Hinovel
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Summary
Cassidy Carter knows struggle. For most of her life, it’s been just her and her mother—windowless studios and rundown motels, holding tight to each other as they fled from broken promises and men who never stayed. Cassidy is fluent in hope’s disappointments, in lies dressed up as dreams. She wears resilience like scratched armor—because in her world, survival means never letting down your guard. But nothing prepares her for the day her mother marries into the infamous Ashford dynasty. Suddenly, Cassidy is catapulted across the tracks into the world of old-money excess: sprawling estates with marble floors cold as judgment, winding driveways lined with perfectly trimmed hedges and iron gates that shut out everyone “unworthy.” She’s swallowed by chandeliers, silenced by rooms so grand they echo with history she’ll never be a part of. And then there’s Dante Ashford. Her new stepbrother is every nightmare in designer form, the one they call "king" at Blackridge Academy. Dante is the favored son of privilege—the campus playboy with a reputation for breaking hearts and ignoring rules. His eyes are cold and his smile never reaches them. Every hallway is his, every party an arena where he hunts, every girl just another notch on a bedpost carved from wealth and indifference. He’s everything Cassidy despises: arrogant, ruthless, untouchable. He’s everything the world worships: devastatingly handsome, impossibly powerful, exuding bad-boy magnetism that intoxicates and destroys. From the moment Cassidy steps into his home, Dante makes his feelings clear. His first words aren’t a welcome—they’re a warning, delivered with the venom only the privileged know how to wield. “You’re a parasite. You and your mother—gold-digging trash. Stay out of my way.” At Blackridge Academy, Dante reigns like a god, and Cassidy is nothing but his favorite game—a target for bored cruelty and casual humiliation. Most days, it starts before class: a heated glare across the quad, a perfectly-timed, cutting remark. In the crowded hallways, he bumps her so hard her books scatter, the crowd snickers, and his girlfriend clings to his arm, sneering. He toys with girls, and breaks them when he’s bored. He toys with her, but never lets her go. Every whisper, every pointed snicker, every dirty look tossed her way is orchestrated by him. “Stay in your lane, Carter,” he hisses when she dares to raise her chin. Behind the smirk and the perfectly rumpled uniform, he’s merciless—a bully who knows exactly how to wound. But Cassidy Carter doesn’t bow. Not to boys with trust funds. Not to bullies in mansions. Not even to bad boys who look at her like she’s a puzzle he can’t solve. What starts as hatred simmers into something far more dangerous. They clash in every corridor, trading savage words and violent stares. But the friction between them is electric—every fight is a heartbeat away from something reckless. Late nights turn into secret encounters: arguments that linger too long, stolen moments in deserted classrooms, the kind of forbidden glances that ignite and refuse to burn out. Dante’s torment soon slips from cruel games to something too intimate. When he corners her in an empty hallway, his lips claim hers—not with tenderness, but with fury. Punishment. Possession. He kisses her just to prove he can—and everything changes. Now there’s fire between them that neither can extinguish. He has a girlfriend—a perfect, poison-tipped queen who waits in the wings. She has rules—boundaries set to keep her heart untouched. But the line between hate and obsession blurs under the weight of their secrets. They fight by day and pretend by night. At home, they are actors on stage—polite, distant, simmering. At school, they’re enemies. But behind closed doors, the walls fall. They fall. Then, Cassidy uncovers Dante’s deepest secret—something dark and painful, hidden beneath the armor of arrogance. It’s the kind of secret that could shatter his world forever. The kind no one is meant to know. She threatens to expose it, and the mask cracks—revealing not the monster she thought, but a broken, wounded boy spiraling behind closed doors. Now, love and destruction circle, tangled by secrets and betrayal. Cassidy must choose: expose him and survive, or protect him and risk everything. Because some love stories should never exist. But hers and Dante’s? It was never meant to begin—and it might never let them end.
Devastated Past!
Cassidy's POV
I used to believe doors were meant for slamming.
When I was small, my father’s anger was the thundering heartbeat of our home, always pulsing behind the thin plaster walls. Every night, I braced for it: the heavy footsteps, the muffled curses, the sharp crack as the bedroom door hit its warped frame, rattling the cheap glass in the windows. My mother would hush her voice, gentle and pleading, trying to soothe the storm—a storm that never listened. Sometimes, after he’d stomped off in a drunken haze, she’d tiptoe into my room and tuck the frayed blanket around my shoulders, her hands trembling. “Go back to sleep, sweet pea,” she always whispered. “It’ll be over soon.” But it never was.
When I was eight, I asked her why he was always mad. She just shook her head and hid her wrists behind her sleeves, and I didn’t ask again.
