Chapter 15 #2
“Alessia is not your family.”
The words came out harsher than I intended, fueled by everything I had been holding back.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she shot back. “She’s your wife. Of course she’s my family.”
She won’t be my wife for long.
The thought left a deep, unwelcome ache behind.
I held her stare, every word sharpened by anger. “No. She is my family. She has never been, and will never be, anything of yours.”
Her face closed off, leaving nothing behind but cold restraint. “Cassian.” The warning in her voice was unmistakable. “Be very careful what you say next.”
“No!” The word tore out of me. I shoved myself to my feet so fast the chair scraped harshly across the floor.
“No, Ma. I told you.” My voice ricocheted around the sterile room, too loud, too full of anger to contain.
“I told you at the reception to never approach her. I told you that if you needed anything, you came to me. Only me. You promised.” My hands curled into fists at my sides.
“I was against it from the beginning. Even the first time she helped you, I told you not to drag her into this. Alessia insisted. She wanted to help, and I gave in once because she asked me to.”
I stepped toward her, unable to keep myself still.
“So why did you let it continue? Why didn’t you come to me?
I’m the one who owes you. Me. Not her.” I pressed a hand against my chest, each word striking harder than the last. “You’re supposed to collect your debt from me.
So I’m asking you again. What did you say to her?
What did you do to make her keep working for you? ”
The last trace of emotion left her face. She sat utterly still, her expression hard and unreadable.
Then she answered with a calm that cut deeper than shouting ever could.
“I didn’t approach her after the first time, Cassian. Your wife is the one who offered to help me. She came to me.”
The air left my lungs in a single, devastating rush.
What?
I staggered back half a step, staring at her. My mind rejected the words before I could even process them.
“No.” I shook my head, refusing to accept it.
“You’re lying.” I stepped toward her again, almost challenging her to say it once more.
“Tell me the truth. Tell me what actually happened. Don’t stand there and tell me she came to you, because I know Alessia.
She would never—” I broke off, my breath catching. “She wouldn’t do that.”
She scoffed and sank deeper into the couch, looking almost insulted that I could question her. “I’m not lying. You can ask her yourself. She’s the one who offered to help me.” One shoulder lifted in a careless shrug. “I just accepted what she put in front of me.”
My mind recoiled from the idea. It made no sense.
Why would she do that? She never liked my mother.
Then a terrible, dawning clarity clicked into place.
“You’re hiding something.” I kept my eyes locked on hers, refusing to let her evade the question. “There’s more to this. Alessia had a reason for making that offer. She wouldn’t have done it without one. What was it, Ma? What did she want in return?”
Alessia had done that… for me?
The thought left me staring into nothing, unable to comprehend the enormity of it. I scrambled through my memories, searching through the past year, trying to count every time my mother had intruded into my life.
There had been nothing.
No calls.
No surprise visits.
No demands.
No fresh wounds dragged back to the surface.
After that first time Alessia had helped her, my mother had simply stopped.
And I had been so relieved that I had never asked why.
I had been grateful for the silence. Grateful for the absence. Grateful that I could finally move through my days without bracing myself for the next intrusion, without having to open old wounds I had spent years trying to bury.
I had taken that peace and never once questioned who had paid for it.
Alessia had seen what my mother did to me. She had watched the way I changed whenever her name appeared on my phone, the way old memories could hollow me out in seconds. She had understood the toll long before I ever found the words to explain it.
And instead of watching me suffer, my wife had stepped in.
She had put herself between us.
She had taken every call, every demand, every confrontation I had spent my life dreading, and carried it away from me without asking for recognition. Without telling me what she had done. Without once making me feel indebted to her.
She had simply loved me enough to do it.
My throat tightened.
That was never her burden to bear. It was mine.
I stared at my mother, barely able to get the words out. “You should have said no. You never should have accepted.”
Her eyes flashed with indignation. “Your wife proposed the arrangement, and you’re blaming me?”
“Yes.” I stepped closer, anger burning through every inch of me. “Because her intention was to protect me. You knew that. You saw her compassion and you exploited it. You took advantage of the love she had for me, knowing she would sacrifice herself rather than let me suffer.”
Her eyes hardened into chips of ice. Her expression turned so frigid that for a heart-stopping second, I was a child again, trapped and helpless, bracing for the storm. Would she pull me close or push me away? Tell me I was her world or that my face disgusted her?
I blinked, the past receding as quickly as it had surfaced, and I was back in the present.
She gave a sharp scoff, her mouth twisting with disbelief. “So your wife decides to play the martyr, and I’m the villain?”
“Yes.” The answer came out low and razor-sharp.
“You are to blame. She offered to help me, and you saw a weakness to take advantage of. You’re a…
” My eyes searched her, and I remembered the way her compliments were always laced with poison, designed to make me question my own worth.
“You’re a cockroach,” I finally said. “Wait, no.” I shook my head, the analogy crystallizing.
“You can get rid of a cockroach. You’re a lizard.
Slippery. Tenacious. Alessia didn’t know how to get rid of a lizard permanently, so she did the next best thing.
She stood as a shield between you and me so you wouldn’t crawl out of the cracks to get to me. ”
Her face twisted into something truly ugly, all pretense of sophistication gone. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that, Cassian. I am your mother—”
“You’re not.”
The words cut through the air, sharp and final. For the first time in my life, I had dared to say it.
She froze, utterly shocked.
Because I had never said it before.
She was the one who had always wielded those words. She turned them into weapons, dragging out my debt whenever it suited her, then waking up the next day and slipping effortlessly back into the role of the loving mother.
Even as a child, I sensed something was wrong. There was a chill in the way she treated me, a strain behind every smile she gave me. I convinced myself it was normal. Maybe that was simply what mothers were supposed to be.
The facade finally shattered when my father abandoned us, fleeing with his mistress. Consumed by grief and fury, my mother unleashed the truth she had guarded for so long.
I wasn’t her son.
I was the living, breathing proof of my father’s betrayal. The result of one night with a woman whose name he never bothered to remember.
But she still took me in. Still pretended, for the world’s sake, that I was hers. Pretended for my sake that she was my mother.
When my father left, she shattered, and in the wreckage, she let the truth pour out. She screamed about how she had forgiven him for his one-night indiscretion, for allowing his bastard to live under her roof, only for him to betray her again and abandon her completely.
She told me my face disgusted her.
That every day she had to pretend to love me felt like a betrayal of herself.
That she couldn’t stand the sight of me.
Finally, her coldness made sense. The puzzle of my childhood snapped into a clear, ugly picture.
I was certain she would throw me out. With my father gone, I was no longer her cross to bear. She was finally free of the living reminder of his infidelity.
I was sure that was the last day I would ever see her.