Page 36 of Crushed Vow (Broken Vows #2)

“What does it matter, Cassian?” My voice cracked from exhaustion and fury. “Love doesn’t erase what you did. Love doesn’t stitch up scars or make trauma vanish. You’ve hurt me, over and over—and I will never forgive you. So stop asking me about love like it’s some magical cure.”

He didn’t flinch. Instead, he stepped closer.

The sound of his boots thudding against the floor was slow and deliberate. Each step made my heart pound harder in my chest until he towered over me where I sat curled on the couch, the urn the only thing separating us. His shadow stretched over me.

“Aren’t you supposed to hate someone you hold a grudge against?” he asked, his voice low, almost coaxing. “Then answer me, Charlotte. Do. You. Love. Me?”

I opened my mouth to lash out, to spit another cruel truth at him—

But he reached into his coat and pulled something out.

A leather journal. Old and battered. Its corners were worn, its spine cracked, pages yellowed from time and handling.

He didn’t force it into my hands.

He knelt. Slowly. As if bowing before something sacred. As if I were something sacred.

Then, with a trembling hand, he placed it gently in my lap.

“Open it,” he whispered.

I stared at the journal, frozen. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.

My fingers trembled as I cracked it open.

His handwriting filled every line. Dark ink, sharp strokes, obsessively neat. Dated entries. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. My eyes scanned the first few.

March 3, 2024:

I chained her today. Collared her. Dragged her like an animal across the floor from the living room to the bedroom. I made her crawl—on her knees—for me.

I told myself it was dominance. That it was power. But when I looked down at her, all I saw was terror.

Not respect. Not desire.

Just a woman I shattered.

And still, I forced her mouth open. Still, I shoved myself past her lips and made her take me like some broken toy I could bend into pleasure. She gagged. I didn’t stop.

God, I didn’t stop.

I finished in her mouth, then told her she looked like a boy. That her chest—flat after surgery—was repulsive.

I couldn’t bear to look at her face. So I turned her around. Took her from behind like she was nothing. Like she didn’t deserve to be seen.

She didn’t cry.

That was the worst part.

She didn’t cry—she went silent.

And I think that’s the day something inside her died.

June 8, 2024:

I broke her.

Fully. Completely.

She doesn’t scream anymore when I say cruel things. She just stares. Like her soul stepped outside of her body and left me with a hollow shell.

I wanted to be the man who loved her, who earned her.

But I became the man she needs therapy to forget.

The man she’ll have nightmares about long after I’m dead.

I lie awake some nights and imagine what would’ve happened if I hadn’t leashed her that day. If I’d held her instead of humiliating her.

But there’s no undoing it.

There’s no going back to a version of her that still believed I was capable of love.

She was soft once. Sweet.

Now she’s brittle. Haunted. And I did that.

God help me, I don’t know how to stop being the monster who did that.

December 1, 2024:

She found out.

About my mother. About what my father did. About what her mother let happen.

I didn’t mean for her to know—not like that.

But my sister told her. And Charlotte looked at me like she understood. Like she wanted to hold me.

And that made me snap.

I couldn’t stand the look in her eyes—like I was something to be pitied. I felt naked. Exposed. Filthy.

So I called her what I promised I never would.

I said, “Get out, you slutty daughter of a bitch.”

Just like that. Like she was nothing.

She flinched, but didn’t cry. Just walked out of my study.

I waited an hour.

Then two.

Then I checked the cameras.

She never came back.

And this time... she didn’t just walk out.

She disappeared.

I’ve sent men across borders. Paid off cartels, bribed police, called in favors from enemies I swore I’d never speak to again.

I’ve stayed up for weeks, reading code from hacked airport footage, scanning blurry CCTV stills, hoping one would show her face.

I haven’t eaten. I haven’t slept. I’ve put bullets through the mirrors just to stop seeing myself.

I burned down the safehouse in Prague because it still had the scent of her shampoo in the pillows.

I got her name tattooed on the inside of my thigh so when I bleed out, it’s the last thing they’ll see.

I injected myself with the same slow venom I used on my enemies. One drop a day.

Because if she’s not coming back, I don’t want to live long enough to forget her.

And the worst part?

The absolute worst part?

I deserve this.

Every scream. Every hallucination. Every morning I wake up thinking she’s lying beside me only to feel the cold void of where she used to be.

She’s not just gone.

She left me.

And I don’t think she’s ever coming back.

The pages blurred as tears filled my eyes. Each entry was raw. Painful. A confession he’d never spoken aloud. Pages and pages of guilt. Of therapy sessions, night terrors, self-loathing. Every monstrous thing he’d done, documented in his own words.

Not for sympathy.

Not for absolution.

But because he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Because he couldn’t stop thinking about me.

What he did to me.

What he became because of me.

Or maybe... despite me.

My fingers trembled as I closed the journal, hugging it to my chest like a relic of war—some sacred text written in violence and regret.

I swallowed thickly, my throat raw, my voice almost unrecognizable as it cracked open.

“What do you even see in me?”

The words sounded so small, so broken. I hated how real they felt.

“I don’t have breasts. The psych ward shattered something in me. Maybe everything. I’m... unwell, Cassian. I talk to shadows. I don’t sleep. I flinch when someone touches me. I scream at myself in mirrors. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

I looked away, ashamed.

“I have to pad my chest just to feel like I belong in my own skin. I feel like a fraud. Like some twisted, mutilated thing pretending to be a woman. I’m not beautiful. I’m not whole.”

“I’m undeserving of love. So tell me, Cassian. What the hell do you see in me to be this obsessed?”

He didn’t answer right away.

His hand rose slowly, warm against my skin, and he cradled my jaw with a reverence that undid me.

His thumb brushed the tear tracks on my cheek, and his voice, when he spoke, was hoarse. Gentle. But firm.

“Ask me,” he said.

I blinked. “Ask you what?”

“The question you’ve been too afraid to say out loud.”

His gaze held mine, blind but burning. “Ask me if I love you.”