Page 141 of Ruin
"I'm okay," I say without stopping.
"I know," he replies. Which is his way of saying I can see that you're not, and I'll be here when you're ready.
Natalia calls an hour later. Not about business, which surprises me, because Natalia doesn't call about anything that isn't business.
"Want to get a drink?" she says before I can say a word.
"It's three in the afternoon."
"I didn't ask what time it is. I asked if you want a drink."
We meet at a bar on Smith Street that's dark enough to hide in and quiet enough to hear yourself think.
Natalia orders whiskey neat. I order the same because I've stopped pretending I'm a wine person. The woman who drinks mimosas at Saturday brunch is gone.
We don't talk about the organization. Don't talk about Zhukov or the restructuring or the Flatbush situation. Natalia asks me about the scar on my forearm—a scratch from the factory that healed badly—and I tell her the abbreviated version.
She shows me a scar on her shoulder that she got in a place she doesn't name, doing a thing she doesn't describe, and the exchange is the most honest conversation I've had with another woman since Emilia.
"The men think you're Cassius's project," Natalia says, halfway through her second whiskey. "They think he built you. Trained you. Shaped you into what he needed."
"And what do you think?"
"Nobody trainedyou to do what you did in that factory. Nobody trained you to break that Russian kid in the chair. And the financial work?" She takes a sip. Sets the glass down. "That's all you. He didn't build you, Selene. He just stopped standing in front of you."
The words land somewhere deep, in a place I didn't know needed to hear them. Not from Cassius, who is biased. Not from Vincent, who is strategic. From a woman who has survived thisworld on her own terms and doesn't hand out compliments she hasn't weighed first.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. Buy the next round."
I do. We stay for one more, and when we part on the sidewalk outside, Natalia does something she's never done before. She hugs me. Brief, firm, the hug of a woman who doesn't do this often and means it when she does.
"You're not alone in this," she says. "I know it feels like it. But you're not."
She walks away before I can respond, which is the most Natalia thing she could possibly do.
Cassius texts me at six. I'm at the dining table, laptop open, finishing the last assignment for Harvard—a paper on prosecutorial ethics that I've been writing with the particular irony of a woman who spent last month helping a crime lord dismantle a rival organization using the federal justice system as a weapon.
The text is three words:Cavallo. Eight o'clock.
I type back:What should I wear?
His response takes thirty seconds:The red.
I smile at my phone. The same sharp smile from the early chapters of whatever story my life has become, but warmer underneath. Softer in a way I wouldn't have allowed a month ago.
The red dress is in the closet. Not the guest closet—the main one. His closet.
My clothes have migrated there over the past two weeks, a gradual invasion that neither of us acknowledged verbally but both of us noticed.
His suits on the left, my dresses on the right, and the domesticity of shared closet space is somehow more intimate than anything we've done in Hell.
The dress is silk, the color of dark wine, cut to fit close without being obvious. I put it on and look at the collar in the mirror. The diamonds sit against the red fabric like they were designed for it, which they probably were, because Cassius doesn't leave details to chance.
By the time I get to Cavallo at eight, the restaurant is warm and golden and smells like fresh pasta and expensive wine and the kind of money that eats well and tips better.
The maitre d' seats us at a corner table that I suspect is permanently reserved, and the staff moves around us with the attentive invisibility of people who know exactly who they're serving and have been trained not to show it.
