Page 77 of Cruel Deception
“Take off your clothes.”
“No. Please—” I recoiled.
He leaned forward, eyes hard. “I told you before. I don’t give a fuck about the scars on your chest.”
“Yeah, but I do,” I snapped. “I’m not comfortable.”
He stared at me a moment, then stood and walked away—only to settle in the chair across from me.
“Why did you disobey me?” he asked.
He crossed one leg over the other, still watching me like I was under a microscope.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Then finally said, “He said he could help find my mother.”
“My mother is everything to me,” I added quickly. “I’ve been searching for her for years. She just... disappeared. And he offered hope. I needed it.”
Cassian was silent for a beat.
Then: “Your brother would’ve died if not for me.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“No one knows where your mother is,” he said evenly. “Except me.”
I blinked. “What?”
He didn’t repeat it.
“Whatever Luca told you... was a lie,” he said. “He never intended to help you. He only wanted to trap you. Lock you up. Break you.”
I swallowed hard. “I didn’t know he was like that.”
“You’re just stupid.”
His words weren’t cruel—they were matter-of-fact. Cold. Like he’d decided that was the truth.
“That’s the man you would’ve married,” he continued. “He’d have hit you again. And again. Until the day your body gave out in his hands.”
His eyes didn’t move from mine.
“And you’d have died calling it love.”
I sat there frozen.
No words came.
Only silence.
Only pain.
Only him.
And yet... somehow, even through all that darkness, I felt safer with the devil in front of me than with the ones I left behind.
“You won’t hit me?” I asked quietly, not out of curiosity—but out of dread.
He said nothing.
