Page 13 of Ruin
The truth is uglier. I sent her away because she was making me weak.
A year ago, Selene Deveraux was a broken thing.
Beautiful, yes.
Responsive, absolutely.
But fragile in a way that made me want to wrap her in bulletproof glass and kill anyone who breathed too close.
That kind of obsession is a liability in my line of work. Men who love things that can be shattered get shattered themselves.
So, I sent her away. Let her harden. Let her grow claws.
I didn't expect fangs.
I run my thumb across my lower lip. She split it.
Actually split it with her teeth, and the copper taste of my own blood in her mouth sent something electric down my spine that I'm still processing.
The old Selene kissed me like she was drowning.
New Selene kisses me like she’s the water.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Vincent:She's back, then.
I type back:She never left.
I set the phone down and watch her sleep for another minute.
The scratches she left on my chest sting when I breathe.
The bite mark on my shoulder throbs with my pulse. She marked me. Deliberately. Territorially.
Interesting.
I have work to do.
The car is waiting outside Purgatory's back entrance.
Black sedan, tinted windows, Peter behind the wheel. Selene is still asleep when I leave—I text Lionel to bring her to me when she wakes.
My penthouse is fifteen minutes north.
Top floor of a building I own outright, no name on the deed, no doorman who talks.
The elevator opens directly into the living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawled out below like something I'm deciding whether to keep.
This is where I do some of my work, where I live. My main office building isn’t far from here, and Hell is for a specific kind of business.
By the time she wakes,I've showered, dressed, and reviewed three reports from Vincent about the Russian situation.
Kirill Zhukov has been testing my borders for six months—probing shipments, bribing dock workers, making noise in neighborhoods I've controlled for a decade.
While I was distracted. While I was watching surveillance footage of Selene walking across Harvard's campus with textbooks in her arms and that collar glinting under her scarf.
Distraction. Vincent's word. He's not wrong.
