Page 125 of Ruin
The shirt underneath is black enough to hide what's on it, and I roll the cuffs up past my wrists so the stains don't show.
The hallway is quiet. Dr. Tate's door opens and she steps out, closing it gently behind her.
"How is she?" I ask.
"Dehydrated. At least two cracked ribs, heavy bruising on the face and torso, abrasions on both wrists from the restraints. No signs of sexual assault." She says the last part watching my face, and I realize she was waiting to deliver that specific piece of information and watching to see if I needed it. I did.
The breath I release feels like the first full one I've taken in hours.
"She's asking for you," Dr. Tate says. Then she pauses. Folds her hands in front of her. Chooses her words the way a surgeon chooses an incision point. "She's also scared. Not of what happened to her. She's scared of you, Selene. Whatever she sawtonight, it's sitting on top of her right now, and she's trying to reconcile it with the person she's asking for. Be careful with her."
I nod. I can't speak. If I open my mouth, the thing that comes out won't be words.
Dr. Tate squeezes my arm once. Brief, professional, kind. Then she walks down the hall to the kitchen, and I hear her putting on a kettle, and the normality of the sound almost breaks me.
I push open Emilia's door.
She's propped against the headboard with pillows behind her back and a glass of water on the nightstand.
Someone found her clean clothes—a sweatshirt and loose pants, soft things, the sort of clothes you wear when your body has been hurt and you need the fabric to be gentle.
Her face is worse under the bedroom light.
Both eyes blackened, the cut above her brow held together with thin white strips.
The bruise on her jaw has spread since the factory, purple blooming into yellow at the edges.
She looks small in the too-big sweatshirt. Small and broken and so far from the girl in the sundress at the mimosa brunch that the distance between those two versions of her feels like a physical gap I could fall into.
"Hey," I say from the doorway.
"Hey." Her voice is hoarse. Scraped raw from crying, or screaming, or both.
I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. Close, but not touching. Giving her the space to decide how near she wants me.
She decides, reaches for my hand, takes it, holds it, laces her fingers through mine, and the contact sends a crack through something I've been holding together all night.
Her hand is cold and small and her grip is weak, and I hold on carefully, aware of the bandages on her wrists, aware of thebruises I can't see, aware of the shadow under my fingernail where a dead man's blood is still lodged.
"You came," she whispers.
"Of course I came."
"I kept telling myself. Every time they—" She swallows. Closes her swollen eyes. "Every time it got bad, I said Selene is coming. Selene will find me. She won't let this happen to me."
"I found you."
"I know." She opens her eyes. Looks at me. And there it is—the thing Dr. Tate warned me about. The fear. Not the residual terror of captivity. Something different, something that's pointed at me, and the shape of it is the shape of the questions she hasn't asked yet.
We sit in silence for a long time.
We hold hands in the quiet, yet we've never been this far apart while sitting this close.
"The men who took me," she says. Not looking at me now. Looking at our joined hands. "They talked. A lot. The first day they mostly just... did what they did. But after that, when they were bored, they talked."
I don't say anything. The cold in my stomach is spreading upward.
"They said you were with a man named Cassius Wolfe. That he runs a criminal organization. That he owns territories and businesses and people." She pauses. "They said he killed your parents, Sel."
