CHAPTER THIRTEEN #3
"I understand survival," Cassia said finally, her voice remarkably gentle. "When the world shatters, you do whatever you have to do to keep breathing. Even if it means freezing yourself from the inside out."
Dante turned his head, studying the lines of her face. "You speak from experience."
Cassia offered a faint, humorless smile.
She looked away, her eyes fixing on the empty air across the room.
"The foster system doesn't breed softness, Dante.
I didn't have a family to mourn, or a legacy to protect.
I just had me. Moving from group home to group home, watching the older kids, figuring out what kind of armor I needed to build so the world couldn't tear me apart. "
She traced the rim of her ceramic mug with a long, elegant finger.
"I fought for every single thing I have," Cassia continued, her voice devoid of self-pity, matter-of-fact.
"My education, my apartment, my job. I built it all piece by piece because I learned very early on that there was no one in my corner.
Nobody was coming to save me. If I wanted to survive, I had to become lethal enough to protect myself. "
Dante listened, a searing respect expanding in his chest. He looked at the woman sitting beside him.
He saw the sheer uncompromising strength it had taken for a forgotten, abandoned girl to forge herself into a brilliant trauma surgeon.
He saw the fire that had kept her warm when the world had left her out in the cold.
"You did an extraordinary job," Dante murmured softly.
Cassia shrugged, dismissing the praise. "I did what was necessary."
"You are magnificent," Dante said, the words echoing the exact sentiment he had voiced weeks ago but carrying ten times the weight now.
He let his gaze trace the curve of her jaw, the soft waves of auburn hair falling around her shoulders, the vivid, striking blue of her eyes.
"You are the most gorgeous woman I have ever seen, Cassia. "
Most women would have melted at the declaration. Most women would have blushed or deflected with false modesty.
Cassia looked at him, her expression hardening just a fraction, the pragmatic survivor instantly returning to the surface.
"Do not romanticize that," Cassia warned, her voice, stripped of the vulnerability they had just shared.
"Being beautiful in a group home is not a blessing, Dante.
It is a hazard. It is a massive, neon target on your back.
It meant men looked at me when they shouldn't have.
It meant I had to sleep with one eye open.
My face has been more of a liability to me than anything else in my entire life. "
Dante went perfectly still.
The blunt, unromantic reality of her words struck him like a physical blow.
He saw the shadowed memories flickering in her eyes, the echo of the predators she had been forced to fend off as a child.
He understood, with clarity, why she was so fiercely guarded, and why she wore her beauty like a suit of armor.
Privately, deep within the bedrock of his soul, without uttering a single syllable out loud, Dante made a silent, unbreakable vow.
He swore to himself that he would protect her.
He would protect her from the shadows, from the predators, from the exhaustion that weighed down her shoulders.
He would burn down any man who ever looked at her with malice, and he would spend the rest of his life ensuring she never had to fight for her safety again.
He knew better than to say a word of it out loud. If he ever dared to voice that vow to her face, Cassia would look at him as though he had lost his mind, tell him she didn't need a white knight, and throw him out of her apartment.
So, Dante nodded, accepting her truth without challenging it.
"I understand," Dante said smoothly, holding her gaze. "And I promise you, Cassia, I do not view you as a liability."
Cassia studied him for a long moment, searching for the lie. She found none. Slowly, the tension bled out of her posture, and she leaned back against the cushions once more.
Dante knew he still had a very long way to go.
He knew she was a fortress, and he was standing at the outer gates.
For reasons he couldn't fully explain even to himself, this-tongued, exhausted, fearless woman was becoming more important to him with every single day that passed.
He needed her to feel something close to the same about him.
He could sense it, hovering in the space between them on the sofa.
She was slowly, almost imperceptibly, warming up to him.
He believed—he hoped with a desperation he hadn't felt in a decade—that there was something real starting to form between them.
Something solid and true, even if she wasn't ready to admit it yet.
But as the last light of the sun faded from the apartment, leaving them sitting in the shadows, Dante understood without any illusions that there was still a long, arduous road ahead before either of them would be willing to call it what it was.