Page 126 of Ruin
The room tilts. Not dramatically, not the way it does in movies when someone gets bad news. Just a small, quiet shift, the world adjusting itself around a truth that's been spoken aloud by someone who shouldn't have it.
"They said he murdered Judge Deveraux and his wife, and then he spent years grooming their daughter to be his...they used a word I don't want to repeat." Her voice is shaking now.Not with anger. With the effort of holding herself together while the thing she's saying takes her apart. "And then I watched you come through that door in body armor with a knife on your leg, and I looked at that necklace you always wear and I finally understood what it was, and you were so calm, Sel. You were so calm in that room with those dead men on the floor, like it was...normal for you."
"Em—"
"And then the hallway." Her eyes find mine, and what's in them is worse than anything the Russians did to her face. "You killed that man. I watched you do it. I was three feet away and I saw your face when you...and you didn't hesitate. You didn't even think about it. You just..."
She can't finish. Her hand is trembling in mine, and I realize she's not gripping me anymore.
She's enduring the contact. Letting me hold her hand because some part of her still loves me enough to allow it, even though the rest of her is screaming to pull away.
"Is it true?" she asks. "About your parents?"
I could lie. I've been lying to her for so long that one more would slide out without friction, would settle into the space between us like all the others, invisible and load-bearing and slowly rotting the foundation of everything we are.
I don't lie.
"Yes."
The sound she makes is small. Not a sob, not a gasp. Just a small, hurt sound, like someone pressing on a bruise to see if it's real.
"And you're with him."
"Yes."
"You're with the man who killed your parents."
"Yes."
"Selene." She pulls her hand free. Not fast, not angry. Slow and deliberate, the way you'd set down something fragile you've decided you can't carry anymore. "How long?"
I tell her. Not everything—not Hell, not the details of what happens behind closed doors, not the specifics of what I've done or what he's done to me. But enough. The organization. My role in it. Harvard. How long it's been. The return.
She listens. Her swollen face is very still, the way faces get when the person behind them is processing something that doesn't fit inside any framework they have for understanding the world.
"I held your hand at your parents' funeral," she says when I'm finished. Her voice has gone quiet. Not angry quiet. Broken quiet. "I sat next to you in that church and I held your hand and I felt your whole body shaking and I thought, I will never let anything hurt this girl again. I will protect her for the rest of my life."
"Em, please?—"
"My dad took you in. He gave you a bedroom and a seat at our table, and he treated you like you were his. He cried the night you got your acceptance letter, did you know that? He sat in his study and cried because he was so proud of you. And now you're..." She gestures at me. At the black clothes. At the collar. At my hands, scrubbed raw and still not clean. "This. You're this."
"I know what I am."
"Do you? Because the Selene I know, the one I grew up with, the one who wanted to be a prosecutor so she could put people like your boyfriend in prison...that Selene would be horrified."
"That Selene is gone."
"No, she's not." Emilia's eyes are streaming now, tears tracking through the bruises on her face, and she doesn't wipe them away. "She's in there. I can see her. She's in there rightnow, looking out at me through your eyes, and she's screaming, Sel. The girl I love is screaming, and you won't let her out."
The words hit me in a place I didn't know was still exposed.
Below the armor, below the collar, below the woman who walked into a factory tonight and did what needed to be done.
They hit the girl who slept in Emilia's guest room and wore an ugly purple friendship bracelet and thought that if she could just be good enough, work hard enough, build a life clean enough, the grief might eventually become something she could carry instead of something that carried her.
That girl isn't gone. Emilia's right.
She's in here, somewhere behind my sternum, and she's screaming.
