The Devil's Favourite Obsession

”Hmm,” she replied and said nothing more.

She lifted her chin to meet his eyes. His reflected darkness that simply went further, pulling you in one layer at a time until you forgot you had ever been standing on solid ground.

Cixi felt herself drowning in them.

Not the violent kind of drowning, where your lungs burn, and your arms flail, and your body fights the water with everything it has. The quiet kind. The kind where the water is warm, and the current is slow, and you stop struggling because some part of you has decided that wherever this takes you, you would rather go there than swim back to shore.

But beneath that — beneath the warmth and the pull and the unbearable closeness of his face to hers, something else stirred inside her.

Fear!

Not the fear of Cassian the man. Not the fear of what he could do, what he had done, what she had seen him do to others without flinching.

The fear of loving him.

The realisation had not arrived with fireworks or trembling hands or a dramatic intake of breath.

She had slept with Cassian Crown.

In her wildest imagination, Cixi’s imagination had been stretched to its limits since the day she met him — she had never pictured herself doing what she had just done. With a man who changed partners the way other men changed shirts. A man whose bed had seen more women than his dining table had seen plates. A man whose reputation for detachment was so well-documented that the women who left his apartment in the morning after the seventh day did so knowing they would never return.

And yet she is now in his arms. And she doesn’t want him to leave or go away from her.

She looked at his face now carefully, searching it, scanning it, the way you scan a contract for the clause that will undo you. Looking for answers to questions she was too afraid to ask out loud.

Did this mean something to him? Does she mean something to him? Will he stay with her forever? Or will he leave her?

Neither of them had said anything to each other. Neither of them had spoken the word that would have changed everything and the three-syllable confession that people in films delivered with tears before the music swelled and the screen faded to black.

He had not said he loved her.

She had not said she loved him.

What they have would be called casual?

But they had shared the intimacy without planning it. And she was not regretting it — that was the part that frightened her most.

She should have regretted it. She should have been drowning in guilt, in doubt, in the sharp, bitter aftertaste of a decision made with her body instead of her mind.

She felt none of that. But felt happy being in his arms! It felt safe and warm.

She wanted him. She could not deny it. Every touch he had given her, and every breath she had taken against his skin, and every moment she had pulled him closer instead of pushing him away — her body had written a confession that her mouth refused to deliver.

Did he feel anything?

He was looking at her with something she could not decode. Not hunger — that had passed. Not possession — that was always there. He looked at her gently. And this gentleness that sat behind his eyes felt like a candle flame behind frosted glass, visible but untouchable.

Was it Admiration?

Then why did she feel so insecure?

”What is troubling you?” Cassian asked.

His voice was soft. Not the commanding low he used in rooms full of people, or the dangerous low he used when someone had crossed a line. This was private. The voice he used when it was just the two of them and the walls had stopped listening.

Cixi’s lips parted. Then closed.

She could not tell him. Should she tell him what was running through her mind? She decided against it.

Because she had not forgotten. He had told her during the contract, clearly and directly, in a voice that left no room for interpretation — not to ask him for love.

He had drawn that line in the sand, and she had nodded and accepted it because at the time she had not wanted it.

But things had changed now. She had changed. Her feelings had grown for him. And now she wanted the one thing he had warned her not to ask for.

She genuinely wanted Cassian Crown to love her. Not because of a contract. Not because of a curse. Not because the Grim Reaper had issued an ultimatum. She wanted it because her chest ached when he was not in the room and filled when he was, and that was the simplest and most devastating definition of love she had ever encountered.

So why was she scared?

Probably, because Cassian had once told her she had put a spell on him. And spells break at a certain point in time. Every fairy tale she had ever read ended with a spell-breaking and the clock striking midnight, the enchantment dissolving, the prince waking up and realising the woman beside him was not who he thought she was.

What if whatever held Cassian to her was not love but magic? What if one morning he woke up and the fog lifted and he looked at her the way he looked at every other woman who had passed through his life with the cold, clinical detachment of a man closing a file he no longer needed?

The contract was for one year. Twelve months. Three hundred and sixty-five days.

She should have made it lifelong. She should have scribbled forever in the margin and initialled it before he could read the fine print. She should have—

She was spiralling. She knew she was spiralling. And she could not stop.

”Hmm?” Cassian tilted her chin upward with one finger.

His face filled her vision. Every angle. Every shadow. The line of his jaw. The slight curve of his lips that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else. The way his hair fell across his forehead, careless and perfect at the same time.

Why did he look so attractive?

She did not want to notice it. She did not want the quickening in her pulse or the heat that crept up the back of her neck or the way her stomach tightened every time he tilted his head at that particular angle. She did not want any of it.

But her heart had never once asked for her permission. It beat when it wanted. It raced when it wanted. It attached itself to whoever it wanted with the reckless, self-destructive confidence of a creature that did not understand consequences.

It was her heart’s fault. Not hers. She was an innocent bystander in her own chest.

Did Cassian feel the same?

The question sat inside her skull like a bomb with no timer. She did not know when it would go off. She did not know what would be left when it did.

Would he leave if she fell asleep?

The thought surfaced without warning, sharp and cold. Her eyelids were heavy. Every muscle in her body ached for rest. But she could not close her eyes — because some irrational, terrified part of her believed that if she fell asleep, she would wake up alone. That this version of Cassian — the one who was looking at her with something soft behind his eyes, the one whose finger was still tilting her chin, the one who had asked what was troubling her as though the answer mattered — would vanish the moment her consciousness did.

She would stay awake. She would fight it.

And if he left anyway, if he walked out of this room and returned to being the man who did not love and did not stay, then she would find him. She would kidnap him the way he had kidnapped her, drag him into a room, lock the door, and keep him there until he admitted that what had happened between them was not a spell or a contract or a moment of weakness but something real.

She would build him a prison with his own walls. She would trap him with his own rules.

Cixi arrived at this conclusion with the calm, unhinged confidence of a woman who had spent too long surrounded by madness and had finally decided to participate.

”I am thinking about your eyes,” she finally replied. Half a truth. ”I thought I saw them change colour.”

Cassian studied her. The finger beneath her chin did not move.

”You make it happen,” he responded.

His voice was low. Husky. The words vibrated through his chest and into the air between them, carrying a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the way he was looking at her — as though she were the only thing in the room worth seeing, the only thing in the world worth speaking to, the only thing that had ever made the impenetrable Cassian Crown admit, even obliquely, that something about him changed in her presence.

He leaned forward.

His lips pressed against her forehead. Gentle. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that is not a prelude to anything but an ending in itself — a period at the end of a sentence he could not say out loud.

Cixi’s eyes closed.

Not because she chose to. Because her body had finally overruled her fear. The warmth of his mouth on her skin, the weight of his hand against her jaw, the steady rhythm of his breathing — they dismantled every alarm she had built, one by one, until the only thing left was exhaustion and the fragile, impossible belief that he would still be there when she opened her eyes.

Her breathing slowed.