Page 82 of Red Dreams

“You,” Kaden growls, the word loaded with threat.

Cassie winces as if he'd struck her but quickly covers it with a sneer. “What? No thank you for saving your most prized kitten?”

Kaden releases me with the utmost care before stalking toward her. She holds her ground, but I catch the way her throat bobs at his approach.

“You led them here,” Kaden snarls, circling her. “You set this up.”

“And I finished it,” Cassie snaps, gesturing to the bodies littering the dock.

“For us? Or for yourself?”

“Fuck you,” she hisses. “You have no idea what I've been through, what I've had to...”

She chokes on the words. Cassie's voice breaks, a strangled sound that's half sob, half snarl. She staggers back from Kaden, nearly slipping in the slick of blood pooling at her feet. Her eyes dart between the carnage she’s wrought and some distant, horrifying point in her past.

She shakes her head violently, sending droplets of blood flying from her ponytail.

“I was just a kid,” she whispers, her voice tiny and fractured. “I thought ... I thought if I was good, if I did what he wanted...”

A shudder wracks her frame, so violent it's almost a convulsion. She falls to her knees.

Tears mix with the blood on her face, cutting tracks through the grime. She looks at Kaden, really looks at him.

“I didn't want this,” she tells him, her voice cracking. “I didn't want to be this. But he made me. He carved out everything good and filled me up with hate. And I can't... I can't get it out.”

She presses a hand to her chest as if she can physically feel the rot inside her. Her breath comes in sharp, painful gasps, each one a struggle.

“I'm sorry,” she chokes out, the words foreign and awkward on her tongue. “I'm sorry I'm not ... I can't be what you wanted. I can't be saved.”

Kaden stares at her, his expression unreadable behind the mask.

Until he takes it off and it drops with a clang at his feet.

Cassie meets his gaze, her own bleak and haunted. “You should’ve put me down the minute you saw I was alive. You knew these ten years wouldn’t have been kind to me. It would’ve been kinder for you to end me.”

He takes a step toward her, then another. Cassie flinches but doesn't retreat, watching him warily. He lowers himself until they’re eye to eye and reaches out as if approaching a woundedanimal, until his hand hovers just inches from her blood-streaked face.

Cassie trembles, a full-body shudder that seems to originate from her very core.

“You didn't let them hurt Layla the way you were hurt. That means something, Cassie.”

Cassie's gaze flicks to me, a trace of grief in her eyes. Then she looks back at Kaden, her lower lip trembling.

Kaden's hand finally makes contact, cupping her cheek with a gentleness at odds with the brutality of our surroundings. Cassie stiffens but doesn't pull away, her eyes scrunching closed as if she can't bear to see the tenderness in his gaze.

Kaden's thumb brushes over a small scar on her cheekbone, tracing the remnant of violence. “I see you, Cassie. I see the strength it took to survive what he did to you. I see the light in you, even when you can't see it yourself.”

My vision turns hot. My eyes well up, and I allow the tears to fall because that is exactly the way I feel abouthim.

Cassie searches his face as if trying to find the lie, the trick, the inevitable betrayal. But there is only open honesty in Kaden's gaze, a vulnerability he so rarely shows.

“I don’t know how to be anything else,” she says. “I don’t know how to be … good.”

Kaden's hand slides to the back of her neck, pulling her forward until she’s pressed against his chest. “Neither do I. But you can start by choosing, every day, to be better than what he made you. And when you can't, when the darkness feels like it's swallowing you whole, you lean on the people who love you. You let me help you.”

Cassie’s hand comes up to clutch his wrist. “You—you still love me? After everything I’ve done?”

“Always,” Kaden says fiercely. “You’re my daughter. Nothing will ever change that.”

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