It had been two days since she was locked inside her room without food, without water. Her body burned with fever, her lips cracked, and her stomach twisted with hunger. Not even a servant came to check. From Cassandra Bolton's inherited memories, this neglect was nothing new—her mother, Karmilla Visent Bolton, loathed her very existence, reserving all her love for her precious son. Cassandra, the unwanted daughter, was a stain, a shame, an afterthought.
The fever grew worse. Her body shook with chills though fire coursed beneath her skin. She tried to drag herself to the window, but her limbs were lead, her vision spinning.
Never, not even when hunted by assassins or abandoned in blood-soaked battlefields, had she been reduced to this wretched state. Not after her Master rescued her and brought her back to the Sect with him.
And then, the thought slipped from her hazy mind—Master would never have let her…
Her heart clenched. Her lips bled as she bit down hard. No. She would not think of him. She would not think of the betrayal, the crystalline teardrop in his palm as he destroyed her. That life was dead. She was Cassandra Bolton now.
And yet, no matter how fiercely she tried to lock it away, her memories clawed at her like chains dragging her deeper into despair.
Her fevered thoughts were broken by the sudden slam of her door.
The sound echoed like thunder in her skull.
Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, heavy with intent, closing in on her bed.
Her instincts screamed danger. Her body tried to rise, but it betrayed her—too weak, too frail, too broken to defend itself.
The room seemed to grow darker, colder, shadows stretching unnaturally across the walls. Cassandra's blurry gaze fixed on the advancing figure, a silhouette swallowing the dim light.
The footsteps halted by her bedside. Cassandra's fever-clouded eyes struggled to focus, and when her vision steadied, she froze.
It was him.
Theodore Bolton. Eldest son of House Bolton. Her supposed biological brother.
From Cassandra Bolton's inherited memories, he was a man of shadows—cruel, ruthless, untouchable. He had never spared his only sister more than a glance in their fourteen years of blood-bound relation. A stranger in the skin of family.
But now, as his gaze fell upon her burning, shivering figure, something shifted in the air.
Theodore's eyes, cold and sharp as honed steel, lingered too long on her face—on the beads of sweat rolling down her temples, on the lips bitten bloody in defiance. His jaw tightened as though he were holding back words—or perhaps an emotion—that had no place here.
It was not pity. It was not care. It was something far more complex, far more dangerous.
A flicker of disdain crossed his expression, gone so quickly it might have been imagined. And yet beneath it lay a strange undercurrent… almost like recognition.
But recognition of what?
His fingers twitched at his side, as if suppressing the urge to reach out—to strangle her or to steady her, even he seemed uncertain.
Among the countless siblings born from his father's four wives, the frail figure lying fever-stricken before him was the only one who shared his 'blood' in full—their bond tied by the same womb, the same mother. And yet, even that truth had never stirred much warmth in him.
He remembered, dimly, a scene from four years ago. A fourteen-year-old girl, small and trembling, half-hidden behind a bush as though the world itself was too much for her. She had watched him as he prepared to board the waiting chopper for his mission.
Her wide eyes had been a confusing mix of fear, awe, and desperate longing. He hadn't turned back then. He hadn't even slowed his step. That yearning gaze—her silent plea for him to acknowledge her—was something he had brushed aside without a second thought.
And now, four years later, he had returned to find her nearly drowned by the bastard child of the Third Wife, then locked away to rot in her fever by the hand of their own mother.