23. Cassie
Cassie
Rafael comes to see me himself the next morning, dressed like he's already halfway to an altar, and something in the calm, satisfied way he looks at me makes my skin crawl worse than any amount of shouting could have.
"Cassandra." He says my name as if it belongs to him already. "You look well. Considering."
"I'm already married, Rafael. That's not a technicality you can lawyer your way around."
"Marriages get annulled every day, especially ones with no real intention behind them from the start.
" He settles into the room's single chair. He’s a man who's never once had to move fast for anything in his life.
"We'll be married within the week. A quiet ceremony, with a small guest list, nothing your biker friends need concern themselves with once it's done.
After that, none of this ugliness matters anymore.
You'll be exactly where you were always meant to end up. "
"He'll come for me," I say with more certainty than I've felt about anything in longer than I can remember. "Ethan. My husband. He will burn every door in this house down looking for me, and when he finds me, and he will, there's not a lawyer alive who fixes what happens to you next."
Something flickers behind Rafael's eyes. It’s there and gone, and for just a second, I see the fear underneath all that borrowed calm. Good. Let him have a little of what I've been carrying since the second that car door slammed shut on me.
"We'll see." He stands, straightens his cuffs, every motion
, performed for an audience of exactly one. "Rest, Cassandra. Big week ahead of you."
He's back again that afternoon, though, sooner than I expect, there’s something tighter in his shoulders than the calm performance from that morning. "Change of plan. We're moving the ceremony up. Two days instead of a week."
My stomach drops straight through the floor, but I keep my face as still as I can manage. "Why the rush?"
"That's not your concern." But something in the way he won't quite meet my eyes tells me it is somebody's concern, that something's spooked him enough to compress a plan he was clearly enjoying stretching out.
I file that away too. Fear makes careful men sloppy, and sloppy is exactly what I need him to be.
He leaves without another word, and I spend the rest of the afternoon testing everything I catalogued the night before.
The window still won't budge. The door's lock is a real one, nothing simple, but a wire hanger and enough patience can still get somewhere against even a good lock, and by the time my fingers ache too much to keep going I've got two of the three pins inside it stripped down, close enough to feel it give a little more than it did an hour ago.
Not open. Not yet. But closer than I was, and closer is still something.
Marisol comes back that evening with another tray, and this time she lingers a few seconds longer than she needs to, straightening the blanket at the foot of the bed with hands that aren't quite steady either.
"He's not a good man," she says quietly, not looking at me. "Whatever he tells you about how this ends, don't believe the pretty version."
"I know." I study her face, weathered and careful. "How long have you worked for this family?"
"Long enough to know better than to answer questions like that." But she doesn't move away right away, and something passes between us, something unspoken, two women who understand exactly what it costs to survive inside a house like this one.
"If there's anything you can tell me," I say carefully, "anything at all, I won't forget it. Not the kindness, and not the help."
She's quiet for a long moment, weighing something behind tired eyes. "Ashford," she says finally, barely above a whisper. "That's where we are. Don't tell anybody I said so."
"Thank you." I mean it more than two words can carry. "Is there a guard rotation? Anything I should know about the house at night?"
Something in her face tightens, torn between the years of survival that taught her silence and whatever small, stubborn kindness is left in her after all of it.
"Two men downstairs after dark. One walks the grounds every hour, on the hour, like clockwork.
The other stays by the front door." She glances at the door as if it might be listening.
"That's all I can say. Please don't ask me for more than that. "
"You've already given me more than I had an hour ago." I reach out and squeeze her hand once before she can pull away. "Thank you, Marisol. Truly."
She's gone before I can say anything else, locking the door behind her.
I sit on the edge of the bed running everything through my mind: the guard rotation, the accelerated timeline, the window that won't open, the lock that won't give.
None of it adds up to an escape yet. But it's more than I had yesterday, and tomorrow I'll have more still, because that's the only thing I know how to do anymore: take whatever scraps the world hands me and build them into something I can survive on.
Ashford. Confirmed now, not just guessed from a delivery label.
A town with a river in its name. It isn't much.
It's going to have to be enough.