Chapter 790: Eternity of Devotion
Emily had felt the storm gathering.
Somewhere in the last sixty seconds — between Cassiopeia’s first careful, measured word and the small, horrified silence that had now settled like frost across the long pale sofa — Emily’s finely tuned instinct for whose room she was currently standing in had finally caught up with the rest of her. She quietly stopped scrolling her thumb hovered mid-swipe while her face shifted into a realization, with the slow, sinking horror that she was sitting in something she was not supposed to be hearing.
She did not leave and simply stilled; listened.
Cassiopeia, watching the small white tremor and rage of Melissa’s knuckles tightening on the trousers, drew a slow, steadying breath.
She was already in; she might as well finish what she had started.
"There were also things I did which I am not proud of anymore"
Melissa did not turn.
"My privileges, I mean. As a Maxton. With him."
The pause in her made Melissa more drift in more rage.
"I will not pretend, Melissa, that I never did. I had access to that house, and I used it — small things, mostly that a girl could get away with. Yes, the first time was an accident. I came around a corner I had not meant to come around, and there he was, getting changed. I stood in the corridor longer than I should have, and I told myself afterwards that the pause had been startle."
She paused, voice softening with painful honesty.
"It was not startle."
She stupidly continued on, thinking she was making a confession of forgiveness to make the slate clean.
"And the visits after that — I will be honest, Melissa, because we are being honest now, and the courtesy of admitting it costs me less than the dignified omission would — the visits after that, I made the same wrong turn deliberately. Several times. I knew where his rooms were. I knew what hour he changed. I took the long route through that wing of the house when I knew he would be there, and I peeked, and I told myself afterwards that I was simply checking on the family’s charity-case nephew if he wasn’t doing something wrong."
There was another pause, heavier this time.
"That, Melissa, I did. With intent. And I am not going to pretend I didn’t."
Her voice held steady, though something fragile trembled beneath it.
"But beyond that — beyond the small Maxton privilege of being a woman who could walk past a corridor without being asked her business and peek at Phei’s huge— I did nothing major to him. I never put my mouth to a single bad word against him. I never told Harold a single thing that would have brought a single additional consequence down on his head. I never told my father things I had seen. I never reported the unlocked door."
The silence in the room held its breath.
Then — from Melissa’s back, still turned to the room, the long pale line of her shoulders not having moved a millimeter throughout the entire confession — a small, low chuckle came out that chilled out the room.
It was sarcastic and dry.
The first sound Melissa had made since Cassiopeia had begun.
"Oh..." A pause. "Thank you so much, Cassiopeia."
She set the trousers down on the sofa and smoothed them once with her palm— then she turned.
Slowly.
The small, bright, clean beautiful of her face was, when it came around, unreadable and composed, steady, the kind of expression that had lived through years of being polite people who wanted her brother’s son dead, and had developed, in the process, a terrifying surface where actual feelings were a place no one had been admitted to people who created that hell.
She looked at Cassiopeia.
"Are you done, then? Making yourself feel better. Now can you tell me what you’re actually doing here."
Cassiopeia nodded.
She did not argue.
There was no amount of talking, no amount of apologizing and no amount of confession that could fix the past.
Time, she had once been told, was the great healer of wounds.
That was a charming little lie told by someone who had never spent years of what she went through and watching it also happen on an innocent boy who’d been thrown in this whole thing he’s small existence had no blame to.
Time did not heal that.
Nothing did.
Cassiopeia let it go:
"Master assigned me a mission. An important one. I came to ask if you would help me."
Melissa did not, immediately, answer.
She looked at Cassiopeia for a long moment — calculating whether the cost of refusing was worth the satisfaction.
It was not, it was never going to be, where Phei was concerned.
She turned back to the sofa and picked up one of his shirts.
"Sure. Whatever you need. Now — until then — can you get out."
Cassiopeia turned to leave.
Another success, technically...
She had brought Melissa aboard. The mission required Melissa’s cooperation — the part of the mission’s first phase that Cassiopeia could not accomplish on her own.
Melissa had said sure.
The piece moved into place.
Another success.
And yet—
The success had left, somewhere in the back of her throat, a small bitter taste that did not arrive after the patient sovereign satisfaction of fooling Harold this morning, or the quiet triumph of bringing her own mother into Phase One over tea this afternoon.
It was a different texture entirely.
She swallowed it and turned to leave.
Then she paused, in the doorway, with her hand on the frame.
She turned back.
"Melissa."
Melissa did not turn this time. She had picked up the next jacket and was holding it to the light again.
"Can you at least, pretend to be a team player."
The hands on the jacket paused.
"I am part of his circle now. Permanently. Forever. Are we going to be at odds every single time we are in the same room? For the rest of our lives, Melissa? The rest of forever?"
On the sofa, Emily’s tablet had been slowly lowered to her lap, she looked, very briefly, at the two women in the room.
The first time Emily had ever met Cassiopeia, the dinner had been cut short and the entire penthouse had emptied in fear of what chaos she had brought with her.
The second time, Cassiopeia had been, by every measurable surface, the gentlest soul Emily had ever encountered. Warm. Soft. Devoted beyond reason to Phei, a woman who folded into a household so thoroughly that within a week she had quietly cracked the heart of every other woman in Phei’s circle.
There were four women who had not warmed.
Delilah. Victoria. Sienna. Melissa.
And Melissa most of all.
Because unlike the others — the women who had taken Cassiopeia’s gentleness at face value — those four knew exactly what was beneath it. Knew that the soft, devoted slave with the eternal smile and the patient hands was, in her bones, a Maxton.
A daughter of that cursed household that they had not realized how broken it was and cruel until Phei shone light to it that night and saved them. And no amount of warm tea at three in the morning, no amount of cracked-open devotion to Phei and the four women now, no amount of charm offensive across a dinner table, could undo anything.
Every time Melissa and Cassiopeia were in a room together, there was tension.
There was always going to be tension.
Emily had not understood why, now, however she did.
Melissa’s small, low chuckle came again. Drier this time.
"Odds? Team player?"
