Page 133 of Ruin
She disappears into the crowd, and I stand in the hallway of my club and think about the fact that three women—Selene, Natalia, and a female doctor whose name I can't remember off the top of my head—have done more to reshape my understanding of power in the last two weeks than thirty years of men with guns.
Marco is the last holdout. He comes to me with spreadsheets and projections and the irritation of a man whose territory has been encroached upon by someone who does his job better than he does.
"The Zhukov restructuring plan," he says, dropping a folder on my desk. "It's good. Annoyingly good. I found two minor errors in the tax projections, which I corrected, and the rest is..." He sighs. "The rest is better than anything I would have built."
"And?"
"And I'm telling you she's earned her seat. Not because you put her there. Because the work speaks for itself." He picks up the folder. "Don't tell her I said that."
"I won't."
"I mean it. She already looks at me like she knows she's smarter than me. I don't need to confirm it."
Selene checks her phone once,late in the evening, while we're reviewing the final territorial integration documents.
I see her screen from across the table. No new messages. No missed calls. The name she's looking for isn't there.
She puts the phone face-down on the table and goes back to work, doesn't mention it, doesn't pause. But there's a stillness in her shoulders for the next few minutes that tells me everything her face doesn't.
Emilia hasn't called and hasn't texted.
The silence has been going on since the brownstone in Carroll Gardens, and it will probably remain, and the woman sitting across from me is carrying that loss the way she carries everything—silently, completely, in a place she doesn't let anyone see.
I have people watching Emilia. Not closely, not invasively. Just enough to know she's safe. She's back with her father. She's seeing a therapist. She even went back to work a couple days ago.
She's alive and healing and she hasn't spoken Selene's name to anyone, as far as my people can tell.
I don't tell Selene any of this. She hasn't asked, which means she either doesn't want to know or can't bear to.
Either way, the information is mine to hold until she's ready for it.
The rest of the week passes in the rhythm of rebuilding.
Meetings. Documents.
The steady, unglamorous work of absorbing new territory into existing systems without attracting the kind of attention that generates federal interest.
Selene is at the center of most of it, her laptop open at my dining table from seven in the morning until well past midnight, coffee cups accumulating around her like a barricade.
We fall into something that looks, from the outside, almost ordinary.
She works. I work. We eat dinner together at the kitchen island—takeout, mostly, because neither of us cooks and the idea of sitting down at Cavallo surrounded by people feels like too much right now.
She steals my whiskey every night and I pretend not to notice.
She falls asleep on the couch with documents on her lap and I carry her to bed, and she curls against me without waking,and the domesticity of it is so far from where we started that some nights I lie awake trying to reconcile the woman breathing against my chest with the girl who held a gun to it.
By Friday, the work is mostly done.
The territory is integrated. The finances are clean. The organization is running smoother than it has in years, and the woman responsible for most of that is standing in my bedroom in a towel asking me what we're doing tonight.
Purgatory is packed.The bass shakes the walls and the members all have shit-eating grins.
It's a good night. A profitable night. The kind of night that used to be enough.
Selene walks in beside me, and enough stops being the word that applies.
She's wearing black. A dress that fits like it was sewn onto her body, cut low enough to show the collar in full, high enough on the thigh that every step gives the room a glimpse of what's underneath.
