Page 52 of Nash
Ruby
Ilastforty-sevenhoursbefore I go back to the basement.
Forty-seven hours of telling myself it was pipes. Old buildings make sounds. Maybe furniture shifting on an uneven floor. Maybe a stray cat that got in through a vent. Forty-seven hours of rational explanations stacked in a neat row, each one capped and labeled, each one completely full of shit.
Because pipes don't breathe. Cats don't drag furniture across concrete with weight.
It's Friday. Two days since the hallway.
Two days since Nash kissed me against a wall, lifted me off the ground, pressed the full length of his cock against me throughhis jeans, and told me he'd decide when I was ready. Since I almost came without him touching me below the waist. Two days since "yes sir" left my mouth stripped of every joke I've ever hidden behind, and he watched me walk to my room with eyes that made my skin burn.
Two days, and he hasn't touched me since.
He makes my coffee in the morning. Gives me rides to Amaranth. He takes the wall. Watches. But the knee taps are gone. The lingering glances in the mirror are gone. The heat that built between us all week has been replaced by something careful, measured, controlled. Nash is behind the wall again, and this time the wall is thicker.
I keep catching him looking at me. Not the steady hold from before. Quick glances that cut off the second I turn my head. His jaw tight. His posture locked. The distance is deliberate, and that's what makes it worse because it means he's choosing it.
He regrets the kiss.The thought lands in my chest and stays there, heavy. Cold.
Nash drops me at Amaranth at nine and rides to the clubhouse for a war room session. He'll be back by noon. The shop doesn't normally open until noon, but Frankie booked an early client today. Some custom piece she's been designing for weeks. She'll be at her station by ten, focused and occupied.
Which means I have a window. And I need one, because if I sit at my station thinking about Nash's mouth on my throat for one more hour I'm going to lose my mind.
At ten-fifteen, Frankie's machine is buzzing. I wait four minutes.
"Running to grab more transfer paper," I call over my shoulder. "Back in ten."
She nods without looking up. I push through the front door, walk around the side of the building to the stairwell entrance, and stand at the top of the stairs.
The basement door is one flight down. Closed. With the same padlock Frankie keeps on it. I walk down. Pull a bobby pin out of my hair. Bend it. Work the shackle.
Twenty-two seconds later, the padlock clicks open.
The basement is dim. There's a single lamp on a table against the far wall. The space is larger than I expected with brick walls and a concrete floor. There's also a bed against the left wall with actual sheets and a hand-stitched quilt. A small bookshelf that's full and a mini fridge humming in the corner.
In the center of the room, sitting in an old leather armchair with his legs crossed and a ham sandwich in one hand, is a man.
He's pale. Genuinely, structurally pale, the kind that suggests sunlight is a concept he's familiar with in theory. Dark hair, an angular face, and sharp features currently arranged into an expression of total, frozen alarm. He's holding the ham sandwich the way you'd hold a grenade.
We stare at each other.
I know his face. Every member of the club has a photo somewhere, a story attached, a name spoken with weight. Leo. The one who didn't make it out of the Holloway building. The one Frankie doesn't talk about. Whose absence sits in every room she enters like a chair no one moves.
He's alive. In Frankie's basement. Eating a ham sandwich.
"So," I say. "You're the breathing."
He blinks. Sets the sandwich down with the precise care of a man calculating exits and finding none.
"Ruby." He says my name like a man seeing a ghost, except he's the ghost. His eyes are wide. Panicked. "You're not supposed to be down here."
"And you're supposed to be dead." My voice comes out steadier than my hands. "You died at the Holloway building. There was a funeral. People grieved."
The stray. Frankie meeting Arden this morning to pick up supplies. The padlock she checks every night before she goes upstairs. Eleven months of Frankie carrying something heavy behind those dark eyes, and I thought it was grief.
It wasn't grief. It was him.
"Frankie knows," I say. It lands flat. Obvious. "She's been hiding you."
