The Devil's Favourite Obsession

As Cixi finally turned her attention away from Cassian and focused outside the window, she sat up straight with her heart racing.

Sand!

Everywhere she looked, only sand, rolling out gold and endless on every side.

’Where are we...?’

This wasn’t familiar to her at all. Demond City was flat and hard, and there was no such place in it with any hint of sand anywhere in sight.

She twisted around to look behind them. The building they had left stood huge and low against the horizon, spread wide across the emptiness. And the thing they rode in was no ordinary car. It was designed specifically to traverse the shifting sands.

’Was I drugged? Is that why it took me so long to notice?’ Cixi asked her silently.

Or perhaps it was one of his spells. That would explain why she sat here so calmly, after all she had seen in that place. The chained people. The rows of barred doors.

’He truly is the Devil. He built himself a hell, and he keeps people inside it.’

She turned her face to him.

He remained true to his name—the Devil, crafting his own private hell out here, chaining people to walls and punishing them for their misdeeds, or perhaps merely for his amusement.

Another thought nagged at her— Why were they in a car at all? He had brought her here magically, folding a living room into a metal cell with just a kiss. So why this sudden need for a drive?

”Why are we taking a car?” Cixi tilted her head. ”Why didn’t you do your abracadabra?”

Cassian chuckled. He was clearly entertained. ”We are going somewhere else,” he replied. ”I thought you might enjoy the scenery on the way.”

He leaned back into his seat as he said it, unhurried, one long finger resting against his temple. A strand of dark hair had fallen loose over his brow. Even here, even now, he looked as though the whole desert had been arranged for his comfort.

At his words, Cixi turned back to the window, gazing once more at the tranquil desert. The desert lay calm and quiet. The wind had carved the sand into long, soft ridges, one dune folding into the next. The sky above was pale and wide, brightening toward the dawn.

’Nothing cruel could live in a place this still.’ Cixi thought.

She kept her eyes fixed on the sand as they travelled. When a gentle breeze blew, she observed how it lifted the grains, sending them swirling and gliding across the dunes in thin, drifting ribbons.

As the car slowed and came to a stop, they arrived at a secluded spot in the middle of all that emptiness.

Tall palm trees stood in a circle, their trunks reaching high and their fronds creating a natural border around the open space.

Cixi opened her door and stepped out before the driver could come out of his seat.

She set one foot on the sand. She looked down at it, looking down at the sand, then back at her bare feet, as if weighing something. She bent down to remove the house slippers she had worn since leaving the Palace, pressing her bare soles into the ground.

The sand felt cool, fine, and impossibly soft, sinking gently beneath her, warm grains sifting up between her toes. In the bright dawn light, she could see each pale grain distinctly.

On the other side, Cassian stepped out of the vehicle, watching her intently. He was mesmerised, though his face gave nothing away, by how wholly she had lost herself to the desert’s beauty.

He kept a hand’s distance from her. He did not disturb her. He only wanted to see what she would do next.

Cixi dragged the tip of her big toe through the sand. A single line.

Then she used all her toes and carved a small zigzag beside it.

For that little while, she had forgotten the people in chains. She had forgotten the whimper behind the bars. The desert was that beautiful.

She looked, in that moment, like an innocent child who had found something wondrous. Or perhaps it was simply that she had never stood in such a magnificent place before. In that instant, she resembled nothing more than an innocent child discovering something truly enchanting.

”Do you like it?”

Cixi heard Cassian’s voice behind her, but she did not turn. Her focus was on the sand beneath her bare feet, warm and fine, the kind that pressed between her toes and held the heat of the sun long after the sun had moved. She walked further along the shoreline, her eyes sweeping across the turquoise water stretching out to the horizon.

”Yes. It is beautiful.” She breathed the salt air deep into her lungs. ”I always wanted to go on a beach holiday, but never had the money to go anywhere for vacation. I couldn’t afford to go to a different city,” She said it lightly, the way she said most things about her past, as though wrapping the words in a casual tone would stop them from weighing anything.

As she ventured further, the beach curved inward, and she found herself walking through a natural border created by palm trees. Their trunks leaned toward each other overhead, fronds crossing and layering until the sunlight filtered through in soft, broken patterns on the ground.

In the centre of the palm trees, a small circular water reserve sat, surrounded by low-growing plants whose flowers bloomed in shades of violet and pale gold. The air inside the enclosure was cooler, sheltered from the open wind, carrying the faint fragrance of something floral and unfamiliar.

Cixi walked faster toward the water. She lowered herself beside the pond and sat on the smooth, flat stones that lined its edge, her legs folded beneath her. The surface was still and clear. She leaned forward and saw her own face looking back at her.

She smiled at her reflection. ”Since I was a child, my parents never took me anywhere,” she said quietly, still looking at the water.

She laughed. A short, bitter sound that sat on the surface of the silence the way a dead leaf sits on the surface of a pond. ”They were not my parents. My kidnappers...” Something in her chest tightened. ”Once they were killed, I was alone. And my manager always cut my salary for various reasons, which left me with only enough to pay my bills and stay alive.”

Cassian walked closer. He squatted beside her, pulling the fabric of his trousers up slightly at the knee before settling into the position, his forearms resting on his thighs. He did not look at her directly. Instead, his dark eyes found her reflection in the water and studied it there, the way a person studies a photograph rather than the subject, because sometimes a reflection reveals what a direct gaze cannot.

She looked sad. That kind of sadness that lives beneath the skin and surfaces only when a person believes no one is paying attention.

”Your manager?” Cassian asked.

The two words landed softly, but Cixi felt them strike something inside her chest. She had made a mistake. The word had slipped out before her mind could catch it, and now it hung in the air between them like a thread he could pull if he chose to.

She could not let him pull it.

If Cassian investigated her manager, he would find Nelson. If he found Nelson, he would find the video. The deepfake. The footage that had destroyed her college life, her reputation, her sense of safety in her own skin. She had buried it so deep that no one in her current life knew it existed, and she intended to keep it that way.

Especially from Cassian.

Because a man who kept people chained in underground cells for stealing money would do something far worse to a man who had made a pornographic deepfake of the woman Cassian considered his.

Cixi did not want to find out what the worst thing looked like.

She changed the subject.

”That was nothing.” She waved her hand as though swatting the word manager out of the air. ”Once, when I was seven years old, I accepted an ice cream from a stranger with kids at a park. My father...” She paused and corrected herself with the same bitterness she started to feel nowadays. ”My kidnapper beat me with a belt until I bled. I had bruises everywhere. I could not go out for two weeks. I could not eat or drink properly because my jaw was swollen from where he hit me across the face.”

She said it the way she said everything about her childhood. Flatly like reciting a grocery list she had memorised long ago. ”Since then, I have avoided talking to strangers,” she added quietly.

The change of topic did not escape Cassian.

He noticed it the way he noticed everything, silently, with the precision of a man whose survival had depended on reading what people chose not to say. She had deliberately steered away from the manager.

The speed of the redirect, and the way her eyes shifted from the water to her own hands, all of it told him that the word manager carried weight she did not want him to lift.

He filed it away and said nothing.