Page 30 of Ruin
There's a note in the box.
White card, black ink, neat handwriting.
Consider this a job application. We'd like to discuss the vacancy.
No signature. No name. None needed.
Peter reads the note over my shoulder. "Zhukov."
"Zhukov."
I look at the hand. At the clean cut— precise, done by someone who's taken hands before.
At the ring that Tomás wore every day for twenty years, a gift from his wife, who will never know how it ended up in a box on a restaurant doorstep.
This is what Vincent meant.
This isn't a territorial dispute with rules.
This is a man who sends body parts as business cards.
I pull out my phone and call Vincent.
"We need a full security review. Every asset, every location, every person connected to the organization. I want safe houses prepped, weapons redistributed, and the twins running twenty-four-hour surveillance on Zhukov's known locations."
"And Selene?"
I look at the hand in the box. Think about the photographs of the restaurant owner's daughter walking to school.
"She gets a detail. Lionel. Full-time. Starting tomorrow."
"She won't like that."
"She doesn't have to like it."
I end the call. Stand on the doorstep of my restaurant, my city, my territory, and stare at the message from a man who thinks empty crates and severed hands will make me bend.
He doesn't know me.
He doesn't know what I've built, what I've survived, what I'm willing to do to protect what's mine.
He doesn't know that the woman asleep in my penthouse right now is reshaping my empire from the inside while he's out here playing games with body parts.
He'll learn.
Peter is watching me…waiting.
"Clean this up," I say. "Send Tomás's family money. Enough to disappear if they want to."
"And Zhukov?"
I look at the Cyrillic note one more time, then I fold it and put it in my pocket. "They want a war, and they're about to get it."
5
Selene
The red dress fits like it was sewn onto my body.
