Page 112 of Ruin
By noon, we have the full picture.
The factory in Sunset Park features three floors, a basement level, loading dock on the west side, and a single vehicle entrance on the east.
Zhukov is running a rotating guard schedule with four men on the perimeter, two inside, and a shift change every eight hours.
The basement is where they're holding Emilia, based on the pipe configuration in the video and the building's original blueprints, which I pulled from the city's digital archive.
I lay it all out on the table.
Floor plans marked with entry points, guard positions, sightlines.
The route from the nearest staging area to the basement access.
Timing windows based on the shift rotation.
Vincent studies it, runs his finger along the approach route I've mapped and looks up at me.
"This is good work," he says. And from Vincent, who has planned operations for three decades and buried the men who got them wrong, that's a lot.
"It's not good enough." I tap the basement access point. "We know the layout, but we don't know what's down there. How many men with Emilia. What kind of weapons. Whether the room is rigged." I look at Cassius, who has been standing at the edge of the table for the last hour, watching me work without interrupting. Our eyes meet and the thing that passes between us is not romance, not desire, not any of the complicated tangled mess that lives in the space where we touch. It's something simpler. Two people who need the same thing right now, looking at each other and knowing it.
"We need someone who's been inside," I say.
The room moves.
That's the thing about these people—about Cassius' people, aboutmypeople, if I'm being honest about what I've become—they don't deliberate.
A need is identified and they get to work.
Vincent makes two phone calls.
Marco pulls up a list of known Zhukov associates with photographs, aliases, and last known locations.
The twins leave without being told, car keys already in hand.
I have nothing to do but wait.
It's the worst hour of my life.
Worse than the night my parents died, because that night I didn't know what was happening until it was over.
This time I know exactly what's happening. Emilia is in a basement in Sunset Park, and every minute I spend sitting at this table is a minute she spends wondering if anyone is coming for her.
I picture her face. The swollen eye. The blood in her hair.
I picture her hands, the ones that braided friendship bracelets for me when we were seventeen because she read online that repetitive motion helps with anxiety, and I wore that ugly purple and green thing on my wrist for three months because it smelled like her room and it made me feel less alone.
I press my nails into my palms hard enough to leave crescents.
Focus. Stay here. She needs me sharp, not shattered.
Cassius sits across from me.
He doesn't speak, doesn't try to fill the silence with reassurance or strategy or any of the things people say when they don't know how to sit with someone else's terror.
He just sits. Present. Steady. A fixed point in a room that feels like it's spinning.
At one point, without looking up from the documents in front of him, he slides his coffee across the table toward me.
