Cassius’s favorite color is, surprisingly, yellow. He’s scared of the dark, despite what he told Claudia the first day they met. He’s never had a pet, and his favorite food is honey peach pie. His mother, Leanna, died in childbirth, and left with only his father, his childhood became a string of boarding schools as his father was constantly chasing “the best” for him. Cassius’s academic efforts were a futile attempt to win his father’s approval—a man too consumed by efforts to break their family curse to offer his son love. To him, Cassius was only worth something if he was the one to break the curse. Anything else was a waste. They hadn’t spoken in years before his father took his own life. Cassius found the body. Cassius is the last MacLeod alive.
“Where did you go after that?”
“Triche took me in at fifteen.”
“Oh, wow. So he really is like a father to you.”
Cassius shrugs. “He’s a mentor. That’s better than a father. Mentors choose to step into that role. They care about your fate and want to help you reach it. Fathers… well, fathers so often do not choose to become what they are. Fathers ruin their children. Mentors save them. And Triche saved me in every possible way. I wouldn’t be here without him.”
“What does that mean?”
Cassius’s demeanor shifts. Stiffens.
Claudia, nuzzling against his neck, strokes his soft hair. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
At that, he laughs. “You think I don’t want to tell you? I’d rip my heart out if you wanted to hold it. There’s nothing in this world I want to keep from you. I want you to know me the waya writer knows their favorite poem; the way a poet knows their darkest desires.”
She pulls herself back so she can look at him. Jaw tense, his gaze lands on her face. “But I don’t want you to think less of me if I tell you the truth.”
“Your vulnerability would never make me think less of you, Cassius. I want to know you. All of you. Everything.”
Cassius’s eyes dip to the ground. He can’t look at her when he says, “Triche has always been protective of me because when I was sixteen, I… tried. I tried to leave the way my dad did.”
“You… tried?” It takes Claudia a few seconds to realize what Cassius is confessing.
He tried to die.
“Once,” he murmurs, nodding. “Didn’t get far. Don’t know if I would’ve gone through with it. I didn’t want to die, really. I just wanted to leave. I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to escape the madness of the curse before it destroyed me, as it did with everyone else in my family.”
He releases a shaky breath and swallows hard. Claudia inches closer to him, squeezing his hand. “Triche stopped me,” he continues. “Saved me. Since then, he’s always been worried about me. He’s wary of anyone who gets close to me. He’s concerned that someone could hurt me deeply enough to bring me back to that place. But that won’t happen. I was sixteen and curious and exhausted and afraid. I’m not that person anymore.” Finally, he looks into Claudia’s eyes. “I have too much to live for now.”
Claudia shudders imagining a world without Cassius. Triche wouldn’t let it happen then, and Claudia won’t let it happen now. She lays her hands on his sharp jaw and says, “Will you do me a favor when we get out of here?”
“Anything.”
She brushes a soft kiss upon his lips. Gazing up at him with shiny eyes, she says, “Thank Triche for me. I owe him everything for saving you.”
He gives her a relieved, almost tired-looking smile before kissing her again. And again. And again.
After that, it doesn’t take long for Claudia to relay her life story in return: an only child who turned to books for company, lost her mother at thirteen years old, and they had money until they didn’t, and—
“What happened there?” Cassius interjects.
“Hm?”
“The money. What happened to it? It doesn’t disappear on its own.”
Normally, she would lie about this. She spun countless excuses back home—it was stolen, she would say. It was an investment that would’ve been worth millions had it not been for the thing and the thing and the other thing. She would say it was anything but the humiliating truth. But this room changes things. Changes her. Here, she doesn’t want to lie again. What’s the point? She has been keeping so many secrets that must stay kept, so it’s too hard to bear the weight of white lies, too.
“He was a shit gambler and lost it all. I don’t know if gambling is any more honorable if you’re actually good at it, but that’s beside the point. The very minute my mother died, he was bleeding her money. My mother’s family—” She pauses. “Actually, you may have heard of them. The Roes?”
“As in the watchmakers?”
She nods slowly with a tight smile. “That’s them. They had set us up quite well, but only out of shame. They couldn’t have their only daughter,theElise Roe, lookingpoor,” she says, then sighs. “They never wanted my mother to marry my father. He was a France-born stable boy and she was a debutante. But apparently he was kind and handsome in his youth, and she wanted to be wild. So, they got married, and her parents did all they could to turn my father into a nobleman. They gave him the land that made him a lord. They gave him money that turned him into a gambler. They hated my mother for him, hated him for who hewas, hated me for existing. After her funeral, they said they would not contact us anymore, and we were not to ask them for help of any kind. This would’ve been fine, as we owned our estate and had more than enough to buy another and staff it for years if we wanted to. But my father had always had that itch, those twitchy hands of a cheat. I think he’d been making petty bets for years, careful to ensure that my mother never found out. But with her gone, and him with all her money, he was free to ruin as he so wished. And ruin, he did.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t have to say that.”
