Chapter 8 – The Shattering
893 Words
⚠️ Trigger Warning: This chapter contains scenes of s****l assault, coercion, and emotional manipulation. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
The air in Cassian’s room was thick — heavy enough that Nyx could taste it on her tongue, a mix of leather, faint smoke, and something darker she couldn’t name. The echo of their last words still clung to the walls like a storm refusing to pass.
She stood near the edge of the bed, arms crossed over her chest as though she could keep herself together by sheer force. Her pulse was wild, and she refused to let him see it.
Then he moved.
Too quick for her to step back.
A hand gripped her chin, the rough pads of his fingers digging in just enough to say there would be no escape. And before she could speak, his mouth was on hers.
It wasn’t tender. It wasn’t hesitant. It was a claim.
Hot breath seared against her cheek, his lips pressing with a force that bent her backward just enough to feel his control.
Her hands flew to his chest — not to pull him closer, but to shove him away. She felt the steady beat of his heart beneath her palms, maddeningly calm, as if this was nothing more than a choice he’d already made long ago.
“Cassian—”
The name was muffled, swallowed whole by his mouth before it could become a plea.
She turned her face aside, but he followed, lips dragging along her jaw until she felt the dangerous curl of his smirk against her skin.
Then came the sting. Sharp and sudden.
A prick at her side that made her breath hitch.
“Wha… what did you…?”
Her voice was weak, already slipping away as her knees buckled. He caught her before she fell — not like a savior, but like a hunter securing prey.
The cold bite of iron closed around her wrists. Chains. The faint metallic click was louder than the pounding in her head.
She turned her face toward him, breath shaky, eyes wide and glass-bright. They spoke without words.
Don’t do this.
I trusted you.
Cassian looked down at her with a kind of stillness that was worse than rage. His eyes were a storm contained in glass, and when he finally spoke, his voice was almost gentle.
“I’ve always loved you, Nyx,” he murmured, brushing hair from her cheek with infuriating tenderness. “But you… you keep running from me. I can’t allow that anymore.”
She watched as he undressed her and himself, once again she pleaded trembling with fear in her eyes as that was the only means she could use to communicate. But it all fell on deaf ears because he began touching.
Somewhere between his touch and her helplessness, the memories began to bleed in — uninvited, merciless.
Cassian, standing between her and a hail of arrows, the warmth of his hand on her back as he shielded her.
Cassian, brushing the dirt from her cheek after a night spent hiding in the ruins, whispering, We’ll survive this together.
Cassian, laughing — truly laughing — once under the glow of a hundred stars.
Those memories didn’t save her rather they killed her.
Each one cracked her open from the inside. With every remembered smile, another thread of trust snapped. With every recalled kindness, another splinter drove deeper into the hollow her heart was becoming.
With the first thrust, she felt the warmth drain out of her chest first.
Then the grounding beat of faith.
Finally, the fragile belief that somewhere inside him was the man she had once known.
Gone. All of it. The warmth in her chest — gone.
The steady beat of trust — silenced.
Her heart didn’t just crack; it split open like glass hit with a hammer, shards sinking into her lungs until it hurt to breathe.
As he kept on going and going a single tear slid down her cheek, cooling against her heated skin. That tear was not weakness.
It was the last fragment of who she had been.
He moved and kept speaking words she could barely hear, but she wasn’t there anymore. Not fully. The tear had been the breaking point — from it, the pieces of who she was scattered, leaving only the beginning of something colder, harder, untouchable.
When it was over, he touched her face as if she was still his, still the girl who once smiled at him without fear. But the warmth was gone. What looked back at him was a shadow, a ghost in the shape of Nyx. She lay still — not because she was defeated, but because something colder than pain had taken root. Her eyes, once molten with trust, were now an ocean with no surface, no shore.
And somewhere deep inside, in the silence that followed, she promised herself that this would never happen again.
Nyx made a vow in the quiet between heartbeats.
And one day, when the time came, Cassian would bleed for what he had taken in this room.
- Writer
