let it settle into the evening air like dust after something falls. "I’m just saying. I’d hate for you to be uncomfortable."
He was smiling when he said it.
He was still smiling.
Sebastian looked at him. He looked at him for a long moment, long enough for King to know he was being looked at and for neither of them to pretend otherwise.
Then Sebastian let the corner of his mouth lift not a real smile, not the warm kind, but the kind a person manufactures in the moments when manufacturing is the only option available.
"No, thank you," he said. His voice was quiet and even. Measured. Like a man counting his steps on ground he is not sure will hold. "For the dinner, I mean." He looked at Demian. "I appreciate the offer. Truly."
Then he stopped. Swallowed once. Not because he was sad, or not only because he was sad, but because the words that came next were the kind that required a small gathering of courage, even when they were simple words, even when they were just a sentence.
"Seren is waiting for me at home."
He said her name gently, the way people say the names of the things they are still fighting for. He said it like it was the reason for everything for the folder, for the worn shoes, for standing here on this footpath in front of men who had watched him fall and were responding to that fall in two very different ways.
"Can I start tomorrow?" he asked Demian.