He paused, and for the first time, I saw real pain in his eyes. Not the distant, cold indifference he so often showed the world, but a raw, unfiltered pain.
“He was a monster.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to continue.
Cassian swallowed hard. “I spent years hiding the truth. Pretending that everything was perfect. But it wasn’t. Behind closed doors, he was cruel. He did things—things to my mother, to my brother, to me—that no one ever saw. And when he died...”
He stopped, his breathing uneven.
“When he died, I thought it was over. But it wasn’t. It’s never over, Isadora. The things he did, the way he broke us—it never goes away.”
The room felt smaller, the air thicker with the weight of his confession. I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort him. But I knew that, despite everyt