He wasn’t always cruel, not in the way you find in horror movies or scandalous news stories. Sometimes he brought flowers, sometimes he played guitar on the porch and made us laugh. Those moments, rare as blue moons, were what I clung to in the dark. But cruelty leaves deeper marks than kindness can ever erase. Cruelty lasted.
It lasted through wine bottles shattered against chipped counters. It lasted through broken promises and bruises she tried to explain away with clumsy lies. “I fell. Just clumsy old me.” But sometimes I saw the purple ringed prints, saw the flash of fear in her eyes when loud voices echoed through the walls.
The night before everything changed, I lay awake listening to him rage about overdue bills, how her cooking was never good enough, how I was a useless burden. I pressed my pillow over my ears, counting the seconds between the shouts. I prayed for quiet, for peace, and for something—anything—to break the cycle.
Her freedom came with my father’s angry signature on the last page of a divorce packet, ink smudged and bitter. The day he left, our apartment was silent for the first time, and that silence was heavier than the violence that haunted it. It took weeks for it to feel safe. But safe never looked like fairy tales.
Freedom meant windowless studios, cold pizza eaten on borrowed couches. It meant moving three times in a year, hiding bruises not just on her skin but in the something fragile in her heart. I learned how to pack boxes fast, how to sleep with my backpack tucked under my pillow, how to listen for trouble. I learned how to comfort her when she woke sobbing in the night, her dreams thick with old pain.
It was always just us: me and Mom, two against the world. I became her anchor, her reason to get up in the morning, even when she could barely breathe. We learned to laugh at the little things—the cockroaches skittering across linoleum, the rain leaking through the roof, the way her beat-up Honda wheezed into life only after a pep talk.
Sometimes I convinced myself it was enough. That our love and our laughter could build something, could push back against all the things we'd lost. But the world has a way of reminding you how fragile your victories are.
And then came Richard Ashford.
Life has these moments, sharp and sudden, that slice through the ordinary and change everything. Mine was the day Mom came home from her new job at a downtown law firm, nervous and radiant in a silk blouse I’d never seen before. She giggled the way she did when she was truly happy—so rare, so precious. “Cass, you’ll never guess,” she whispered over burnt coffee and toast, her eyes bright, voice conspiratorial as thunder. “I met someone. And… I think—” She hesitated, then laughed, brushing hair behind her ear, cheeks flushing with hope. “I think he might be wonderful.”
She spoke about him cautiously in those first weeks, as if mentioning his name out loud could break the spell. But every detail painted him as a man so far from our world—a billionaire, she’d said, emphasizing the word like it was foreign, unreal. Richard Ashford, owner of sprawling companies, yachts, homes in cities she’d only ever seen in magazines.
He didn’t walk into our lives—he glided. A tailored suit, a dazzling smile, hands gentle as summer rain. He took her out to elegant dinners, sent flowers that filled our cramped apartment with the scent of roses and lilies. He never showed up drunk, never raised his voice. He spoke in poetry and promises, not threats.
I didn’t trust him at first. I met him in a coffee shop, my mother’s hand trembling in his as he waited for my verdict. I watched him, searching for cracks in the façade—a flicker of impatience, a hidden edge. But he just smiled, warm and practiced, and told me he admired my strength. He said he hoped I’d come to see him as part of our family, that he wanted nothing more than Mom’s happiness.
But what I heard most was the word **powerful**. Money is just another kind of power. I’d spent my whole life trying to survive men who wielded power recklessly. Richard handled it the way some people handle fragile glass: careful, measured, aware of what it could destroy.
A year later, they were married in a garden so lush and bright I almost believed fairy tales might be real. I wore a dress that felt like clouds and ate strawberries with cream, laughing at stories told by strangers in elegant suits.
But I couldn’t forget the past. I could never forget the lesson: **Perfection is never permanent.**
Which was why, as I climbed into the back seat of a gleaming black car destined for Richard’s estate, my thoughts spun in uneasy circles. The leather swaddled me, expensive and cold. My mom sat beside me, twisting her silken scarf in nervous knots, glancing my way with that quiet, pleading hope. The driver—professional, silent—never acknowledged us except for a polite ‘good afternoon.’
I pressed my forehead to the window, watching the world filter past in blurry streaks. Gone were the graffiti-splattered walls, the cracked sidewalks and chain link fences. Instead: iron gates that rose up like sentinels, manicured lawns dotted with white statues, flower beds spilling over with color. We drove for what felt like forever, turning down tree-lined avenues, up a winding driveway bordered by ancient oaks and lanterns lit even in the daylight.
Mom reached over, squeezed my hand. Hers felt small, delicate, yet strong—like she’d survived a thousand storms just to be here. “This is it, Cass. A new start. I know you’re scared, but… it’s different now. We’re safe here.”
I searched her face and saw the old shadows flicker at the edges. I wanted to believe her. God, I did.