Page 95 of Ruin
"Weird messages? Like threatening messages? Selene, what the hell?—"
"It's nothing. Probably spam. I'm just being cautious."
"Do you want me to talk to Dad? He can make some calls, get someone to look into it?—"
"No." Too fast. I hear the sharpness in my own voice and soften it. "No, it's fine. Really. I just wanted to hear your voice."
Silence.
The kind that means Emilia is thinking, turning something over, deciding whether to push or trust.
"You'd tell me if something was really wrong," she says. Not a question. A plea dressed up as a statement.
"Of course I would."
Another lie. They're getting easier. It should scare me more than it does.
After I hang up, I sit with the phone in my lap and stare at the wall that separates my room from his office and think about how many layers of deception a person can maintain before the weight of them collapses the thing they're trying to protect.
Vincent comes later that evening.
I'm in the kitchen making a salad I won't finish when the elevator opens and he walks in with a leather briefcase and the expression of a man carrying bad news.
Cassius emerges from his office, and for a moment the three of us stand in the open-plan living space like points on a triangle, each of us calculating the angles.
Vincent nods to me. "Selene."
"Vincent."
It's the most civil exchange we've ever had.
Something has shifted in the way he looks at me.
The wariness is still there, but underneath it, there's something that wasn't before.
Recognition, maybe. Or resignation. Like he's accepted that I'm a fixture in this equation and decided to stop arguing with the math.
We move to the dining table.
Vincent opens his briefcase and spreads documents like a dealer laying cards.
Photographs, financial reports, intercepted communications.
"Zhukov has taken two more businesses in the last week," he says. "The dry cleaning chain on Flatbush and the auto body shop on Atlantic. Both protection rackets we've run for fifteen years. He's offering the same coverage at half the price and backing it up with enough muscle that our people can't hold."
"Casualties?" Cassius asks.
"Two hospitalized. One dock worker found in the river off Red Hook. Message carved into his chest in Cyrillic." Vincent slides a photograph across the table and I see it before I can look away.
A man's torso, bloated and gray, with letters cut into the skin from sternum to navel.
I don't read Russian, but I don't need to.
The meaning is clear enough in any language.
"He's not just taking territory," I say. Both men look at me. I don't know when I decided to speak, but the words are already forming, the analytical machinery in my brain engaging despite every reason it should be offline. "He's making a statement. Half-price protection isn't a business model. It's a loss leader. He's buying loyalty now so he can raise the price later, once your infrastructure is gutted and there's no alternative."
Vincent's eyebrows rise a fraction.
