Chapter 6 – Cassandra
The office was suffocating.
I’d been staring at the same spreadsheet for the better part of an hour, and the numbers had started to blur together into meaningless symbols that my brain couldn’t quite process.
My coffee had gone cold hours ago. My shoulders felt like they were made of concrete.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a low, persistent hum that wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
Rafael’s voice cut through it all.
“Cassandra. Are…are you okay?”
I blinked, the question registering as if it had come from underwater. When I looked up, he was leaning back in his chair with that expression that suggested he was seeing something he didn’t particularly like.
“Why are you asking?” I replied carefully, already running through the possibilities. Had I missed something? Forgotten something? Given myself away somehow?
“You sent me the wrong file this morning.” He set down his cigar with deliberate care. “And your scheduling was off. Your calendar recommendations have an error in them. Meetings are double-booked.”
The words hit like a physical blow.
In three years—three years of working for Rafael, of being his shadow, of orchestrating every minute detail of his existence with surgical precision—I had never made a mistake.
Not one. I prided myself on it. Built my entire identity around the fact that I was flawless in the details, ruthless in the execution, someone who already had all the answers before anyone thought to ask the question.
Until today.
“I’m fine,” I heard myself say, though the words felt like they were coming from someone else. “I’ll correct it immediately.”
Rafael watched me for a long moment, and something twisted in my chest. Dark and bitter and nauseating. He always checked my work. Had he been doing it all along? Monitoring me, verifying every detail I provided, double-checking the sacred trust I’d thought we shared?
Because if he could manage without me, if he could function without my hands controlling the machinery of his life, then what the fuck was the point of keeping me around? What made me valuable if not my flawlessness, my ability to anticipate his needs before he voiced them?
One more thing to get confused about. One more thing to hurt over.
“Cassandra.” His voice was quieter now. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” I said, and stood up before he could ask another question. “I’m sure.”
***
I didn’t go back to my desk. Instead, I locked myself in one of the spare offices, the kind of space no one ever used, with blinds half-drawn and the faint hum of the air conditioner filling the silence.
The room smelled faintly of dust and stale coffee, papers stacked neatly on a desk that hadn’t seen real work in months.
I crossed to the small cabinet in the corner, where someone—probably Rafael—had left a bottle of whiskey and a few glasses for “late nights.” My hand shook as I uncorked it, the scent burning its way up my throat before I even poured.
Amber liquid splashed into the glass. I watched it swirl for a long moment before lifting it to my lips. The first sip seared, sharp and punishing, and that was exactly what I needed. Something that hurt enough to remind me I was still here.
The office felt smaller with every breath. The walls seemed to close in, pressing against the weight of everything I didn’t say, everything I refused to feel. I poured another glass.
The burn in my throat was immediate and all-consuming. It was the only thing that kept me grounded in my own skin, the only sensation sharp enough to cut through the fog that had settled over everything.
One glass became two. Two became three. By the fifth glass, the whiskey had stopped tasting like alcohol and started tasting like forgetting.
Forgetting Rafael’s veiled mistrust, his careful question about whether I was okay, the implication that maybe he didn’t trust me the way I’d thought he did.
Forgetting Drew’s maddening presence, the way he’d looked at me this morning with something like heartbreak in those steel-gray eyes when I’d told him it meant nothing.
Forgetting Vance’s two-week deadline, his threats, the way he’d been squeezing me tighter and tighter until I could barely breathe under the weight of his expectations.
The whiskey helped with all of it.
I lost count somewhere around the eighth or ninth glass. The office had gone dark around me, the sun sinking below the Chicago skyline, and I was sprawled on the floor with my shoes kicked off and my shirt half-unbuttoned when a knocked sounded on the door.
For a second, I thought I’d imagined it. Then it came again—firm and commanding—and I knew exactly who it was.
“Fuck off,” I called out, not bothering to move.
The door opened anyway. Of course it did.
Drew had somehow gotten a key, or maybe he’d just kicked it in—I was drunk enough that I wouldn’t put it past him.
He filled the small space like a storm front, all dark intensity and coiled violence, his eyes cataloging the empty glasses on the floor with the kind of cold precision that made me want to either punch him or kiss him.
Possibly both.
“You’re not driving,” he said, his voice pitched low and calm and carrying that dangerous edge that made my skin prickle with awareness. “Not like this.”
I laughed, and it came out hollow. “I didn’t know you were the sober police now, Kamarov.”
He didn’t respond. Just crossed the room in three strides, pulled me up off the floor with more gentleness than I deserved, and started moving me toward the door.
I went without fighting. Went because resistance seemed like too much effort, and because some part of me—the part that was always calculating, always strategizing—recognized that Drew right now was more dangerous than any enemy I’d ever faced.
The kind of dangerous that made you want to surrender completely.
His car smelled like him. Expensive cologne and something sharper underneath—the scent of the forest after rain, or maybe that was just my drunk brain making metaphors out of fragrance.
He settled me into the passenger seat, pulled the seatbelt across my body with meticulous care, and didn’t say a word as he pulled into traffic.
The silence stretched between us, heavy and loaded with all the things we weren’t saying. The kiss on the dance floor. The night at his place. The way I’d tried to reduce it all to nothing this morning because acknowledging it meant acknowledging something I wasn’t equipped to handle.
“If you’re doing anything against the Bratva,” Drew said finally, his voice so quiet I almost missed it, “I will be the first one to kill you.”
The words were meant to be a threat. Should have been a threat. Instead, they hit something deep inside me and cracked it open.
I knew what I was doing. Knew it with absolute certainty.
I was working with Vance, feeding him intelligence, trying to bring down the organization that had taken everything from me.
And Drew—beautiful, intelligent, infuriatingly observant Drew—knew something.
Not the full picture, but enough to suspect.
