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if you leave now. If you go, you are nothing to me. You are as

dead to this family as your whore of a mother.”

Cassia was too stunned to feel the pain of those words. They

were like a lash falling against her back, breaking open her

skin, striping her until she was red and oozing blood, but she

couldn’t feel a thing. Her father’s cold indifference, the way he

viewed her as a thing and not a person at all, his easy

confession as to how he had killed her mother—it was too

much. It turned her inside out, and the only way she could

protect herself against the horror of it was to hide inside

herself until she felt nothing.

All those years when she thought her father loved her, he

was only nurturing her, waiting to offer her to the highest

bidder to advance his own position. She meant nothing to him,

this cold, vicious man who had murdered his own wife. Her

head still spun with it. She couldn’t quite grasp onto the

horrible fact, refused to let it settle into the meat of her where

it could be digested and turned into a ghost to grapple with for

the rest of her life.

“I can’t stay here,” she whispered thickly. “I need to get

away from this place!”

“You’ve made your choice.” Antoni’s voice was as cold as

ice water, his eyes flinty and unfeeling. “You have until

midnight to get out. Pack your things. Don’t bother trying to

get money out of your account or taking your credit cards.

They’re all jointly in my name and I’ll be freezing them

immediately. Where you go isn’t my concern. Do not try to

contact me or your sisters after you leave this house. As I said,

you are dead to us.”

Knowing she only had an hour at most to get whatever she