Page 96 of Ruin
Cassius' expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind his eyes.
"The financial structure is the vulnerability," I continue, because apparently I've decided to help the man who murdered my parents defend his criminal empire, and the cognitive dissonance of that is something I'll process later, alone, probably in the middle of the night with my hand pressed against a wall. "Zhukov is moving money through shell companies, but shell companies leave paper trails. If someone with access to legal databases started pulling threads—corporate filings, beneficial ownership records, suspicious activity reports—you could trace the money back to its source and choke it off. Hit his finances and the muscle has nothing to protect."
The silence that follows is heavy and specific. Vincent looks at Cassius. Cassius looks at me.
"She's right," Vincent says quietly.
"I know she is." Cassius' voice is even, but his eyes are doing that thing they do when he's recalculating something fundamental. Reassessing. I've seen him look at chess problems the same way, and the comparison should insult me but instead it sends a current through my chest that I recognize as the worst kind of validation.
Vincent leaves an hour later.
I stand at the kitchen counter rinsing the salad bowl I never ate from and feel the weight of what just happened pressing down on my shoulders like a physical thing.
Ihelpedthem.
I sat at that table and offered strategic intelligence to a criminal organization, and I was good at it, and the worst part isn't that I did it.
The worst part is how natural it felt.
How the gears in my head clicked into place like they'd been waiting for exactly this kind of problem.
My mother was a defense attorney. My father was a judge.
I grew up at dinner tables where the law was a living thing, debated and dissected and loved.
And tonight I sat at a different kind of table and used everything they taught me to protect the man who killed them.
I wash the bowl three times, but it's already clean after the first.
I can't fucking sleep.
It's past midnight and the penthouse is quiet in that particular way it gets when the city noise fades and the only sounds are the building settling and the distant hum of the elevator shaft and him.
He's in his office.
The light leaks under his door, a thin gold line on the dark hardwood, and I can hear the muted tap of his fingers on a keyboard.
He doesn't sleep either.
I've figured that out over the past few nights of lying awake analyzing his patterns through the walls.
He works until two, paces until three, pours a drink at three-fifteen, and falls silent around four.
Whether that silence is sleep or something else, I don't know.
I'm standing in the hallway in one of his shirts.
My own clothes are hanging ten feet away in the guest closet.
I know that.
I walked past them and into his laundry room and put on a worn gray T-shirt that smells so much like him it made my eyes sting.
I hated myself and kept it on anyway.
The office door is open.
Not all the way.
