Page 45 of Ruin
"But enough to map your supply chain."
"Yes."
"Then we change the routes. All of them. Tonight. Before whatever Santos tells them becomes useful."
She's not asking permission. She's not making suggestions. She's issuing directives with the same certainty she used to command the meeting in Hell, and my men are listening.
Lionel is watching her with an expression I've never seen on his face. Something close to respect. Like he's seeing in her what I've seen since the moment she walked back into my world.
I let her work.
She pulls Harris aside and grills him on every transport route we've used in the past six months.
She calls Vincent from my phone and gets the names of every crew member who had access to Warehouse Six.
She asks Lionel about the security rotation, identifies the gap that allowed the Russians to get close enough to cut Demetri's throat, and tells him how to close it.
All of this in the middle of the night, standing in the ash of a burned warehouse, wearing my shirt under a black jacket with a diamond collar around her throat.
She is, without question, the most dangerous thing I've ever created.
And I didn't create her. Not really.
I just sent a broken girl to Harvard and waited for something else came back.
Something that was always inside her, buried under grief and fear and the soft life people tried to build around her like a cage.
All I did was open the door.
She walked through it on her own.
We don't get backto the penthouse until almost five.
Peter drops us at the private entrance and takes the car to the garage.
The lobby is empty. The elevator carries us up in silence, Selene leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, the first sign of exhaustion she's shown all night.
Inside, she kicks off her shoes and walks to the windows.
The city is still dark, but the eastern edge of the sky is starting to pale.
Dawn coming. Another day.
"Santos is dead," she says quietly. "You know that, right?"
"Probably."
"They'll have gotten everything they needed and dumped the body somewhere public. Another message." She presses her forehead against the glass. "How many more messages before this becomes a war?"
"It's already a war. It has been since the first empty crate."
She turns from the window.
The collar catches the first thin light of dawn and throws tiny prisms across her face.
She looks tired and fierce and utterly certain of where she stands.
"Then stop treating me like something to protect," she says. "Start treating me like something to aim."
