Page 85 of Ruin
Something involuntary and sharp, like a muscle seizing.
She still wears it.
After everything—after the gun and the truth and every reason in the world to rip it off and leave it on the floor—she tucked it under her sweater and walked out the door with my diamonds against her skin.
She met Emilia at a restaurant on Seventh.
I watched her hug the Hart girl, watched her sit down and pick up a mimosa and smile like a woman whose world hadn't just caved in.
She's a better liar than I gave her credit for.
From the camera angle on the street, I could see the tension in her shoulders, the way she held her glass too tightly, the micro-expressions that someone who didn't know her would miss entirely.
But Emilia wouldn't catch them.
Emilia sees what Selene wants her to see because Selene learned from the best how to show one face while wearing another.
Two hours later, she was back in the apartment.
Sat in her car for six minutes before going inside.
Then nothing. Just her, on the bed, holding her phone against her chest in the dark.
I know because I watched. I watchedallof it.
I toggled between running an empire and watching a woman grieve on a surveillance feed, and if that makes me a monster, then the word lost its meaning long before I earned it.
Vincent comesto my office with the expression he wears when he's about to say something I won't want to hear.
"Zhukov hit the warehouse on Thirty-Eighth," he says, settling into the chair across from my desk with the deliberate calm of a man delivering a casualty report. "Took the whole shipment. Left three of our men in the hospital and one in the morgue."
"Who?"
"Danny Reeves. Twenty-six. Two years with us. Good soldier."
I file the name. Every name gets filed. "And the message?"
Vincent slides his phone across the desk.
A photograph of the warehouse wall, spray-painted in Cyrillic that I can read well enough.
The translation doesn't require fluency.
Your wolf lost her teeth.
I stare at the words until they stop being words and become something else. A detonation point. A line crossed.
"They know," I say.
"They know something happened between you and Selene. Whether they know the specifics..." Vincent shrugs, but his eyes are sharp. "They have someone watching your building. Or hers. Or both."
"Both." I've already run the analysis. The Cyrillic message is pointed. Personal. Zhukov doesn't write personal messages unless he has personal intelligence. "They're mapping her movements."
"It's worse than that." Vincent reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a phone.
He slides it across the table.
The screen shows a photograph—a man sitting in a parked sedan outside Selene's apartment building. Dark jacket, cigarette, telephoto lens on the passenger seat. The timestamp is two days ago.
