Page 123 of Ruin
Then she climbs in after her and pulls Emilia against her chest and Emilia curls into her, small and shaking, her face pressed into Selene's neck.
I get in the front and Lionel drives.
The city closes around us as we pull away from the factory, and in the rearview mirror I watch Selene hold her best friend and stroke her hair and murmur things I can't hear over the engine.
Selene's face is turned toward the window, half-lit by the passing streetlights, and the expression on it is one I know.
I know it because I've worn it, after the first man I killed, after the second, after the tenth.
The expression of someone whose body did something their mind hasn't caught up to yet.
She's running the moment on a loop behind her eyes, I'm sure of it.
The weight of the knife. The way it felt going in—the resistance and then the give, the awful, easy give. The sound the blade made coming out. The heat of his blood on her hands, hotter than she expected, hotter than anything she'd ever felt on her skin.
She'll wash her hands later and the blood will come off and the stain won't, because that kind of stain lives somewhere soap and water can't reach.
Her hands are still trembling.
I can see it from the front seat, the fine vibration in her fingers where they rest against Emilia's hair, and she keeps curling them into fists and uncurling them, like she's trying to shake something loose that won't let go.
Emilia shifts against her. Murmurs something into Selene's collarbone.
Selene tightens her arms and presses her lips to the top of Emilia's head, and the gesture is so tender that it seems impossible it's coming from the same woman who drove a blade into a man's throat twenty minutes ago.
But that's Selene.
That's what she is now—or maybe what she's always been, and I just gave her the circumstances to find out.
The killer and the caretaker.
The woman who holds a knife and the woman who holds her best friend, and the hands that do both are the same hands, and the blood is still on them when she strokes Emilia's hair.
Two versions of her, existing in the same body, in the same breath.
She looks up and catches my eyes in the rearview mirror, holds my gaze for a long moment while Emilia trembles against her chest.
I don't know what she sees in my face. Whatever it is, she doesn't look away.
Neither do I.
She's chosen.
Not with words. Selene never chooses with words.
She chose the moment she strapped that knife to her thigh and walked through a sewer tunnel beside me instead of calling the FBI.
She chose when she shoved Emilia out of the line of fire and ran at a man with a gun because the only thing between him andthe person she loves most was ten feet of concrete and her own body.
She's mine now.
Not because of the collar. Not because of the sex. Not because of the years I spent shaping her into something that could survive my world.
Because she looked at what she is and she didn't look away.
The woman looking back at me in the rearview mirror isn't the girl I found in Hell.
She's the queen I didn't know I was building.
