Page 37 of Dominion

But with Casimir here, his already subdued personality became almost non-existent, and my once vibrant guy dimmed out. My heart broke every single time I looked at him. The wounds he was hiding from us weren’t something that could heal with kind words and a kinder touch. They were something that could only heal with time.

The scrapes and bruises he came back with were almost gone, but it was the wounds on our souls that were the ones that hurt the most. Those were the wounds you couldn’t see, but you could feel them for many more years after the wound was inflicted. It was the self-loathing, the agony you had to live through that made it harder to breathe.

I knew it better than anyone. I knew what it was like to hate yourself so much that disappearing felt like the only option. Trapping yourself in a rusty old cage, while your mind worked against you, telling you how alone you truly were.

I hoped that Casimir’s presence wouldn’t cut off the thin thread that was connecting Dylan to us. I was new to the Order, new to all these things, but Dylan wasn’t. Dylan knew how things worked, and in the Order, the real blood, my real brother had a claim on me as if I were some sort of an object. But if Dylanthought that I would choose a stranger over him, then he didn’t know me at all. Instead of laughing this time, I looked at him, pulling his hand into my lap.

Those cerulean blue eyes looked up at me in shock, as if he was waking up from a deep slumber, the look on his face like a question mark. I refused to allow him to disappear from us. If he wanted to hate himself right now, then fine. There was nothing I could do but show him love and kindness and all the support that he needed.

I couldn’t tell him to stop feeling the way he was feeling, but I could be there for him. With Casimir or without him, Dylan would be the one I would choose.

“This is really good.” Casimir’s deep voice broke through the tense silence in the room, and I didn’t miss the way Ash leaned forward, staring straight at him. He was already at a breaking point after everything that had happened, and this shocking new arrival wasn’t something any of us needed.

I knew we had to go back to Winworth.

We had to talk to Kane, to Rowan. We had to find Danny and Judah, but I wanted us to have more time to lick our wounds. Time to heal instead of barging into something that we weren’t ready for. But I also didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t ready to face it all.

To face the consequences of what I had done.

Whether I loved those people in the Order or not was not what kept me awake at night. What worried me were the innocent children who were left behind in the hands of an even bigger predator. I had no idea what the agenda of those members of the Order was, but maybe not all of them were as bad as I thought them to be.

Maybe some of them were fighting against the current in their own way, trying to fix things before it was too late. Maybe some of them tried to help, like the Red Maidens who, judgingby the few words and sentences I could translate from Medea’s book, weren’t always slaves to the Order.

Maybe there were people there we could’ve used to help, and I killed them all. I kept the front page of theWinworth Dailyin Medea’s diary, even though I knew that looking at that thing and the destruction I left behind wasn’t good for me.

The thought that haunted me the most was the fact that my actions didn’t separate me from Judah. They only made me more like him, and being like him was the last thing I wanted to be. His slimy words from the other day still lingered on my skin, like tar I wasn’t able to wash away, and seeing Casimir here told me that it had something to do with him.

Why not seek me out before all this? If he had the power to help Ash, to tell him everything about the Order, why would he wait this long? Why let me suffer?

From the time he stepped inside the house— without an invitation, mind you—to the time when Zoe butted in, rushing us all inside the living room, he told Ash that he was Lars. He told him things that only Ash and Lars knew, and I guess that it relaxed him a little.

And when I say a little, it relaxed him enough not to try and kill him, but it did nothing to ease the tension in the house. Cillian still stood at the door, and I didn’t miss the way he held his hand on the gun holster at his hip.

I also didn’t miss the careful glances Zoe kept throwing at the men with Casimir, or the way Ash flexed his left hand that was still in his lap, waiting to attack. Maybe he would have jumped on the man if it wasn’t for the calm way Zoe tried to handle the situation.

“Why are you here, Casimir?” I was the first one to ask, too tired from all these glances. This silence was suffocating every single one of us. You could cut the tension in the air with a knife. The last thing I wanted to have tonight was more bloodshed,because I had no doubt that the men following Casimir carried their own guns. “Why now?”

I couldn’t hide the bitterness in my voice. I held his eyes as he lowered the cup down to the table, leaning against the backrest to really, really look at me. A part of my brain, that rational part, told me that he could’ve killed us by now if he wanted to, but people rarely did what you expected them to do.

People like Casimir, people who held power in their hands, they were the ones who liked games. They liked to mind-fuck you to the point where you couldn’t really discern the truth from a lie, brainwashing you until you started trusting them, only for them to betray you when you least expected it.

So I didn’t trust him—brother or not.

Blood meant nothing if those you shared the blood with weren’t willing to do everything for you, just as you would for them. It meant nothing to me because I saw what my blood tried to do to me. Danny was my brother, one of my brothers, obviously, and he tried to destroy me. He tried to destroy Dylan and Ash as well, helping Judah, when he knew, he fucking knew, what a monster Judah was.

“Straight to the chase.” Casimir smiled, his eyes softening with every passing second, but I hated the way he looked at me—dissecting me, reading me, trying to see through the armor I managed to put on the moment we sat down. If he expected to have me jumping into his arms, crying because he’d told me he was my brother, he had another think coming. “I like it.”

Family or not, he had to earn his place in my life, if that was what he really wanted. As far as I was concerned, he could crawl back into whichever hole he came out of and stay there. I already had my family, my people, the ones I could trust. I didn’t need him and the goons he brought with him to protect me.

I wasn’t a fighter. I didn’t know karate, jiu-jitsu or some other fancy martial arts that would help me protect myself. ButI had a heart bigger than most of the people I’d met in my life, and for those I loved, I wouldn’t mind becoming a murderer if it meant saving them or avenging those I loved. I didn’t need a fancy-looking guy, with his slicked blond hair and the clothes that probably cost more than this entire house.

I knew what those clothes were. I also knew who wore them.

Masks weren’t worn only on our faces, but on our entire bodies. We fooled people into thinking that we were just like them by wearing the clothes they expected us to wear, going to schools they expected us to go to, but deep underneath, where our hearts beat, we were nothing more than monsters, ready to attack when those same people who trusted us showed their weakest points.

Casimir wasn’t the kind of man that didn’t know how to put on appearances for other people’s sake, only to stab them when they least expected it. There was not an ounce of remorse in his brilliant eyes even though he could hear the pain and bitter emotions weaved through every single word of mine. I doubted that he could even feel remorse.

There was a gleam in his eye that I’d seen many times before. There was a sickness in his veins, thrumming close to the surface of his skin, trying to break free. This man sitting in front of me, seemingly relaxed, had scanned the entire area at least twice and he’d been observing us and the way we’d been interacting with each other.

---