Page 24 of Ruin
The last thread connecting me to the girl I used to be—the orphan, the victim, the one who needed saving.
I don't need saving anymore.
The thought should scare me. Instead, it settles into my bones like a key turning in a lock.
Click. Done. Decided.
Cassius appears in the doorway.
His tie is loosened. His jaw is tight. Whatever the phone call was, it wasn't good news.
"Everything okay?" I ask.
"Business." He crosses to the bar cart, pours two fingers of whiskey, and drinks half of it in one swallow. "Nothing you need to worry about yet."
Yet.
"Who was on the phone?" he asks, nodding toward my cell.
"Emilia. I’m not sure if you remember her, but she’s my friend."
"The judge's daughter." He says it the way he says everything—flat, informational—but something flickers behind his eyes. There and gone.
"She wants to do brunch on Saturday."
"And you said yes."
"I said yes."
He watches me over the rim of his glass. "Can you handle that? The two lives?"
I think about the ease of the lie. The smoothness of the performance. The total absence of guilt.
"I'm already handling it."
He nods, finishes the whiskey and sets the glass down and looks at me with an expression I'm learning to read. The one that means he's seeing something he didn't expect, and recalculating.
"Vincent is impressed," he says.
"Vincent is cautious."
"Same thing, coming from him." He pulls his tie off, drapes it over the chair. "He's setting up your office. You'll have full access to financial systems by morning."
"I know. He told me."
Something that might be amusement crosses his face. "Already going around me?"
"Not around. Alongside." I lean back against the headboard. "Isn't that the point?"
He stares at me. The room is quiet—that heavy silence that isn't really silence.
"A couple of days," he says. "You've been back for a matter of days, and you've restructured a debt recovery, solved a laundering vulnerability, neutralized a city councilman, earned Vincent's respect, and lied to your best friend without blinking."
I hold his gaze. "Is that a compliment or a concern?"
He crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.
He runs his thumb along the collar at my throat, tracing the diamonds like a rosary.
