Rise of Cassian Vale: The Forbidden Healer

Chapter 7

Cassian just kept looking at them as they all were breathing heavily while he didn't even look like someone who had fought more than ten men just few minutes ago.

"I see you are already itching for your own Henry. Don't worry, this is just the beginning." Cassian said to Henry.

Henry's face turned red like an overripe tomato as anger and humiliation flooded through him.

"How dare you this pauper!" Henry bellowed.

He could not believe that the same Cassian who had always grovel around him, begging him to accept him into his family and always pleasing them could have the audacity to beat his son and even threaten him. It was too much for him.

"You useless boy that I picked from the gutters and allowed into my family, you have the effrontery to threaten me and even beat up my only son?!" He shouted.

"Well, what can we say, the boy has finally become a man." Cassian grinned, his voice dripping with sarcasm and mockery.

The smile on Cassian's face seemed to get Henry more irritated and angry.

"Don't worry, once the company security comes, I will make sure they wipe that silly grin off of your face!" Henry threatened.

"Nice, obviously, you haven't learnt anything, so I will be waiting." Cassian replied in a bored tone.

At this point, Lucia's composure finally shattered.

She had watched her brother go down screaming, watched her family's hired muscle scattered across the floor like discarded toys, and something in her seemed to snap loose from whatever restraint had been holding it in place all night.

"You ruin everything!" Her voice cracked, shrill and raw, carrying easily over the murmuring crowd. "Seven years, and you're still exactly the same. A nobody who thinks causing a scene makes him somebody! You should have rotted in that cell! I should have made sure of it myself!"

She surged toward him, hand raised, fully intending to slap the calm off his face.

Cassian caught her wrist before it connected and everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath.

"I let you say a lot of things tonight," Cassian said, his voice quiet enough that people leaned in without meaning to. "I let you humiliate Nora in front of this entire room. I let you put a price on my legs like I was livestock. I'm done being patient."

He released her wrist. Lucia stumbled back a step, cradling it against her chest like he'd burned her.

"You don't get to touch me," Cassian went on. "Not after everything your family did. Not after what you let happen to Maya. Not after what you let happen to Nora's hands."

"I didn't—" Lucia's voice wavered. "I didn't order any of that, Julian and his father—"

"You knew." Cassian's eyes didn't blink. "You knew, and you smiled anyway, every single time someone brought you news that I was suffering for it and you did nothing about it. You didn't even bother checking up on my family after I slaved myself away for you."

Cassian eyes bored into her, the pain from all the years and the suffering his family went through ate at him.

"You were the reason why I worked with Helix Biomed in the first place! Because I wanted to be worthy of you and at the first sign of trouble, what did you do? You ran off into the arms of the very people that framed me even when you knew about it."

Lucia looked at him with bored irritation.

"Are you done?" She asked. " Look, we already signed the divorce papers, and besides I didn't ask you to go kill a patient just because you were trying to prove a point that you were somebody and wanted to claim Nexara's glory for yourself."

His hand moved before she could react. It was not a punch, not the kind of violence he had used on the men across the floor, but a single open-handed slap that snapped her head sideways and sent her staggering into the arms of the guests behind her.

The sound of it seemed to hang in the air long after it faded.

Somewhere in the crowd, a woman gasped audibly. Someone else whispered, "Oh my god," under their breath but nobody moved to help her. At this point, no one was willing to be the next object of Cassian's anger.

Lucia pressed a trembling hand to her cheek, tears springing to her eyes. The tears were not from pain, Cassian suspected, but for the sheer, unthinkable reality of being struck in public, in her own family's house, in front of everyone whose respect she'd spent her whole life curating.

He turned from her without another word, crossing to where Marcus still knelt clutching his ruined wrist, whimpering through gritted teeth.

"You put your hands on Nora tonight," Cassian said, crouching to Marcus's eye level. "You threatened to break her neck like it would cost you nothing. And your family let a rig fail on my sister eighteen months into her recovery, because she worked somewhere that made your allies nervous."

"I didn't—" Marcus's voice was a thin, panicked whine. "That wasn't me, that was Helix, I swear—"

"You benefited from it," Cassian said. "That was enough."

He gripped Marcus's already-broken wrist and pressed, just slightly, just enough to make the bones grind. Marcus's scream tore through the ballroom.

Then Cassian's hand moved to Marcus's knee, and the second scream that followed was worse than the first. It was sharper, higher, the sound of a man discovering exactly how much pain a body could hold before something in the voice itself started to break.

"Please—please.." Marcus begged, whimpering like a little child.

Guests turned away. A woman near the bar was openly crying. Someone had their hand pressed over their own mouth like they were trying to keep from being sick.

Cassian rose, leaving Marcus curled on the floor, sobbing.

He turned to face the room. Every trembling guest, every phone still recording with unsteady hands, Henry Rowan frozen pale near the head table, Lucia still pressing her palm to her reddened cheek.

"Everyone in this room needs to understand something," Cassian said, and his voice carried without needing to rise at all. "Tonight isn't revenge. Tonight is a warning."

He let the silence stretch, let every eye in the room settle on him.

"The Rowans. The Harrows. Everyone who built their fortune off what they stole from me, off what they did to my family, off what they let happen to a woman whose only crime was believing I was innocent, I am going to take apart everything you have. Piece by piece. Company by company. Until there is nothing left of what you built on my back."

He looked, briefly, at Lucia.

"This," he said, "was just interest."

The doors at the back of the ballroom burst open before anyone could respond, and a fresh wave of security in matching black suits flooded in, weapons drawn, radios crackling.

Behind them walked a man in an impeccably tailored suit whose face went utterly still the moment his eyes landed on the scene in front of him. The broken bodies, the blood on the marble, Lucia's reddened cheek, and Cassian standing calmly at the center of it all like the eye of a storm.

"Julian," Lucia breathed, relief and terror warring in her voice. "Julian, thank god—"