Page 116 of Ruin
"The service tunnel is our way in," I say, still adjusting the vest straps. "Alexei confirmed the welding on the seal is weak. Lionel can breach it quietly. We come up through the basement, bypassing the ground floor sensors. Two guards on Emilia. If we time it right, we catch them at the four-hour rotation gap."
"Vincent's already briefing the team." He's closer now. I can feel him behind me, not touching, just present, the way a fire is present even when you're not looking at it. "We move in two hours."
I turn around.
He's in black. Tactical pants, fitted shirt, holster already strapped to his ribs.
No suit, no tie, no cufflinks.
This is the version of Cassius that exists beneath the boardroom, the version that was raised in bloodshed.
He looks dangerous in a way that his suits only hint at, and my body responds to it with a directness that I don't have time for and can't afford to acknowledge.
But I acknowledge it anyway.
Silently. In the space between one breath and the next, I let myself feel it.
The pull. The gravity. The insane, inexcusable fact that I am about to walk into a firefight beside the man who killed my parents, and the thing I feel when I look at him isn't hatred.
It's something bigger than hatred, bigger than love, bigger than any word I've learned in twenty-five years of trying to make language do what feelings won't.
I love him. I hate that I love him. I hate that hating it doesn't change it.
He reaches out and adjusts the strap on my left shoulder. His fingers brush my collarbone, just above the collar, and the touch is so brief and so careful that it carries more weight than anything we did on his desk the other night.
"When we get in there," he says, "you stay behind me."
"No."
"Selene—"
"No. I'm not walking in behind you like cargo. Emilia is therebecauseof me. I go in beside you or I go in alone, but I don't go in behind."
His jaw works.
I watch the muscles flex beneath the skin and I know he's weighing my safety against my autonomy, trying to find the angle that protects me without insulting me.
It's a calculation he's been doing since the day we met, and he's never once gotten the balance right.
"Beside me," he says finally. "But if I tell you to get down, you get down."
"If someone is shooting at me, I don't need you to tell me to get down."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something closer to surrender.
"Emilia is going to be okay," he says. Quiet.
Not a promise, because he doesn't make promises he can't guarantee, and we both know this could go sideways in a hundred ways.
But the way he says it, looking at me with those gray eyes that have lied to me a thousand times and aren’t lying now, makes me believe it anyway.
"She has to be," I whisper. And something in my voice breaks the surface of the composure I've been maintaining all day, just for a second, just enough for him to see the terrified girl underneath the tactical gear and the diamond collar and the woman who just psychologically dismantled a Russian operative without raising her voice. "She's all I have left. From before."
He doesn't say anything.
He steps forward and presses his lips to my forehead, and the gesture is so gentle and so out of place in this room full of weapons that my eyes sting and I have to close them to keep the tears from falling.
Three seconds.
