Page 103 of Ruin
Navy tie. Silver cufflinks.
The uniform of a man who built an empire on the principle that appearance is the first weapon you deploy.
In the kitchen, I make her coffee before I leave.
Set it on the nightstand beside her with the cream already added because I know she takes it light, have known since the second week, and the domesticity of the gesture sits strangely against the backdrop of everything else.
A killer making coffee for the woman he orphaned.
There's probably a word for that in a language I don't speak.
The elevator takes me down to the garage and Lionel is already waiting with the car.
"How is she?" he asks. Not personal curiosity. His typical operational assessment.
Lionel has been with me for twelve years and he's never once confused the two.
"Sleeping."
"Peter's on until six. Paul takes over after."
"If she asks to leave, she goes with a full detail. Two cars. Armed."
"And if she doesn't ask?"
I look at him in the rearview. "Then she stays, and no one bothers her."
The city scrolls past the tinted windows.
Morning traffic, delivery trucks, the ordinary machinery of a world that doesn't know or care that a war is building beneath its streets.
I check my phone.
Three messages from Vincent, each one more urgent than the last.
An encrypted file from Marco tagged with a red flag I haven't seen him use in four years.
And a notification from the surveillance system that the bedroom camera activated a few moments ago.
She's awake.
Sitting up in my bed, holding the coffee I made, staring at the space where I was lying an hour ago.
She touches the sheets where my body left warmth.
Just her fingertips, pressing into the fabric, and the gesture is so small and so private that watching it feels like trespassing on something more intimate than anything we did last night.
I close the app. Some things aren't meant to be watched, even by me.
The thought surprises me.
I've watched this woman sleep, eat, cry, undress.
I've watched her build an evidence wall that maps every sin I've committed and I didn't look away.
But her fingertips on the warm sheets where I slept—that's the thing that makes me close the app.
Fuck, I’m insane.
