Page 124 of Cruel Deception
CHARLOTTE
The room was too quiet.
Elodie’s sobs had barely faded before silence swallowed everything. A silence so thick it pressed against my chest like a weight. I stood in the middle of the room, unmoving, stunned. Not from fear. Not even from grief. But from the unbearable pressure of knowing. Of seeing him differently now.
Cassian Moretti—the man who broke me, mocked my chest, dragged me by chains—was once a little boy screaming at the top of a staircase, blood running down his arm, trying to protect his mother.
I sat down, slowly, on the edge of the bed. My breath came shallow. I didn’t cry. Not again. My body was done crying. My pain didn’t feel justified anymore.
Because now I understood him.
He hated my mother.
And for the first time... I did too.
I stared at my hands. Pale. Empty. Shaking. Was it guilt I felt? Was it sorrow? Or just the shame of having misjudged a man I swore was the monster?
I had to find him. I had to tell him I knew.
And I had to survive whatever came next.
I stepped out of the room and into the long, shadowed corridor that led to his private wing—his war room, his study, and that damned steel door he vanished behind like a ghost. Mycotton dress whispered around my legs, my bare feet striking the hardwood with soft, sharp slaps, and my pulse pounded like a war drum inside my chest.
The study’s door is ajar, lamplight spilling out, and I shove it open. Cassian sits at his desk, a half-empty whiskey bottle glinting beside a knife, its blade catching the light, a ghost of the boy who killed at nine.
His shirt hung open, exposing the scars carved across his chest—etched reminders of a boy who’d survived too much too young.
His head was bowed, fingers slowly tracing the blade beside his half-drunk whiskey, not absently but deliberately, like it grounded him. Like he needed the cold steel to remind himself he was still here.
And when I looked at him—truly looked—I didn’t just see the man who’d chained me. I saw the boy, forced to watch his mother scream, his tiny hands pried open by Seraphina as Jade was raped in front of him. His cries silenced. His soul cracked.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cassian said without looking up. His voice was quiet, cold. Controlled. The kind of calm that comes before a storm.
“I know.”
But knowing didn’t stop the fury. It surged up anyway, choking the pity I wanted to feel.
“You knew,” I snapped, stepping further into the room. My voice sliced through the silence. “You knew my mother was your father’s mistress. You knew what she did to Jade—how she humiliated her, chained her, turned your home into hell.”
His hand stilled over the blade.
“You knew she set her up—lied, framed her, hurt her. You knew she made you watch Matteo rape your own mother, Cassian.” My voice cracked, then turned sharp again. “And you’ve been punishing me for it ever since. For her sins. Youchain me. You mock my scars. You break me in the dark because I look like her.”
He finally looked at me.
And what I saw stopped my breath.
Rage. Panic. Shame. And underneath all that—something wild. Something wounded. Cornered. The flicker of a boy still trapped in a room he couldn’t escape.
“You spoke to Elodie,” he said, his voice flat. Empty.
“I did.”
He stood slowly, picking up the glass in his hand. The amber liquid trembled with the tension that filled the room.
“Then let me guess...” His mouth twisted. “You came to cry. To offer sympathy to the monster who stabbed his father to death in cold blood.”
“No,” I whispered. “I came to tell you—I understand.”
