The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Cassian did not care that Olga had found him alive.

He did not care about her shock, her questions, her wide eyes scanning his face for an explanation that would make sense of a dead man standing upright in a dimly lit room with his arms full of an unconscious girl.

None of that mattered to him. What mattered was that someone had tried to kill Cixi.

He stood with his back to the bedroom window, Cixi lying motionless on the bed behind him, her breathing shallow, her hair fanned across the pillow like spilled gold. He had not moved from that position since he had carried her inside.

Olga stood near the doorway. She had not been invited in. She had followed because her legs had carried her here before her mind had finished deciding whether to run.

”I want to know if you saw anyone.” Cassian’s voice was low. Not loud. Not threatening. The kind of quiet that made people listen harder because they understood, instinctively, that the man speaking did not need volume to be dangerous. ”Her fall and you being on the terrace at the same time make me think it was you.”

He did not turn around.

”Why would you kill her?”

Olga’s breath caught. The accusation landed on her chest as a stone dropped from height.

”I saw no one.” Her voice came out steady, but barely. She met Cassian’s gaze when he turned his head — met it directly, chin raised, the way a woman meets a threat she knows she cannot outrun but refuses to cower from.

”How can I kill her?” Olga said, and her voice trembled on the last word, cracking along a fault line she had spent twenty years trying to seal, ”when she resembles my daughter?”

Cassian’s eyes flickered.

It was brief. A single shift in the light behind his irises — the kind of movement that could mean recognition, calculation, or nothing at all depending on who was reading it.

He looked at Olga once more. His expression gave her nothing.

”Cassian.” Olga’s voice dropped. ”How are you alive? Where have you been all this time?”

He turned his head to look at Cixi.

Her chest rose and fell beneath the blanket. A bruise was forming along her temple. Her lips were parted slightly, and even unconscious, the stubborn set of her jaw had not softened.

”None of your concern.”

He walked past Olga and out of the bedroom.

She did not know why she followed him. Her body moved before her mind gave permission, pulled forward by something older than logic — the desperate, animal need of a mother who had just heard the word daughter leave her own mouth and could not take it back.

They reached the living room.

Behind them, the bedroom door swung shut.

No hand touched it. No breeze moved through the room. The heavy wooden door simply closed on its own, the latch clicking into place with a sound that echoed through the silence like a lock turning.

Olga flinched. She turned to look at the closed door, then back at Cassian.

Her mind raced. Each thought crashed into the next without order or mercy.

Her husband on the terrace. Cixi falling. The scream. Cassian — alive, impossibly alive — standing with Cixi in his arms. The belly that had turned out to be fake. A door closing by itself.

Nothing made sense. Everything made sense. And both truths terrified her equally.

Cassian walked to the couch and sat down.

He did not sit the way tired men sit, or worried men, or men who have just caught someone falling from a height that should have killed them. He sat the way kings sit — one arm draped along the back of the couch, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, his spine straight, his chin level. As though the room had been built around him and everyone in it existed at his discretion.

”What happened in the dining room?” His eyes settled on Olga. ”Leave nothing out.”

Olga remained standing.

She did not know where she found the voice for it. Some small, ancient part of her — the part that was still the daughter of an industrialist, still the wife of a Crown ally, still the mother of a child who had been taken from a nursery twenty years ago — reached up through the fear and handed her the words.

She sat in the chair opposite him and began.

Cassian listened.

His mouth did not move. His eyes did not blink. He sat perfectly still, absorbing every word the way stone absorbs rain — silently, completely, giving nothing back.

Olga told him about Michael’s announcement. The shares. The reactions. Rosetta’s contempt. Ursa’s demand that Cixi take money and leave. She told him about Lorian’s words — this is what happens when a child grows up without a family — and watched Cassian’s face for a reaction.

There was none.

She told him about the metaphor. The elephant and the wild dogs. The lion. She told him about Tamara calling for the asylum.

Nothing.

Then she told him about Rafael.

”He said he wanted to marry her.”

Cassian’s eyes narrowed.

The movement was slight — a fraction of a millimetre, the tightening of muscles around his irises that would have been invisible to anyone who was not watching him the way Olga was watching him now: desperately, searchingly, looking for any crack in the mask that might tell her what this man intended to do with the information she was giving him.

She missed it.

She had already moved on to the next detail, and by the time her eyes returned to his face, the narrowing was gone, replaced by the same flat, impenetrable calm.

She finished.

Cassian remained still for several seconds after she stopped speaking. The silence pressed against the walls of the room.

”You did not see anyone running,” he said. ”No shadow. No movement. After Cixi was pushed.”

”I did not see Cixi fall.” Olga shook her head. ”I heard only the scream. When I reached the terrace, you were already standing there with her in your arms.”

Cassian held her gaze.

”Why did you stay hidden all this time?” Olga asked. The question had been sitting in her throat since the moment she saw him, and she could not hold it back any longer. ”Everyone believes you are dead. Your family. Your company. The entire city. Why?”

”Again.” Cassian’s voice did not shift. ”Not your business.”

Olga pressed her lips together.

”The only business you have,” Cassian continued, ”is Cixi.”

Olga’s heart thudded. A single, heavy beat that she felt in her temples and behind her eyes.

”What about Cixi?”

Cassian looked at her. The way he looked at her now was different from before. Before, he had looked at her as a suspect — someone on the terrace at the wrong time, someone who needed to be cleared or condemned. Now he looked at her the way a man looks at a woman he has not yet decided whether to permit to live through the night. Not because he wanted her dead. Not because she had done anything to deserve it. But because the information he was about to share would change the shape of her world, he was deciding whether she could carry it or simply enjoy seeing her taking her last breath.

Olga had seen Lorian look at men like that. Across negotiating tables. Across crowded rooms. The look that preceded either a handshake or a ruin.

Lorian had never looked at her like that.

The borrowed jacket slipped from her shoulder. She did not pull it back.

”I already collected the debt from your family.”

Olga’s heart lurched. The rhythm broke — one beat too fast, then a pause too long, then a hammering that filled her ears and drowned out everything except Cassian’s voice.

”What do you mean?” she whispered.

”You know exactly what I mean.”

He reached for the cigarette on the side table. Placed it between his lips. Lit it with a single, unhurried motion. The flame reflected in his eyes for a fraction of a second before he snapped the lighter shut.

He inhaled. Exhaled. The smoke drifted upward in a thin, grey line.

”But that does not mean Lorian will not be punished for what he did.”

Olga’s chest tightened. Her breathing came faster now.

”What do you mean, Cassian?” Her voice shook. Her hands gripped the armrests of the chair. ”What did you collect? What debt?” She knows what debt he was talking about, but she decided to feign ignorance.

Cassian watched her through the smoke and said nothing.

”Do you mean—” Olga’s words stumbled over each other, tripping on the truth that was rushing toward her faster than she could brace for it. Her eyes burned. Her throat closed. ”Is Cixi—” She stopped for a while...

”Is Cixi my daughter?”

Cassian took another drag of his cigarette. The tip glowed orange. The smoke left his mouth in a slow, deliberate stream.

He did not confirm it. Neither did he deny it.

He simply sat there, watching her.