Page 56 of Ruin
I watch her enter her apartment, moving with the exhausted grace of someone who's been thoroughly loved.
She looks content, satisfied, still glowing from our evening together.
Then I watch her settle at her laptop with a glass of wine and Michelle's files.
The change is gradual.
A frown as she reads something unexpected.
A pause to cross-reference information.
Her body language shifting from relaxed to tense to increasingly agitated.
A little before three-thirty, she opens what looks like a newspaper article.
Even through the grainy footage, I can see the exact moment of recognition.
Her face goes pale, her hand flies to her mouth, and the wine glass slips from her fingers to shatter on the floor.
She's found the photo.
The article about my taking control of the organization.
The timeline that puts me in the perfect position to have killed her parents.
I watch her stare at the screen for seven minutes without moving.
Just staring at my younger self's photograph while her world reshapes itself around the truth.
Then she runs to the bathroom and vomits.
The sound doesn't come through the surveillance audio, but I can see her shoulders heaving, her hair falling around her face as she empties her stomach of wine and betrayal and the last remnants of trust.
When she finally stops retching, she splashes cold water on her face and stares at herself in the mirror.
Her hand goes to the collar at her throat—my collar, my mark of ownership—and for a moment I think she's going to tear it off.
She doesn't, but the look in her eyes as she touches it tells me everything I need to know.
She knows exactly what she's been wearing. And for how long. And what it means.
Noon comesand goes without a word from her.
I try to focus on business—territory disputes, shipment schedules, the mundane details of running a criminal empire—but my attention keeps drifting to the surveillance monitors showing her office door, still closed.
Lionel reports hourly.
She declined lunch.
Sent her assistant to the quarterly review meeting instead of attending herself.
Asked her assistant to hold all calls.
She's creating barriers, building walls, walls that I don’t want her to create.
At two, my phone rings.
Unknown number, but the caller ID shows international routing through multiple servers.
