Page 124 of Ruin
18
SELENE
The safe house is a brownstone in Carroll Gardens that belongs to no one on paper.
Two bedrooms, a kitchen that hasn't been updated since the eighties, and a bathroom with a lock that actually works.
Cassius owns it through so many layers of shell companies that even I couldn't trace it back to him, and I've been tracing his shell companies for weeks.
Emilia is in the bedroom at the end of the hall, and the doctor is with her.
Cassius made a call from the car before we arrived, and a woman was waiting when we pulled up. Dr. Maren Tate is in her mid-forties, with calm eyes, steady hands, and most important—no questions about the blood, the tactical gear, or the girl being carried through the door by two men who looked like they'd just been through hell…because they had.
A female doctor. He chose a woman.
The detail lodges in my ribs like a shard of something I can't identify.
He thought about Emilia's trauma, about what it would mean for her to be touched and examined by a man after being hurt by men, and he made a different choice.
It's such a small thing. Such a human thing, from a man I've spent weeks trying to convince myself isn't human at all.
I stand in the hallway outside Emilia's door and listen to the murmur of Dr. Tate's voice. Low, soothing, professional. The occasional sound of Emilia crying, muffled, the thin, exhausted crying of someone who has been doing it for days and doesn't have the energy left to sob.
Lionel is by the front door. Cassius left an hour ago to deal with the aftermath—the bodies, the scene, whatever cleanup a man like him does after a night like this.
He didn't kiss me goodbye, didn't touch me. Just looked at me with those gray eyes and said, "Stay with her. I'll send someone for you when she's settled."
Then he was gone, and the brownstone felt smaller and colder without the space he takes up in a room.
I go to the bathroom.
The mirror is small and spotted with age, mounted above a sink with rust stains around the drain.
The woman looking back at me is someone I've been meeting in stages over the last two weeks, and each time there's less of the old version and more of whatever this is.
Tactical vest, unzipped but still on. Black shirt underneath, stiff with sweat and something darker at the cuffs. The collar at my throat, catching the weak overhead light.
Blood under my fingernails.
I turn on the faucet and the water runs cold, then warm, then too hot, and I hold my hands under it and scrub.
Soap from a dispenser that's probably been here since the house was last used.
I scrub my palms, between my fingers, the creases of my knuckles.
The blood comes off in thin, rust-colored streams that spiral down the drain.
Except the bit that’s under the nails.
It's dark there, wedged into the cuticles, staining the half-moons at the base of each nail bed.
I dig at it with my thumbnail, with the edge of a towel, with the corner of a bar of soap that crumbles against the pressure.
It doesn't come out. Not all of it.
There's a shadow under my right index finger that I can't reach, and after five minutes of trying I stand there with my hands dripping and my chest heaving and accept that I'm going to sit with Emilia with a dead man's blood still on me.
I strip off the vest, leave it on the bathroom floor.
