CHAPTER 241: CHAPTER 241: CURIOSITY IS A NASTY HABIT.

Connor had been in the café for forty minutes.

Technically thirty-nine, but the way the second hand dragged itself around the clock made it feel longer. The room was warm and familiar, with sunlight catching on polished marble and the scent of roasted beans mingling with the faint whisper of morning ether flowing through the conduits above, but none of it helped to relieve the tension in his chest.

He was waiting for him.

He disliked how quiet the rooftop café was at this early hour; it allowed for thoughts, and his thoughts were rarely kind when they turned to the divine.

The sky hung heavy above the glass canopy, washed in the silver-blue haze of a city that never quite slept. Below, traffic pulsed like veins of light. Up here, everything smelled of coffee, ozone, and the faint hum of ether lines buried beneath steel.

He checked his watch... again. Ten minutes past the agreed time.

Typical.

Uno had always treated time like a courtesy, not a rule. When you created it, Connor supposed, you stopped respecting it.

He leaned back in his chair, the leather sighing under the movement. His deep emerald suit, tailored to an inch of its life, reflected the morning light like water on glass. The same could be said of the man wearing it: calm, composed, and too still to be relaxed.

His fingers tapped once against the cup of untouched espresso in front of him.

"This is a bad idea," he muttered.

The waiter glanced over, clearly misinterpreting it as a complaint, but Connor waved him off. "No, no. You’re fine. It’s the company I’m questioning."

He exhaled slowly, trying to loosen the tension creeping up his shoulders. He’d faced shareholders, competitors, the press, and even Victor Numen on a bad day, and hadn’t flinched. But this wasn’t business. This was a god who had once said, ’I want to understand love,’ and then used him as a research subject.

He should’ve said no.

He’d almost managed to convince himself of that when the air shifted. The light bent. The space beside him folded inward like reality itself was taking a breath.

Uno.

He didn’t need to look up to know it. The temperature dropped a few degrees, and the scent of something sharp and clean, like rain before it hits the ground, slipped into the air.

When he did look, he hated himself a little for how familiar the sight still felt.

Uno stood there, dressed in a long dark coat over a pale shirt, with no tie and no arrogance in his posture, which almost made it worse. His blond hair caught the sun and his blue eyes, those impossible eyes, carried that same calm certainty that had once charmed him, then destroyed him.

"Connor," Uno said softly, voice still a melody that could make storms kneel.

Connor leaned back, masking the instinctive jolt of memory with something that sounded like humor. "I see omnipotence still doesn’t come with punctuality."

Uno smiled faintly. "I didn’t want to startle you."

Connor let out a low laugh, dry and humorless. "You appeared out of thin air. Congratulations, you’ve achieved irony."

Uno’s lips curved, but the light in his eyes dimmed at the edges. "You came. I wasn’t sure you would."

"I wasn’t sure either," Connor admitted. "But curiosity is a nasty habit."

He gestured toward the empty chair. Uno hesitated, an almost human hesitation, before sitting. The movement disturbed the air enough to make the coffee steam shift toward him.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The sound of spoons clinking against porcelain and the hum of city life below filled the silence, grounding it. Connor studied him carefully, the faint exhaustion in the lines around his mouth, the way his hands stayed folded neatly on the table as if to prove he wasn’t dangerous.

"You’re not here to apologize," Connor said at last.

Uno shook his head. "No."

"Good," Connor said, sipping his coffee at last. "Because it wouldn’t change anything."

"I... I’m here to explain," Uno said. "Or try to not make it worse."

Connor hummed, tilting his head, a few strands of black hair falling onto his forehead. "The only thing that made me come here is the fact that you didn’t use your power to make me return to you."

Uno flinched, barely, but Connor caught it.

It was subtle, the kind of reaction most people would miss, but Connor had always been annoyingly observant. He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other, his posture the definition of polite disinterest.

"You did something aside from the Adler’s thing, didn’t you?" He asked, narrowing his deep green eyes.

Uno’s gaze didn’t rise right away. His fingers stayed laced on the table, motionless except for the smallest twitch, barely visible, but enough for Connor to notice.

The morning light caught the rim of Uno’s cup, throwing fractured gold between them. The city noise below seemed far away, softened by distance and tension.

"You’re imagining things," Uno said finally, though his tone was too calm, too cautious.

Connor gave a soft laugh, the kind that made people underestimate him. "That’s not an answer. You’re usually better at lying."

Uno looked up then, the faintest flicker of something divine crossing his expression, a shadow of infinity pressing through the surface before he forced it back down. "You always do that," he said quietly. "You look at me like you already know the ending."

"That’s because I usually do." Connor rested his chin against his hand, his expression deceptively lazy. "So. What is it this time? Another ’controlled accident’? Some new experiment, you’ll say, was inevitable?"

Uno hesitated. For someone who had created time, the pause was unnaturally long. "It wasn’t like that."

"Then tell me what it was like," Connor said, his voice still light but his eyes sharp. "Because from where I’m sitting, you look a lot like a man who broke another rule and doesn’t want to admit it."