Page 48 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER TEN

Cassandra

I ’M COMPLETELY SHAKEN by everything that just passed between us.

I don’t know if I believe him or not. About any of it. That he was intent on actually kidnapping me. Keeping me captive, or that he won’t do it now.

I’m disappointed in myself in some ways. Because I didn’t just cave to his seduction. I attacked him. I drew blood. I was the one who was feral. Who was beyond myself. I proved to him that I’m half the problem.

I proved it to myself.

But I sit at the edge of the bed and I let him pick the box up and set it down. He’s only wearing his pants, his muscular body on display, and I’m wearing my underwear. I look down at myself, and bring the cups of my bra back into place.

“You don’t need to do that,” he says.

“I’d rather not have my tits out while we go through your childhood trauma.”

He laughs. And then he seems dumbfounded by the fact that he did.

“Is this what it’s always like? A storm and…”

“There isn’t actually very much laughter.” I relent, and force myself to be fair. “There was. In the beginning. You really liked taking me places. Showing me new things.”

“I suppose I did. Tonight you showed me something new.”

That makes me blush. Which I hate. I shouldn’t be able to blush. The things I’ve let this man do to me.

Everything. Every hard line I thought I might have with a partner got erased the minute I met him. He pushes me to places I never thought I would go, and makes it all sexy.

So it seems stupid that I’m blushing like the virgin I was the first time he found me.

“That’s one of the few things we haven’t actually done much of. Me on top. You like to be in control.”

“Do I?”

“There’s a reason I have a collar with your name on it.”

He lets out a low, rumbling growl. And that’s how I know he is still Dragos.

“Do you remember that?”

“No, but it sounds to me like you wear it willingly, so it says as much about you as it does me.”

“I guess it does,” I say.

He opens the box up, and instantly, my chest seizes up. Because all the niceness is about to go away. I can feel it.

“I’m not going to understand half of what I’m looking at,” he says as he takes out a stack of photographs. I take the first one from his hand.

“This is the house,” I say, pointing to a manor with a wall covered in climbing roses. “This is where you grew up.”

“I see.”

I study his face to see if he feels anything.

But this doesn’t seem to bring out strong emotion. Not the way other things have.

He takes out another photo. It’s of him. He’s a small boy but I can see it in his eyes. He doesn’t have that spark of mischief or joy you see in children’s eyes. That grimness is there already. That hard, implacable nature.

I take the photo from him, and he moves on, but I can’t. I stare at the small boy in the photograph, and I wonder how he became the man sitting beside me. The man whose body I know better than my own.

All of this has made me question what I know. About who we are, about who we can be.

I don’t know everything that happened to him; neither does he. But it doesn’t make him less real. And I wonder if that doesn’t make my love for him less real. Just because I don’t know every single thing about him.

I don’t know every brick that went into building him, but I do know the wall.

It’s the wall that’s the problem, because if he could open up and give me some of himself, then the details might not matter so much.

But I have to be included in the life he’s living now, complicated by the fact that he doesn’t seem to know what that life is. He did, though, before all of this.

He takes another photo out of the box. “My father,” he says, his jaw going rigid.

“You look like him,” I say.

I sense a shudder go through his body. “I suppose I do.”

“You didn’t want to grow up to be like your father.”

He shakes his head, very slowly. “I did want to be like him. I didn’t think I had a choice.”

“Are you remembering?”

“I…”

He closes his eyes, and then opens them again, staring resolutely at the photograph. “I loved my father. Very much. I… It is not normal for a parent to raise their hand to their child.”

“No,” I say softly.

“I think I know that now. I think I know that a man should not strike his wife or his children. But I didn’t.

I didn’t, because I didn’t go to school.

I had tutors at home. I did everything at that house.

” He takes the photo of the house back from where he has said it.

“Yes, I didn’t leave there. Not for a very long time.

So what my father said was love, it was love.

What he said was for my own good was for my own good. ”

I’m sitting there with a growing sense of horror dawning inside of me.

I feel a deep sense of pain. A deep sense of sadness emanating from him.

