Chapter Twenty-Four
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Casimir released her, his arms heavy at his side. His shoulders slumped, yet he still met her gaze. Deep red eyes searched hers, flicking back and forth until the corners of his mouth turned down and his normal smirk was gone. The firm lines of his face smoothed, pulled into a kind of remorse that made him look . . . well, lighter . She couldn’t find holo-images of Casimir as a teenager, before Etzel gotten a hold of him, but she imagined this is what he looked like before: earnest and eager to please the people he looked up to.
There was still an easy confidence, a raw pull of charm that so easily turned toward an undeniable sensuality. In this moment, though, there was a vulnerability to him, a slight fissure of fragility that Olline wanted to patch and protect. She reached out toward him, but stopped when she caught the harrowing look in his eyes.
“I didn’t meet you by chance,” Casimir said, his words low and slow, as if he spoke them with great reluctance. Suddenly, the tiny device she had brought with Casimir’s files felt like a lead weight in her pocket.
“You have to understand, it took me a little while to piece it together,” Casimir continued, running his hands through his silvered hair, his fingers tugging at the soft curls. “When Etzel gives my chip a command, I rarely remain aware of what the command is or what my body is doing. This didn’t start out any differently. But then you found the chips, you curious, precious thing.” He trailed off, the ghost of a bittersweet grin tugging at his face before fading. “The first thing I saw when I came to was you, Olline. Turns out, the order Etzel gave was to abduct you. To take you. To add you to his sick collection of mindless peons.” Casimir laughed bitterly, gesturing at himself. “It’s probably why he relocated someone here rather than hire locally. By the time anyone noticed anything was wrong, it’d be too late.”
Olline’s throat was a dry desert, her tongue coated in sand. She couldn’t force enough moisture in her mouth to even squeak, let alone scream the way she wanted with the utter sense of terror of almost becoming a thrall. What would have happened had Casimir been mere hours earlier? Would she have ever seen her father again? Her brothers? What would become of her work? What would Etzel have used her magic for? Icey fear lodged itself around her heart; her breathing was fast and labored.
That was before the betrayal crashed through her.
And yet . . . and yet she clung to the hope that maybe Casimir had just now figured out what he had been ordered to do. That he hadn’t purposely lied to her and hidden the truth all this time. The dread of being fooled by him, like Achan had fooled her, made her want to curl into a ball to better shield her cracking heart.
“It wasn’t until you explained about the difference in control chips that I figured it out,” Casimir said, dropping his hands back to his sides, flinching away from her. “I completed the order to find you and grab you. When the chip refreshed, to get the next step, the next instruction, it couldn’t connect anymore. That’s how I knew I was ordered to get you at Etzel’s command. The rest, I surmised on my own from past experiences. If Etzel wasn’t preoccupied with his conference . . .” he faltered, unable to continue.
Her heart sank, falling through her body and crumbling to dust. She had explained those technical aspects of the chip what felt like so long ago now. He had known who she was. He had known Etzel had wanted to enslave her, and instead of telling her, he feigned ignorance. The conversation with Bode and all those little things that had tickled in the back of her mind from the onset crashed to the forefront, finally making sense.
“That’s why you were there that night at The Pit, how you got there so fast when that prick wouldn’t leave me alone. You were following me. Nothing about that was a coincidence at all.” She couldn’t stop the tremble from entering her voice. A ragged gasp escaped around the sharp, broken edges of her chest where her heart had once been, and she said, “That’s why you always stopped us—me from decrypting your files. You didn’t want me to see what Etzel had ordered you to do to me .” The horror of having a control chip in her, forcing to her be someone else, to do terrible things, to maybe even hurt her family, threatened to shatter her into a million pieces.
As she swallowed to strengthen her resolve, another realization slammed into her with the force of a runaway cargo truck. “That’s what Bode meant, wasn’t it? When he asked if I was ‘the one’? He was asking you if you’d fulfilled your assignment in getting me.” Casimir raised his head, and the look in his eyes was the only confirmation she needed. He twitched, like he would move closer to where she sat, and she lurched clumsily out of reach. She bumped into the table, nearly knocking over the night orchid, but Casimir was quick to save the little plant.
Something broke inside of her, a strangled whimper escaping. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Olline cried. Time seemed to stop as the force of the betrayal made her nauseous, and black spots flashed in her eyes.
“I didn’t—” Casimir began, but cut himself off with another heavy sigh. “The truth? I didn’t want to. At first, I simply needed you to like me. I didn’t know if you were already working for Etzel or my brother. If you were compromised. I hoped if you liked me enough, you wouldn’t hand me over to Etzel again. After I realized you were, well, you, I didn’t want to change what you believed of me.”
