Three days had passed since Ethan walked away from the crowd of "winners" in the office lobby. Now, as the clock on his apartment wall ticked toward two in the morning, Ethan was still wide awake. There was no Megan around to demand bill payments, and no noise from Noah bragging about himself. There was only silence, a laptop, and a man in a crisp white linen jacket currently trying to climb his dish rack. "What exactly are you doing?" Ethan asked flatly, breaking the silence. Raphael fell from the rack with a thud. Even though his body seemed to pass through the stack of plastic plates without breaking a single one, he immediately stood up and brushed imaginary dust off his sleeves. "I am looking for justice. Or maybe your stock of instant coffee that hasn't expired yet. Seriously, Ethan, the way you work makes me want to call the heavenly authorities to revise the human reward system!" Raphael puffed out his chest, and thin, silver-shimmering wings appeared briefly on his back b

Heat rises from the cheap, off-brand iron with the frayed cord. Ethan moves the metal with surgical precision across his gray slacks. Holding his breath to avoid the scent of scorched cheap fabric, he glances at his watch. 6:30 AM. To his left, Raphael is floating face-down in mid-air like a lazy yoga instructor, his face hovering just inches above the ironing board. "That cord is about to snap, Ethan. If it shorts out now, half that slick hair of yours will be standing on end," Raphael said cheerfully. "Want me to fuse the filaments with a dash of altar-protecting lightning? It'll last until your great-grandchildren are born." "Stay out of my iron's private business, Raphael," Ethan replied without looking up. He yanked the plug, letting the residual heat finish the crease at the hem. "Iron's private business." Raphael clicked his tongue, spinning in the air until he was lounging against the wardrobe whose door wouldn't stay shut. "Unbelievable. Anyone else would wake up with a m

The Horizon Arc building felt like a high-end funeral parlor that afternoon. Ethan stood in the dim underground parking garage, adjusting the straps on his backpack. He was calm eerily so for someone who had just ensured his rival was hauled off to the legal department for cooking the books. Raphael hovered over the hood of the car, staring intently at the damp concrete wall. He wasn't joking around. He wasn't causing trouble. The angel just sat there in silence, staring at his own fingertips as if he were counting the atoms clinging to his skin. "Why so quiet?" Ethan asked, turning the ignition. His old car sputtered to life with a roar that sounded like an old man’s hacking cough. Raphael looked up, his usually shimmering silver eyes now dull. "I’m trying to remember the last time I felt this bored. Or maybe, this is awkward." "Is it because of how the meeting went?" "No. That meeting was entertaining. Manipulative, cold-blooded, but precise," Raphael said as he drifted down to

Ethan Gray's old car roared through the thickening gridlock on the main thoroughfare. The windshield vibrated violently as the bass from a nearby mall’s speakers thumped against the glass. Ethan gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. Beside him, Raphael hovered in an anatomically impossible position, sitting on thin air with his legs crossed, idly playing with a silvery glow between his fingers as if it were a wad of cotton candy. "Don't look at me like that," Raphael remarked without looking away from the city lights flickering outside the window. "It makes your nervous system look incredibly frayed." "One of the headlights on the car in front is out. That bus driver on the left definitely has vision problems," Ethan grumbled, his eyes fixed on the road. "The world is falling apart because people are too lazy to follow even the most basic rules." "And in the middle of all that chaos, a man named Ethan Gray chooses to remain the most law-abiding person on eart

Ethan Gray's car was parked at a crooked angle in a no-parking zone. The engine hissed as he turned it off, venting hot steam into the City night air, which was thick with the stench of gasoline and pollution."Ridiculous!" Raphael's voice shattered the silence of the cabin. The angel was no longer sitting, he stood upright in the cramped space, his head passing right through the car's roof. His aura erupted into a deep maroon, a visual phenomenon that felt to Ethan's eyes like a contained firestorm. "You're letting this Erick character sabotage your audit, Ethan? He cut off your server access, then he bribed the IT technicians to forge the original data!"Ethan locked the car doors. He strolled casually past a group of gossiping security guards, his expression like someone who had just picked up dinner from a street vendor, not a man who had just been forcibly removed from his internal audit duties by his own boss."It's not about being sabotaged, Raphael," Ethan replied flatly, his