The Devil's Favourite Obsession

If either of them had known what the other was thinking, the conversation would have arrived at a different second of itself.

Neither of them did.

”I will not talk to you if you do not talk —” Cixi began. ”No. Probably I should have accepted Rafael’s offer —”

She did not finish the sentence.

She did not finish the sentence because Cassian Crown, who had been across the low table from her one second earlier, was now beside her on the couch.

His hand was at her jaw. His fingers held her face. The face she turned her eyes up to was not the patient, half-amused face he had been wearing through the entire conversation. It was a face she had not, until this bright second, ever seen.

”Did I not tell you to stay away from him?”

His voice was low.

”Or maybe I should go and kill him now.”

Cixi watched him rise. He had been across the low table from her one second before. He had been beside her on the couch the next, and now he was rising to his feet, and the slow, distant cataloguing part of her brain registered the movement as another piece of evidence for the supernatural hypothesis she had been collecting since the previous evening.

He took one step toward the door.

Cixi yelled.

”It is your fault. Everything is your fault!”

Cassian’s steps halted, and he turned to look at the one who was screaming at him.

”If you could simply answer my question, I would not be this annoyed.”

Her eyes were filled with tears.

She had not — by any honest account of the careful corner of her chest that had been hoping to cry in front of men and didn’t mean for her eyes to fill. They filled anyway. She had not wanted him to kill his own brother. She had taken the Rafael name in anger. She had not meant it.

”Go,” she said. ”Go and kill all the people. I will never see your face again after this. I will go back to my life the way it was. I do not need you. For keeping me in the dark since yesterday night. I was stupid to look for you all these months, like a crazy person, looking for any sign of life from you. I was a fool to think that you would like me. That you would treat me better. But it seems you enjoy playing with my heart.”

The words left her mouth in the long, uneven order they had been queued up in her chest for the past four months. She heard each of them land in the room, and she heard, with the cold clarity of the morning after the worst night of her life, how much of her own private chest she had been keeping closed from the man across from her.

Why was she fighting with him?

They had had sex the previous evening. She had fallen asleep in his arms in his bath. He had drawn a flower on her neck while she slept. They had woken in the same bed. He had bathed her. He had laid her down. He had fed her — or arranged for her to be fed — or stood beside her while a man bowed and called him Master.

Was this a couple’s fight?

Were they a couple now?

Not that Cassian had said anything. But she was considering them a couple. And, in the private corner of her chest, she had decided some hours ago not to consult on this question; she was hoping he was considering it too. He had told her, somewhere in the long, uneven middle of a previous evening, that he was obsessed with her. But then again, she was only assuming.

She wanted to cry more.

Cassian did not move at once.

He stood in the long, dim space between the couch and the door and looked at her. He looked at the tears that had begun to fall, and at the hand she had raised halfway through her own sentence to wipe her cheek and had not lowered.

He had been told for the entirety of his adult life that he was not permitted to look at a woman this way.

But he was doing it.

He was also, in the uneven middle of this morning, doing every other thing he had stopped doing decades ago. Sleeping in the same bed as a woman. Killing for a woman. Feeling jealous of a man whose name she had let fall on her tongue. Looking, now, at tears on her face he did not want to see there.

He walked toward her.

Somewhere between his last sentence and his next, the air in the room changed. He stopped in front of the couch where she was sitting. He lowered himself onto one knee on the carpet in front of her. He did not, for the long, careful second the kneel arrived in the room, say anything.

He raised one hand.

He laid it, lightly, against the side of her face.

His thumb passed once, slowly, beneath her eye. It carried the warm, wet weight of a tear away with it.

He looked at her face as if he had been planning, for some time, to memorise it.

”My only reason for not telling you anything is because I do not want you to be afraid of me.”

Cixi said nothing.

She waited for him to say more.

This was not enough. He had served a man’s severed head to her on a plate, and she was still here. In his suite. In his shirt. In his city. What else did she need to do to make it clear that she wanted to be with him?

It had started with the curse. But the kiss had changed something between them after that.

It would be wrong to say Cassian had been obsessed with her while she had not been obsessing over him in return. Yes! She had been. She had simply never admitted it.

She looked at his face. She waited.

”I can do things normal humans cannot do.” He looked at the rose on her neck. ”That mark—it signifies that you belong to me. It manifested because you chose to be mine, just as I have chosen you.”