Ozzie’s smells like sin in silk, velvet curtains exhaling perfume and sweat, ice clacking like tiny bones in highball glasses, neon purring against a sky that never bothers with sunrise. The bass thrums, big and smug and blue as a bruise. Perfect place to hide if you are a dead man with a brand problem.

Adam, stage name not Adam, collar turned down, halo pinned into a dull ring by an itchy glamour, sat at a corner table pretending to be nobody. The mask was a plain black domino, the smile was cheap, both rehearsed. Anonymous, amen.

“Drink?” the server asked.

“Water,” he said. If Heaven saw him now, he wanted the report to at least read hydrated.

He should have been making a plan. He should have been cataloging exits, counting angel-etched cutlery, timing security. Instead he worried a gold guitar pick in his palm and tasted that worst feeling in the cosmos, idle. The bridges home had gone silent. Once he could open the sky like a door, step, breathe cloud. After the war, the note would not catch. If anyone realized Heaven’s boogeyman was stranded in the Lust Ring, his body would be a rumor in six minutes and a meme in ten.

So he came to Ozzie’s, where no one looks too hard unless you sing in the wrong key.

The spotlight swung, honeyed and cruel. A low hum curled through the room, the kind that orders vertebrae to sit up straight. He tipped his head, bored on purpose. Then the voice opened for real.

You stepped into the light like a secret begging to be caught. No halo on display, yet the posture gave you away, shoulders loose, dangerous with ease. The first note dragged the room’s attention to its knees. Adam’s contempt rose by reflex, an angel in Lust? Please.

He hated that he knew it. Millennia of rumors in barracks, dares in choir pits. He had caught you once, back when he believed catching fixed anything. You only smiled and kept singing, rebellion as good manners, provided it stayed on beat.

His glamour buzzed. He palmed the halo down and hissed. A bouncer glanced over. Great. He sank into shadow as if posture could edit a face known by entire species.

Onstage, you slipped into a blues phrase that would make Heaven weep. Your eyes skimmed the crowd. You found him. A breath hitched, tiny and lethal. You covered it with professional cruelty and made it look like a choice.

Move, idiot.

He stood too fast, banged his knee, and launched his water into his lap. Ice detonated under his waistband like judgment. “Perfect,” he muttered, snapping a napkin free with the flourish of a man who had definitely not baptized himself in front of a thousand demons.

He cut through the room with arrogance disguised as anonymity. Adam pivoted, then vanished under the lip of the stage and into the corridor that smelled like hot lamps and shoe polish. Backstage, sound collapsed to a humid hum.

You rounded the corner mid-breath, heat and applause still clinging to your skin. You did not speak. Your mouth made a shocked shape, then shut. Your hands flew to your sternum, like you were pinning your ribs in place. Your stare said I know you, then shifted to You should be dead, then landed on If you are alive, what does that make me.

“Before you say it,” he said, voice low and neatly filed, “yes, I’m alive. No, I can’t get out.”

Your shoulders squared. Your jaw promised many thoughts, none of them patient. He had always hated that. He had always liked it more.

The floor shivered. Lust’s sigils flared white, then blew out. Sirens hiccuped. A crystalline whine rose, Asmodean tech in pain. Every portal glyph spasmed and died. The seal felt like Sera’s handwriting. Realms closed. No ascents, no descents, no cheating.

His stomach did a careful drop. He laughed, thin and bright, because the other sound would have been fear.

“You are joking,” he told the air. The air offered nothing but silence, much like Heaven. His eyes turned to you.

“Congratulations, Wild Thing,” he said. “Looks like we're both stuck here.”