The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Cixi instantaneously turned back to the couch.

It was empty.

There was no dent left in the cushion. The only thing that felt real in that moment was the knife lying in her palm.

"Cassian?" She said it to the empty seat, quietly, as if she would receive a reply from the empty sofa.

To her disappointment, the couch did not answer her back because there was no invisible Cassian.

She tried to tell herself she had imagined the man beside her, that fear and low light had built a second Cassian out of nothing. But that lie had never once held for her. She did not hallucinate. Whatever her eyes showed her had always, every single time, turned out to be real.

So both of them had been real.

Footsteps crossed the room toward her.

She looked up. Cassian, the one who had come through the door, was crossing the room toward her, slow and unhurried, his dark eyes fixed on her face.

Cixi followed him without meaning to, sinking back into the cushion as he approached, never once taking her eyes from his. She stared into them as if they could tell her the truth, as if somewhere behind the darkness of them was a sign that would show her whether this was the real Cassian or not.

He lifted his hand and brushed the pad of his thumb across her cheek.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Are you trying to scare me?"

Cassian tilted his head. "What do you mean?"

"Why," she questioned, "were there two of you?"

"There is one of me."

She opened her mouth to answer him, and she blinked; he was no longer beside her.

He was standing in front of her now, a few steps away, facing her, and the place at her side where his warmth had been was cold and empty. She had not seen him stand. She had not felt him leave the couch. So how did he? It was the same stupid question she kept repeating, she told herself.

"How did you do that?" Cixi demanded.

"Do what?"

"You were beside me. Now you are there. You did not move."

"I have not moved at all," Cassian stated. "I have been standing here the whole time, Cixi." The corner of his mouth shifted, which was far from a smile. "If you still doubt me, how would you like me to prove it?"

She thought fast. The knife sat heavy in her lap. Her mind went back across the afternoon, sorting through everything that had passed between her and the man she trusted as Cassian.

"You are not Cassian..." Cixi was not sure if she was making a bold move, not knowing how the guy with Cassian’s face would react.... But the good thing is she can’t die.

Cassian would not make her feel scared. Confusing her? Yes! Annoying her? Yes! Making her go crazy? Yes, he would do that! Invading her personal space? Definitely yes!

"Do I need to prove that I am Cassian?" Cassian patiently asked, looking at Cixi with amusement. "Did you get drunk while I was not here?"

"Cassian, you have been here before." She raised her hand to reveal the knife she held. "This is what you just gave me. You instructed me to kill Rafael... his left eye, yes, the left eye, you told me to stab it if he ever entered this room or came closer to me." Cixi extended her hand to show him.

Cassian pulled something from his pocket and displayed it to her. "I have my knife with me. Where did you find this identical one?"

Cassian stepped closer, but she halted him.

"Stop! Stay right there!" Cixi gave Cassian a perplexed stare. "If you are messing with me, I would like you to stop right now." She left the knife on the table. She did not want to handle it any longer, worried it might be a cursed object, and yet she had touched it...

Once again, why was she having such strange thoughts?

She concentrated on Cassian. "Make this belly disappear. I know it is you who made my belly look six months along. So you had better make it go away. And after this, leave this place. I want to unwind."

Somehow, Cixi felt anxious about what she was experiencing. Perhaps the butler had added something to the food...

The clouds covered the sun, and the room went dark. She reached for the lamp beside the sofa, but the switch refused to work.

After many attempts, the light returned, and he was no longer where he had been before. He was standing at the window, his back half turned to her, looking out at the darkened sky, and the couch on both sides of her was cold.

"Cassian." Her voice cracked on it. "Stop moving."

"I am not moving." He said it from the window without turning. "You keep losing me, Cixi. You blink, and you think I have gone somewhere. I have not gone anywhere. I am exactly where I have always been."

"Then why are you in a different place every time I look?"

He turned his head, just enough that the lamplight caught the edge of his face.

"Because you are the one who keeps slipping," he murmured. "Not me."

The words went through her like cold water, because they were almost reasonable, and almost reasonable was the most frightening thing a person could be in a room that would not hold still. She pressed her free hand flat to the couch to feel something that did not change. The fabric was solid under her palm. The knife was solid in her lap. Her own racing heart was solid in her chest. Those three things were real. She held on to them.

"All right," she whispered, and made herself breathe. "All right. If you have not moved. If you have been in the same place the whole time. Then tell me. Where were I sitting when you first entered? My left side, or my right?"

Cassian, at the window, did not answer at once.

Cixi watched him. He had sat on her right. She was certain of it. She had felt his shoulder against her right shoulder, his thumb on her right cheek. It was a small thing, a stupid thing, the kind of thing only the man who had actually been there would know without thinking.

"Your left," he said.

The room went very quiet.

"No," Cixi breathed. "It was my right."

"Does it matter," his voice said, very near now, "which side you sat on?"

"It matters," Cixi hissed, and closed her hand around the hilt, "because the real Cassian would have made a sarcastic comment by now..."

Cixi’s eyes flew open. She was on the sofa.

She lay there for a moment, her chest heaving, her cheek pressed to the cushion, the bright afternoon spilling across the floor in long, ordinary squares. No second Cassian. No voice. No room folding in on itself. Only the quiet hum of the garden below the window and the steady thud of her own heart slowing down.

A dream. The whole of it, a dream. The empty couch, the loop, the man who kept appearing where she was not looking, all of it stitched together by her own exhausted mind while she slept through the afternoon.

She pushed herself upright, slow and careful with the heavy belly, and dragged a hand down her face. Her skin was damp. Her fingers drifted to the side of her neck almost without asking, searching for the warm raised shape of the mark, and found it there, exactly where it had been, real and steady under her touch.

That, at least, had not been a dream.

"Get a hold of yourself," she muttered, half to the empty room and half to the alien baby that sat between her and the rest of her sanity.

And the door opened.

Cixi flinched hard, her whole body snapping toward the sound before her mind could catch up, the dream still clinging to her like a cobweb.

Cassian stepped into the room.

He filled the doorway the way he always did, calm and unbothered, his dark gaze finding her at once where she sat tangled and breathless on the sofa. For a long beat, he simply took her in, the damp on her brow, the hand still pressed to her neck, the wild look not yet faded from her eyes.

"You were sleeping," he observed, his voice low as he crossed toward her.

"Y-Yes... I guess... I was dreaming," Cixi corrected, and even she could hear how unsteady it came out.

One dark brow lifted. "About what?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it. ’About two of you’, she nearly told him. Then she felt something in her palm. She uncurled her fingers slowly, one by one, and stared down at what she had been clutching the entire time.

The knife.

It sat in the centre of her palm, small and cold and undeniably real. The same blade. The same hilt. The same knife that the other Cassian, the dream Cassian, had pressed into her hand and told her to drive into Rafael’s left eye.

But it had been a dream.

She looked at the knife. She looked at Cassian standing in front of her.

She looked back at the knife.

"Cixi." Cassian’s voice sharpened with a note of concern she rarely heard from him. "What is in your hand?"

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