Olline stared at him, brows furrowed in confusion. Casimir looked up briefly before dropping his gaze, as if it physically hurt him to look at her. “This, Olline, is the truest part of my confession.” Casimir’s back straightened, but he still wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Once I knew what Etzel wanted, and that I was free, I decided that you, my brilliant Olline, were going to save me. I decided that it wasn’t a choice I could risk giving you, whether or not to help me. To do what I consider— considered to be the right thing. ‘Do-gooders’ are terribly unreliable, after all,” he said, attempting a weak smile, but the effort was halfhearted and the expression soon evaporated.
“I fell back on a century of experience. I let the things Etzel commanded me to do become instinctive, and it was easy . So terribly easy.” He took another deep breath, his face hardening again into a type of anger laced with disgust. “I needed you to like me, so I manipulated your feelings. I needed you to care about me so you would do what I wanted and set me loose in order to usurp Etzel and take his power and influence and claim it as my own. It was the only way I saw to save myself, protect myself, and keep me safe. Forever.”
Olline’s chest constricted even more; her worst fear come to life: she had been taken advantage of and would be abandoned again by a man she had feelings for. Unlovable, unlovable, unlovable . . . the vicious voice in her head whispered over and over until it drowned out every other virtue she believed she possessed.
She didn’t know when she stopped breathing, but her lungs were on fire as she took a shaky breath. Everything around her was disintegrating, her vision blurring at the edges with darkness. Her gaze flicked to the exit, then back to Casimir, then back to the exit, but she couldn’t make her feet move. The mini-stick weighted her down, still tucked in her pocket, the thing she had so foolishly brought as an excuse to talk to him and see if Casimir liked her.
“I was right all along,” her voice as broken and strangled as her heart.
The realization stung even worse than it had with Achan.
A thousand tiny needles of molten steel pierced her soul, and she couldn’t understand why . Why did Casimir’s confession hurt so much when they weren’t anything? The attention, the flirting, the soft caresses were all a momentary ruse. All to help him get what he wanted.
The memory of his soft, elegant fingers trailing over her skin made her nauseous now.
For as much as she tried, she couldn’t push that dalliance into the meaningless rendezvous category she desperately wanted, if only to save her from the crushing weight of heartbreak. The thundering pulse of her heart nearly drowned out the rest of Casimir’s so-called ‘confession’.
“Seducing you was my plan to achieve all of that, to ensure your cooperation and that you would never betray me while allowing me access to the control chips. It was the natural thing for me to do.” His words were gruff and low, but Olline could no longer tell if it was remorse or something else at play. “Frankly, seducing you was the easy part.”
Olline could take no more. She would listen to no more of this. Her heart hurt too much as it was and rubbing at her breast bone wouldn’t ease the pain this time.
Her hands were trembling. The black orchid, the only real thing in Casimir’s shitty apartment, began to vibrate and shake, practically bouncing on the table as she tried to control herself. Casimir jumped a little, eyes widening in terror as he watched the little plant threaten to break apart. The room vibrated, the metal and stone cracking, breaking free from their fabricated constraints beneath their feet. Bending and twisting, screaming to be unleashed and to rip everything apart until Olline didn’t fucking hurt so much.
Instead of obliterating the orchid and throwing the pieces at Casimir’s stupid, gorgeous face, Olline shoved her hands in her pocket, fingers wrapping around the mini-stick. Gripping it tighter and tighter until the room no longer buzzed around her.
She clutched it so tightly in her hand she thought it would crumble. She pulled it out and stomped toward the door, shoving the data stick into his chest as she passed. Casimir moved to grasp her hand. But she tore her fingers away before he could, leaving him fumbling to catch the mini-stick before it fell to the floor.
Olline stormed to the door, and before her tears could make her voice catch, said over her shoulder, “Congratulations, Casimir. You got everything you wanted. You played me for the gullible little fool I am and got your precious file.” She took a shuddering, steadying breath, and wrenched open the door. “That’s all I was to you, a means to an end. So, here it is: the end. Your freedom . You can go and fucking choke on it for all I care. Alone .”
She didn’t hear any movement from Casimir as she forced herself to tear away, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t hear it open again, not as she fled down the hall. No tall, imposing figure followed her to the elevator bays, or called after her as she raced out of the building.
A small, quickly dying part of her wanted him to chase after her. But he didn’t.
Casimir Everhart let Olline flee, alone, into the night.