Page 94 of Ruin
He shows me to a guest room on the opposite end of the hall from the master.
King bed, en suite bathroom, walk-in closet already stocked with clothes in my size.
Not my clothes from the apartment. New ones. Tags still on. He's been planning this.
Maybe not consciously, maybe not with a date in mind, but somewhere in the architecture of his control, there was always a room for me with clothes on the hangers and towels in the bathroom and a door I could close.
"This is yours," he says from the doorway. "The lock works from the inside. Only you have the key."
"How generous. A cage with a lock I control."
"A room, Selene. In a building where no one can get to you."
"Except you."
"Except me." He doesn't flinch from that truth. Doesn't dress it up or soften the edges. "Lionel is outside the front door. Peter and Paul rotate twelve-hour shifts. You have access to everything in this apartment, including the office, the kitchen, and the elevator. The only thing I'm asking is that you don't leave without security."
"Asking. Not telling?"
The pause before he answers is a fraction too long. "Asking."
I step into the room and close the door in his face.
Then I stand with my back against it and listen to him breathe on the other side for ten seconds before his footsteps retreat down the hall.
The room is beautiful. The bed is soft. The view is stunning.
Yet, I have never felt more trapped in my life.
It’s beenfive days in the penthouse, and the tension is a living thing.
We orbit each other like objects caught in a field neither of us controls.
He leaves for work before I wake and returns after dark, and the evidence of his day is in the lines around his eyes and the way he pours his whiskey—two fingers when things are normal, three when they're not.
It's been three fingers every night.
I hear him pacing in the middle of the night.
The rhythm of his footsteps is something I know the way I know my own heartbeat, and lying in the dark, listening to him walk the length of the hallway, is its own form of torture.
I stand in the dark with my hand flat against the drywall and feel the vibration of his footsteps through the wall and hate myself for leaning into it.
His cologne lingers in every room.
The office, the kitchen, the hallway outside my door. I can't escape it.
I shower and the steam carries it.
I make coffee and the warmth of the mug smells like him.
I sit on the guest bed in the dark and the pillows smell like the laundry detergent he uses, and even that, even something that mundane and domestic, makes my chest tight.
I call Emilia on the sixth day, sit cross-legged on the guest bed with the door locked and my voice pitched to casual. "Hey, Em. Just checking in."
"Sel! Where have you been? I texted you like four times."
"Sorry. I've been staying with a friend for a few days. Got some weird messages, figured I'd lay low somewhere with better security." The lie comes out smooth. Practiced. I stare at the ceiling and deliver it like lines in a play I've rehearsed too many times.
