if you leave now. If you go, you are nothing to me. You are as
dead to this family as your whore of a mother.”
Cassia was too stunned to feel the pain of those words. They
were like a lash falling against her back, breaking open her
skin, striping her until she was red and oozing blood, but she
couldn’t feel a thing. Her father’s cold indifference, the way he
viewed her as a thing and not a person at all, his easy
confession as to how he had killed her mother—it was too
much. It turned her inside out, and the only way she could
protect herself against the horror of it was to hide inside
herself until she felt nothing.
All those years when she thought her father loved her, he
was only nurturing her, waiting to offer her to the highest
bidder to advance his own position. She meant nothing to him,
this cold, vicious man who had murdered his own wife. Her
head still spun with it. She couldn’t quite grasp onto the
horrible fact, refused to let it settle into the meat of her where
it could be digested and turned into a ghost to grapple with for
the rest of her life.
“I can’t stay here,” she whispered thickly. “I need to get
away from this place!”
“You’ve made your choice.” Antoni’s voice was as cold as
ice water, his eyes flinty and unfeeling. “You have until
midnight to get out. Pack your things. Don’t bother trying to
get money out of your account or taking your credit cards.
They’re all jointly in my name and I’ll be freezing them
immediately. Where you go isn’t my concern. Do not try to
contact me or your sisters after you leave this house. As I said,
you are dead to us.”
Knowing she only had an hour at most to get whatever she