Or perhaps that’s just me. My grief. My resolute sadness over where this is going.

Because I already know how it ends. His father killed his mother, so of course his admiration of his father couldn’t have extended beyond that.

“Everything that my father touched turned to gold. He was a man of extraordinary control and a clear way of doing everything. Yes. I wanted to be like him. I very badly did. Because my father had everything. And he was the best father.”

“How?”

“He was strong. He was strong and I idolized him for that. Because he told me that it was what I had to be. He told me it was what I had to want. So you see, it is very easy to manipulate someone. When they are all you know. When you tell them that they are what you want to be. I didn’t know any better. ”

“Surely after he killed your mother…”

He clutches his head like he has a headache. I touch him, and he pulls away.

He is quiet for a long moment, and I don’t say anything. My heart is pounding so hard.

“She deserved it,” he says. “She deserved it, he told me that she did. Anyone who defies him meets their end. He runs everything as he must to keep us safe. To keep so many people safe. The business is everything. If it collapses so do many lives. And she… She was going to ruin everything.”

He looks up at me, his ice-colored eyes haunted. “My mother deserved to die.”

I watch his face as the words leave his mouth. I watch the dawning realization that deep inside, he believed this.

I don’t know for how long. I don’t know why.

Does he still believe this?

I know it’s because of his father. His father brainwashed him. Clearly from the earliest age, his father had been manipulating him, shaping his mind, shaping his view of the world.

His father controlled him.

“Dragos, you know that a woman doesn’t deserve to be murdered, not for any reason.”

The silence between us has a pulse of its own.

“Yes, I know,” he says, his voice harsh, sharp like a dagger. “I know,” he says.

“Your mother didn’t deserve that. Your father is a monster.”

“I know that too,” he says, his words sharp. “I do know. I didn’t. I… I didn’t for so long. He told me. He built my entire world. How could I ever look at it and say that it was false?”

And suddenly I realize something I never have before.

Dragos doesn’t live in the same world that I do, and it isn’t because he’s a billionaire.

It isn’t because he has money and privilege.

It’s because his world was shaped by something altogether broken.

And whatever I’ve believed about him is wrong, because I made assumptions about the fact that we must have some shared morals.

A shared idea of what love is. Of what marriage looks like.

But he grew up in a home with a maniac who convinced his son that his mother deserved to die.

“You’ve never harmed me. You’ve never made me feel unsafe physically.”

“That isn’t true,” he says, his voice rough. “You were afraid of me when I came for you in Paris. What if I did intend to hurt you? How would either of us know?”

“I don’t believe that you did. I don’t believe for one moment that you intended to harm me when you came after me. I think you were angry, and I think you wanted me back in your possession. But hurting me wouldn’t get you what you wanted.”

“How could I have ever thought my father was justified?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to say what I want to say.

Without sounding… Without sounding like I believe you’re beyond hope, because I don’t think you are.

But there’s an old song about a wise man who built his house upon the rock, and a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.

Your house was built upon something else altogether.

Something broken. Something destined to make a person… Fall to pieces eventually. Or…”

“Become a psychopath?”

“Maybe. I had thought that our foundations were the same. I knew that you didn’t seem to have a relationship with either of your parents, I think I assumed they had passed away.

But it never occurred to me that you had grown up in a house like that.

So broken. So damaged. I just never even thought for one moment… It’s making me reevaluate.”

“Reevaluate what?”

I look down at my hands. I miss my wedding ring for the first time. Not just because I wish I had something to play with to distract myself, but because it was part of what bonded us together.

I’ve done a good job of reducing us to sex. But it has always been more than that. We’re husband and wife. And yes, our attraction was a key part of that. It always has been. That instant attraction we felt at first meeting, the way we couldn’t stay apart after.

It’s why I married a relative stranger. But he did too.

He was caught up in that same sweep of inevitable fate I had been caught up in.

He still has his ring on his finger. I reach over and I put my hand over his, the metal of his wedding band warm under my palm.

I’m the one who decided it meant nothing to him, because he wasn’t showing me affection the way I expected to see it.