Page 63 of Cruel Deception
The memories surge—his weight, my screams, the pain—and my resolve crumbles.
The gun wavered in my grip.
They deserved to die.
But my hand wouldn’t move.
I’m not tough, not like I thought. I’ve stolen, fought street gangs, but I can’t shoot them, can’t pull the trigger on these monsters.
I broke.
The sobs ripped from me, feral and raw. My knees buckled.
Cassian was behind me before I hit the floor. He caught me. Carried me like I was weightless and placed me on the same throne he’d sat on.
His voice was velvet—slow, intimate, and sharp as broken glass.
“Sit back, dolcezza... let me take care of it.”
I nodded, my throat tight, tears streaming. “Okay,” I whisper, my voice breaking.
I couldn’t kill them.
But I could watch.
And I would.
Cassian’s gaze held mine for a long beat—quiet, unreadable. Maybe there was a flicker of something human buried deep beneath the violence. Maybe not.
“If it gets too much...” his voice dropped, soft as death, “close your eyes.”
He walked toward them—calm, lethal. Rolled his sleeves to the elbows with deliberate precision, revealing forearms inked and veined, the quiet promise of pain.
The white of his dress shirt—immaculate and expensive—wouldn’t survive what was coming. He didn’t care.
And then he smiled.
Slow. Predatory. A ruinously beautiful thing.
The kind of smile a man wears when he’s waited years to bleed the devils from someone’s skin—one scream at a time.
He rips the tape from the middle man’s mouth, the man gasping, blood trickling from his lips.
“You remember her screams?” Cassian asks, his voice a chilling whisper, crouching to meet the man’s eyes.
“I do. I heard them in her nightmares.” He pulls a knife from his belt, its blade glinting, and slices a thin line across the man’s cheek, slow, deliberate, blood welling in its wake.
The man screams, high and broken, thrashing against the ropes.
“You thought you’d walk away,” Cassian continues, moving to the man on the left, tearing his tape off. “You held her down, laughed while she begged.”
He presses the knife’s tip to the man’s throat, just enough to prick, a bead of blood forming.
“Beg now.”
The man sobs, words tumbling out—“Please, I’m sorry, don’t kill me!”—but Cassian’s eyes are ice, unmoved.
He drags the blade down the man’s arm, shallow but precise, carving a spiral that mirrors the viper tattoo, blood dripping onto the floor.
