The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Water covered the floor to the man’s waist. He stood in the centre of the cell inside the round glass jar, which reached up to 11 metres high. His skin had turned white and pruney, the texture of something left submerged too long. His teeth chattered. The water was cold. Cixi could feel the chill radiating from the cell three feet away.

How long had he been standing in it? The waterline on the walls said weeks.

Cixi stopped walking.

She stood in the centre of the corridor, her arms wrapped around herself, her grey eyes wide and glassy, her chest rising and falling in short, uneven breaths.

The corridor stretched ahead of her with more cells, more bars, more shapes behind the bars that she could not bring herself to look at anymore.

She turned to Cassian.

He stood beside her, calm as morning, his hands still in his pockets, his dark eyes watching her face with the same patient, unreadable attention he had carried since the first cell.

"Who are these people?" Cixi’s voice came out as a whisper.

"People who crossed me," Cassian replied. His tone was conversational. The same tone he used to order coffee. "Some lied. Some stole. Some threatened the people I protect. Some simply made the mistake of thinking they could walk through my world without consequence."

"How long have they been here?"

"Some months. Some years."

Cixi’s mouth trembled. "This is what you wanted to show me?"

Cassian’s gaze was steady. "This is who I am, Cixi," he said, using her name instead of the nicknames he used before.

She felt not happy at the mention; she was no longer the "lousy kisser" or "Cig" or "Little Lamb" or "Fake Fiancee" he had teased many times. And thoughts of kisses and playful moments felt out of place in their grim prison cell.

Why was she distracted by such things when people’s survival was at stake? Perhaps she had caught Cassian’s indifference, a strange "don’t care" attitude. How else could she explain about her current thoughts?

"You asked me once what I do to the people who cross me. I told you I do not kill them. This is what I do instead." Cixi heard Cassian’s voice.

Cixi looked at Cassian. She looked at the man she had kissed on the couch. The man whose fingers had combed through her hair while she slept. The man who had made her belly disappear with a touch and held her through a nightmare and told her he was here now.

This was the same man.

She looked at him, and for the first time since she had known him, she did not know what to say. So she said the only thing her mouth could form. "Are you trying to scare me?"

"No." Cassian’s reply came without hesitation."I brought you here so you would never have to wonder. So you would never have to ask someone else what I am capable of. I wanted you to see it with your own eyes." His dark gaze held hers. "And then decide for yourself."

Cixi’s fingers tightened around her own arms. A chill ran through her that had nothing to do with the temperature of the corridor. Her mind pulled in opposite directions, torn between the instinct to run and the stubborn, irrational observation that kept surfacing no matter how hard she tried to push it down.

She was not in a cell.

He had not chained her. He had not locked the door behind them. He had not threatened her, not once, not with a word, not with a glance.

His hand hung loosely at his side, open, the same hand that had held hers all the way through the corridor, and it was still open, still waiting, as though the offer had never been withdrawn.

’What am I supposed to do with that?’

Her eyes drifted back toward the third cell. The woman with a shaved head.

"What did she do?" Cixi’s voice came out steadier than she expected.

Cassian followed her gaze. "She poisoned a six-year-old boy. Her nephew, who happens to be my ex-employee’s son. She wanted his inheritance redirected to her name. The boy survived. Barely. His kidneys failed. He will need dialysis for the rest of his life. She has been here for fourteen months."

Cixi swallowed hard. The horror did not disappear, but something shifted inside it.

A fissure in the clean, simple revulsion she wanted to feel. Because the image of a six-year-old boy on a dialysis machine was also horrifying. And the woman who put him there was sitting four feet away, breathing in careful counts, alive and unharmed except for the walls pressing in around her.

Cassian did not kill them. He made them live with what they had done in a space small enough that there was nothing else to think about.

Cixi did not know if that was mercy or cruelty. She suspected it was both.

"What happens to me," she asked slowly, "if I cross you?"

Cassian’s expression changed, and it held a playful smirk. "You can try Cig." He was challeging her. "But you will never be in one of these cells," he said. "Not because you will not cross me. You will. Often. But because the rules I built this place on do not apply to you. Because I will let you play with me. And don’t forget, Darling, you have my mark. What do you think Mark is for?"

Cixi stared at him. Her arms slowly uncurled from around her.

She looked down at his hand, still hanging at his side, still open. She took it. While her mind was on her mark on her neck given by Cassian.

His fingers closed around hers immediately, firm and warm, and they walked back down the corridor together, past the cells, past the silence, past the people who had crossed Cassian Crown and learned the cost in the slowest possible way.

Neither of them spoke until they reached the lift.

When the doors closed and the car began to descend, Cixi leaned her shoulder against his arm. It was not a hug. It was the small, exhausted gesture of a woman who had just seen something she could not unsee and had chosen, despite every reasonable argument against it, to remain standing next to the man who had shown it to her.

Cassian looked down at the top of her head resting against his shoulder.

He said nothing.

But his thumb moved once across her knuckles, slow and deliberate, and that single, quiet stroke said more than any explanation he could have offered.

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