Page 12 of Ruin
"Dangerous?"
His chest rumbles. "Lethal."
I lift my head.
In the low light, with his hair wrecked and his lip still swollen where I split it, he looks almost human, almost approachable.
It's a lie.
Cassius Wolfe is no more human than the darkness he rules.
The fact that my body is still humming from what he just did to me doesn't change what he is.
It just means I'm the same thing now.
"I have plans," I tell him. "Things I learned. Connections I built. Legal frameworks that could protect your operations fromthe inside out." I trace the wolf tattoo on his shoulder. "I didn't spend a year at Harvard just to come back and warm your bed."
His eyes sharpen.
The post-sex haze burns away and underneath is the strategist. The king. The man who built an empire.
"Tell me."
"Tomorrow." I settle against his chest. Press my ear to his heartbeat. "Tonight, I'm here."
His arm tightens around me. His lips press against the top of my head.
In the silence of Hell—a silence that isn't really silence but the muffled echo of a hundred dark transactions behind soundproof doors—he says the only words that matter.
"Welcome home, little wolf."
I close my eyes. The collar is warm against my throat. His heart beats steady under my cheek.
And somewhere in the wreckage of who I used to be, something unfurls.
Home.
Yes. I'm home.
2
Cassius
She's asleep in my bed, and I can't stop watching her.
Not the way I used to watch her—through surveillance feeds, through Peter and Paul's reports, through the distance I maintained for twelve months while she remade herself into something I hadn't anticipated.
This is different. She's three feet away. Breathing slow and deep against my pillow, dark hair spilled across the black silk like ink.
The collar catches the low light every time her chest rises.
Three hundred and sixty-five days. I counted every one.
I told myself I sent her away to grow. To become useful. Hell had already forged her in fire; I simply chose to sharpen the blade.
The law degree wasn’t why I pulled her from the wreckage—but it was how I would turn survival into strategy. Beauty that makes men reckless. A mind trained to dismantle them after they underestimate her.
That was the rational explanation. The one I offered Vincent when his brow arched at the thought of me sending her to Harvard on my dime—a girl who once needed Hell just to endure, now being prepared to win.
