Page 138 of Ruin
Not the specifics—I've never told him, and he hasn't asked—but the shape of it.
The way I wake up gasping, the way my hand goes to my throat, to the collar, checking that it's there the way you check for a pulse.
He pulls me closer. One arm around my waist, his chest against my back, his mouth near my ear.
He doesn't speak. Just holds me, and his heartbeat against my spine is slow and steady and eventually mine matches it, the way it always does, my body syncing to his whether I tell it to or not.
I don't fall back asleep. Neither does he.
We lie in the dark and breathe together, and somewhere around four or so, his hand finds mine and our fingers lace together, and that's how the morning finds us. Side by side. Holding on.
The light comes in gray and slow, and I extract myself carefully, sliding out from under his arm and padding barefoot to the kitchen. He'll sleep now, if I let him.
The middle of the night pacing has gotten better since I started sleeping in his bed, though he'd never admit the connection and I'd never point it out.
Coffee. Two cups. His black, mine light.
I set his on the nightstand where he'll find it when he wakes and take mine to the dining table where my laptop is still open from last night's work.
Three more assignments for Harvard and I'm done. The coursework has become background noise, something I do between the real work of restructuring an empire's finances, and my professors have no idea that the case studies I submit are drawn from actual criminal operations happening in real time.
My paper on shell company detection got the highest mark in the class.
It should have. I wrote it while dismantling Zhukov's.
My phone buzzes at eight. Not Cassius—he's in the shower. It's Marco.
There’s a problem at the Flatbush location. The manager Cassius installed two weeks ago is skimming. Small amounts, testing the waters, seeing what he can get away with under the new management structure. Marco found it in the weekly financials and wants to know how I want to handle it.
HowIwant to handle it. Not how Cassius wants to handle it. Me.
I finish my coffee and pull up the financial records.
The skimming is clumsy—inflated vendor invoices, round numbers that stick out like red flags in a column of legitimate transactions. Amateur work. The kind of theft that a smarter man would have hidden better and a braver man wouldn't have attempted in the first place.
I call Marco."Pull his access to the accounts. Freeze his operating budget. And set up a meeting for this afternoon—him, me, and Lionel. At Purgatory."
"You want Lionel there?"
"I want Lionel visible. I'll do the talking."
A pause. Marco’s weighing whether to push back, run it past Cassius, or trust the woman who rebuilt his entire department's financial infrastructure in eleven days. "Done," he says.
The meeting happens at three. The manager—a thick-necked man named DeSoto who got the job because he's Lionel's cousin and not because he's qualified—walks in expecting Cassius and finds me instead.
I'm sitting at a table in the back of Purgatory, the club dark and empty in the afternoon, a folder of his doctored invoices open in front of me.
I don't raise my voice. I don't threaten.
I show him the numbers, line by line, and watch the color drain from his face as he realizes that every shortcut he took is documented, dated, and traceable.
Then I tell him what happens next: he pays back what he took, plus interest, and he continues managing the location under a revised financial structure with weekly audits that report directly to me.
Or he doesn't, and the conversation moves from this table to a different room in the building. One with worse lighting and no exits.
He pays. Takes out his phone and transfers the money before I've finished my coffee.
Lionel, standing by the door with his arms folded, catches my eye on the way out.
