The Devil's Favourite Obsession

While David sat with his arms folded, his mind quietly assembling a strategy piece by piece, the way a chess player maps three moves ahead, Nelson’s thoughts drifted somewhere far cruder.

To the deepfake video.

That officer, Bill, had forced him to delete every copy from every device he owned. Had stood in his office and home, watching him scrub the files from his phone, his laptop, his backup drive, and his cloud storage. Had waited until the last thumbnail disappeared from the last folder before leaving with a warning that sat on Nelson’s skin like a bruise for weeks.

But David had a copy on his phone, it seems.

The file sat in David’s device like a loaded weapon tucked inside a drawer, waiting.

David did not care about the video. He had watched it once, shrugged it off, and told Nelson it was clearly fabricated. According to David, that was not really Cixi. The face was hers, but the body was not.

Nelson had a feeling it was Cixi... And he wanted to believe the video... He did not care if it was Cixi or not.

Whenever he thought of her, whenever his mind drifted to the image of her bending forward to collect papers from the printer tray, her hips were the main focus point for him.

He imagined her skin was exactly that shade of cream beneath her clothes. He imagined the curve of her waist, the round softness of her backside that he had watched a thousand times from behind his office door, and he imagined a thousand ways he would take what she refused to give him.

His tongue slid across his gold tooth. The habit surfaced whenever his thoughts turned to Cixi, as though the two were wired to the same circuit in his skull.

First, that officer had stopped him. Nelson decided to give it time, let the dust settle before he approached her again. He waited for her to call him about the money. She never did. He even drove to her college once, parked across the street, and sat in his car for three hours watching the entrance. She never appeared. The street thugs he had hired to loiter around her apartment building, the ones who reported her movements and her visitors and the hours she kept her lights on, had vanished into thin air. He could not reach them. Their phones rang dead. Their usual corners stood empty. None of the familiar faces he had ever seen. Infact, their phones were also switched off.

And now, when he had finally gathered enough nerve to make another move, she was living with the Crown family.

The Crown family.

Why could he not simply have her? He did not understand. Why could that bitch not accept him? How much more did she want him to chase? How many more hints did she need?

Maybe he should just kidnap her. Yes. That was the simplest answer.

"Maybe we kidnap her and take her far away from this land," Nelson suggested, leaning back in his chair. "A different country. Somewhere, no one knows her face."

David’s expression did not change. "I want Crown under my thumb, Nelson. If we do that, I gain nothing."

Nelson chewed on that for a moment. Then his lips stretched into a grin that belonged on a man with far less self-awareness than he possessed.

"I will share her with you," he offered. "If you want to taste her."

David raised one eyebrow. His arms remained folded. His posture remained still. The only thing that moved was his gaze, which shifted from the papers on the table to Nelson’s face with the slow, measured contempt of a man reassessing whether his own brother was worth the air he consumed.

"I am not a pervert," David replied. "Neither am I a rapist." His tone was flat, like a doctor reading a diagnosis. "She does not interest me. What interests me is having power over the Crown family."

"You are saying no to a girl like her?"

"No. I am saying you are a pervert and a rapist." David did not raise his voice. Infact, he didn’t even look bothered by his younger brother’s falling-over-heels act. "Because she is clearly not into you, and you keep dreaming of her. With the money you spend obsessing over one woman, you could afford ten who actually know how to satisfy a man. I do not do amateurs. And she is definitely one."

"So you do not want her because she has no experience?" Nelson’s brow furrowed. He was genuinely confused. Every man wanted to be a woman’s first. That was common knowledge. That was the natural order of things.

If Nelson possessed a brain, he would have understood what David actually meant.

David decided to ignore his brother’s stupidity and return to the plan. They discussed. They debated. They mapped out timelines and contingencies on the backs of the papers scattered across the table. And when they finished, Nelson smiled, satisfied with whatever they had agreed upon, his gold tooth catching the light from the bare bulb above.

*

On the other side of the city, in the Palace bedroom where the evening light pooled across the sheets like warm honey, Cassian lay still.

Cixi slept soundly against him, her head resting on his chest, her breathing slow and deep. Her fingers had curled loosely into the fabric of his shirt during sleep, holding on without knowing she was holding on. Her hair spilled across his collarbone in dark, tangled waves.

While she slept, Cassian watched their reflection in the mirror mounted on the ceiling. His dark eyes traced the shape of her pressed against him. The curve of her shoulder. The rise and fall of her ribs. The way her lips parted slightly with each exhale, as though even in sleep she was about to say something she would never say while awake.

He reached for his phone on the bedside table without disturbing her. His thumb scrolled to Sashkia’s number and dialled.

It rang twice.

"We have a problem," Cassian stated, his voice low enough not to wake Cixi. "I need your help. Come to Demond City as soon as possible." He paused. "If you do not come, I will set fire to the Valtham."

Silence on the other end. Then a giggle. Light and unbothered, the kind of laugh that only someone who had lived long enough to find threats amusing could produce.

"Do you think it is easy to hurt Valtham?" Sashkia challenged. Her voice carried the warmth of someone genuinely entertained. "Do you know how many witches live in this city? It is a city of Lucian Valtham. He will rise to end you, Cassian. Do not dare talk like that about Valtham."

"Do you think he has that much power to end me?" Cassian did not back down. His free hand brushed absently through Cixi’s hair while he spoke, his fingers combing through the tangles with a gentleness that contradicted every word leaving his mouth. "I will drag him to hell and imprison him there and let us see if he can find his way out... Speaking of hell. The King visited me. And he has plans to interfere in my life. Any tips for me? I heard he visits Valtham from time to time. I am rusty in how to deal with him..."

Sashkia said nothing for a long while.

"Well," she finally replied, and her tone had shifted; the playfulness stripped away. "I am not saying anything about this. I do not want to anger him by speaking against him. Unlike you, Cassian, he likes you. He might spare you. But it is another story entirely when it comes to me."

"Why are you afraid, Sashkia?" Cassian’s voice carried a nonchalant edge. "Your mother is a good acquaintance of his. And whatever he is cooking up with your mother, I am sure he will not harm you. Not if he does not want things to spiral."

Cixi murmured something in her sleep and pressed closer against his chest. Cassian’s hand stilled in her hair for a moment, waited until her breathing deepened again, then resumed its slow, absent strokes.

"He is the King," Sashkia countered, and for the first time, a note of genuine apprehension bled through her voice. "Not my mother. He might have thousands of acquaintances and discard them all. There is only one King of Damnation in all this universe. And he will remain one despite whatever he does, because the heavens have decided to look the other way." She exhaled. "I do not think you can strip him of anything, Cassian, until you do what he wants. Look at you. Roaming the earth aimlessly because of him."

"Why are you forgetting," Cassian murmured, and the corner of his mouth twitched with something sardonic, "that because of your mother, an entire flourishing land turned into desert? Poisonous roses are the only thing that grows from that soil now. People were swallowed by the earth and died." His cruel remark made Sashkia’s eyes turn sharp. "All thanks to your mother, because she could not get the man she liked. Wrong choice of words. An Alpha. She even fooled the Moon Goddess into placing a generational curse on the Alpha’s mate bloodline... And all out of your mother’s jealousy. "

Sashkia gritted her teeth. Cassian could hear it through the phone.

"Are you sure you want my help?" she hissed.

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