Enough to warn me that if I made him choose between me and his family, he wouldn’t hesitate.
I’d known that from the beginning. Had built my entire plan around the assumption that when he found out, he would choose the Bratva without a second thought. Because that’s what loyalty meant in his world. That’s what family demanded.
But hearing it said aloud—hearing him give voice to the execution that was already written somewhere in our shared future—broke something in me that I didn’t know could break.
Tears started streaming down my face, hot and violent and completely uncontrollable. I hated crying. Hated the vulnerability of it, the loss of control, the way it exposed all my carefully constructed armor as nothing but illusion.
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” I said through the sobs that were wracking my entire body. “I’m not. I never wanted—”
His hand came up, thumb brushing away the tears from my cheek, and that gentle touch shattered me more completely than any threat ever could.
He pulled me against him awkwardly over the console, one arm wrapping around me like he could shield me from every terrible choice I’d made, every impossible situation I’d created.
“It’s okay,” he said into my hair. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
But it wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. I was betraying him and his family, and he was holding me like I was something worth saving, and the guilt was suffocating me from the inside out.
I reached for him without thinking, desperation overriding every rational thought.
My lips found his, and the kiss was nothing like the others.
It wasn’t about passion or possession or proving something.
It was desperate and wet and bruised, tasting like whiskey and tears and the flavor of a girl trying to apologize without using words.
His hand slid into my hair, fingers tangling in the strands, and I clawed at his jacket like I could burrow inside it and disappear. Like if I held on tight enough, none of this would be real. None of the lies, the betrayals, the impossible position I’d put us both in.
The kiss tasted like fire. Like goodbye. Like all the things I wanted to say but couldn’t because they would require me to tell him everything, and I wasn’t ready to lose him yet.
His other hand came up, cradling my face, and he kissed me like he was trying to hold me together while I fell apart. And then—slowly, inevitably—the exhaustion and the alcohol and the emotional hemorrhaging caught up with me.
The world tilted. The edges of my vision went soft and dark. And somewhere between one breath and the next, I passed out against his chest.
***
I woke up in Drew’s bed.
Not mine. His. The sheets smelled like him: that same cologne mixed with something warmer, something that felt like home in a way I didn’t have the luxury of understanding.
Sunlight was streaming through the windows, and for one blessed moment before consciousness fully arrived, I didn’t remember anything.
Didn’t remember the mistakes or the threats or the way I’d broken down in his car.
Then it all came rushing back, and the shame was suffocating.
I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, though someone—Drew, presumably—had removed my shoes and unbuttoned my shirt further for comfort.
My mouth tasted like whiskey and regret.
My head was pounding with the kind of intensity that suggested my body was launching a personal vendetta against my brain.
The door opened, and Drew appeared with two glasses of water and what looked like aspirin.
He had that careful, gentle expression that suggested he was handling someone fragile, and I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t fragile.
That I was strong and capable and could handle my own shit without dissolving into tears like some traumatized orphan.
Except I was a traumatized orphan, and I had just dissolved into tears, and pretending otherwise seemed pointless at this stage of the game.
“I didn’t know where you lived,” Drew said, handing me the water and the aspirin. “So I brought you here.”
That was somehow worse than any accusation could have been. The fact that he’d thought of that, that he’d recognized I needed to be safe somewhere, that he’d been gentle enough not to force me to relive last night while I was actively dying of a hangover.
“I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” he interrupted, settling onto the edge of the bed. “You shouldn’t have been hiding away and drinking alone in the office while you’re clearly falling apart. But we’re not doing this right now. Right now, you’re going to take the aspirin, drink the water, and sleep. We’ll talk later.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to maintain some semblance of control by refusing his help and his gentleness and his infuriating assumption that he could just fix this by being decent to me. But honestly, I was too hungover to manage more than the bare minimum of functioning.
I took the aspirin. Drank the water. Didn’t protest when he pulled the covers up around me like I was something precious instead of something poisoned.
For the first time in my entire life—growing up in the orphanage with nothing, working in Seattle bars while dodging grabby hands, years of perfect performance and calculated survival—I felt utterly exposed.
No armor. No performance. No carefully constructed version of myself designed to survive in a hostile world.
And somehow, impossibly, that vulnerability felt safer than any shield I’d ever built.
Drew stood to leave, and I caught his wrist before I could stop myself.
“Stay,” I said, and the word was barely a whisper. “Please.”
He didn’t hesitate. Just kicked off his shoes, slid into bed beside me, and pulled me against his chest with the kind of careful tenderness that made me want to weep all over again. His hand found my hair, his fingers stroking through the tangled strands in a hypnotic rhythm.
“I’ve got you,” he said again, like a promise. Like a prayer. Like something he was willing to stake his life on.
I buried my face against his neck and let myself believe it, even though I knew better. Even though I knew that the moment he found out about Vance, about my mission, about the files I’d been stealing and the intelligence I’d been selling, all of this would burn.
For now, in the darkness of his bedroom with his arms around me and his heartbeat steady against my ear, I could pretend that maybe, somehow, it might not.
The illusion wouldn’t last. I knew that much. In this world, nothing good ever lasted.
But for these few hours, wrapped in the safety of his presence, I would let myself dream of a life where I could be both the girl in his arms and the woman with a mission. Where I didn’t have to choose between redemption and revenge, between the man holding me and the father I’d lost.
Where I could just be Cassandra, and that was enough.
The sun moved across the sky. Drew’s breathing evened out into sleep. And I stayed awake, memorizing the feel of him, the scent of him, the weight of his arms around me—storing it all up like I was preparing for a winter that would never end.
Because I knew, with the kind of absolute certainty that came from years of survival, that this was temporary. That everything good in my life had an expiration date.
I was just waiting for this to reach its end.