In that fantasy, Soren grabs me by the face and tells me what a bad boy I’ve been. He ignores me when I try to pull away from him, just holding me by the jaw and chin while he yanks the bottle from my hand and tosses it to the side. It crashes to the floor, breaking into several jagged and sharp pieces.
I imagine myself swearing at him. Telling him he has no right.
Soren grabs me by the back of my hair and reminds me what he told me. Punishment. It’s time for my punishment.
I’m dragged over to a couch, what couch doesn’t matter, but in my mind it’s there. Everything else is just hazy and undetailed. Even the floor under our feet and that couch. The walls around us don’t matter.
I fight him, briefly, but eventually I lay over his lap with my face against the sofa and he takes my belt off from around my waist. Then he tugs my suit pants down and?—
“Oh, I didn’t realize you were in here.” Cassian’s voice pulls me out of my unintended daydream.
I jump slightly, and I’m incredibly aware that my cock is rock hard in my pajama pants.
“Cassian,” I mumble. Forgetting, just for a moment, that I’m upset with him. I know I shouldn’t be. Logically, rationally. He’s just a kid.
My drunken brain quickly brushes that to the side though, and falls back onto the frustration and anger I’ve been feeling toward him since that day in our father’s office.
“You’re speaking to me now?” he asks quietly. I know that he means it genuinely, that he’s upset too, but his words spark more irritation in my chest.
Heat spreads from my groin to my neck and face, leaving my arousal semi-hard as my focus turns to something less pleasant.
“You know why I haven’t been,” I snap at him. “You know what you did.”
Cassian steps closer, standing almost entirely across the room near the doorway. He walks in just far enough that the doors close behind him and then stops.
“Why don’t you just say it to my face again?” he asks.
I scoff and grab the bottle beside me, just holding it. It feels comfortable to have it in my hand. Like a blanket I used to keep close as a child.
“Haven’t you heard it enough?” I ask in return. “How about you say it?”
Cassian walks over to me, standing an arm’s reach away. “I can’t.”
“You’re a coward, that’s why,” I sneer.
He huffs, and his eyes, mirroring my own, glitter with tears and emotion. I watch his hands ball into fists. “No, because it wasn’t my fault, Carmine.”
I stand up with the bottle in hand. “The fuck it wasn’t,” I tell him. “You weren’t supposed to be the one in father’s office. You aren’t fit to be guarding anyone!” My voice raises and I wave the bottle around recklessly. I feel the heavy, warm, and fuzzy feeling of the alcohol setting in. Soon, I won’t be able to control the volume of my voice at all.
“I wasn’t supposed to be in there, you’re right,” he says back to me, his younger and slightly less mature voice strained. “But it would’ve happened either way, Carmine. Don’t you understand that?”
I shake my head. “No. No, it wouldn’t have, not if?—”
“If an actual fucking guard was in there?” he stands completely still, his frame stiff, only his fists shaking slightly. “It didn’t matter who was in there. Dad would’ve died anyway. They came in too fast; they ambushed us. It wouldn’t have mattered who was keeping watch on the other side of the fucking room when they came right through the office door and shot him in the head and chest at his desk!” Cassian is yelling now. His voice sounds so much like my own when I was younger. It’s like standing in front of a mirror, looking at a smaller and more vulnerable version of myself.
“Well, it wouldn’t have happened if I had been there!” I demand, my voice breaking and starting to slur.
“It would’ve, and you know it,” he tells me. “That’s why all you’re doing since he died is drinking and you’re letting some stranger and their family take over ours.”
My breath hitches in his throat.
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing,” I growl. My words barely make sense. I stumble backward a little bit.
“You’re acting like a disaster, Carmine!” he says, and his tears stream down his face and he starts to sob. “I don’t want this. I don’t want it to be like this between us!”
“You’re lying!” I hiss at him. “All you do is lie. You probably wanted him to die,” I accuse, my head dizzy, words flooding me. Words that didn’t come from me to begin with. They leave my mouth anyway. Directed right at Cassian.
“What?” he gasps. “How could?—?”
