Page 122 of Ruin
She'll get better at this if she stays in my world long enough, and I hate that I'm already thinking about that.
She has to try twice before the knife goes back in the sheath because she can't line up the blade with the opening.
She stands and her legs don't cooperate at first.
She has to put a hand against the wall to steady herself, and she leaves a bloody handprint on the concrete that looks like something from a crime scene, because that's exactly what it is.
Her face closes like a door. Whatever she was feeling, whatever was breaking open behind her eyes, she packs it away with a speed that scares me more than the kill itself.
She turns, walks back to Emilia, who is pressed against the wall with her hands over her mouth and her eyes wide with a new kind of horror—watching her best friend kill someone in front of her.
"Can you walk?" Selene asks. Her voice is almost steady. There's a crack running through it that she's holding together with nothing but willpower, and if you didn't know her, if you hadn't spent years learning every frequency of her voice, you might not hear it.
But I hear it, and Emilia hears it too.
Emilia doesn't answer. She stares at Selene's hands.
At the blood that's drying on her fingers, darkening under her nails, staining the cuffs of her sleeves.
At the knife that's back in its sheath on her thigh, smeared and wet.
"Em." Selene's voice softens. Just at the edges, just enough to sound like the girl Emilia knows instead of the woman who just killed a man in a basement corridor. "Please. We have to move."
Emilia takes her hand. The bloody one.
She takes it and holds it and I watch her fingers close around Selene's red-stained palm with a tenderness that breaks something in me I didn't know was still intact.
"Okay," Emilia whispers. "Okay."
We move.
Getting out of here is a fucking mess.
The gunshots in the hall brought the perimeter guards down the stairwell, which means our planned exit through the service tunnel is no longer clean.
Lionel leads us to a side door that opens onto an alley on the building's north face, and the night air hits us like cold water after the stale, iron-smelling basement.
Peter and Paul have the vehicles staged a block east.
Two black SUVs, engines running, headlights off. The twins are in the first vehicle. Our car is the second.
We cross the alley at record speed.
Lionel has Emilia's other arm over his shoulder, taking most of her weight while Selene steadies her from the right side.
Emilia's legs keep buckling beneath her and between the two of them they're half-carrying, half-dragging her toward the vehicles.
I cover their backs, gun up, scanning the alley and the fire escapes above us and the dark windows of the buildings on either side for the shape of a rifle or the glint of a scope.
A man rounds the corner ahead of us. Russian. Armed.
He sees us and hesitates, just for a fraction of a moment, the fraction that separates the men who survive from the ones who don't.
Lionel doesn't hesitate. The man goes down and we step over him and keep moving.
We reach the SUV.
Lionel opens the rear door and Selene lifts Emilia inside, gentle, so gentle, easing her onto the seat the way you'd lay down something precious and fragile.
