Page 137 of Ruin
"That's the closest thing to a love letter Marco has ever written."
She laughs. Quiet, real, the laugh of a woman who has not had much to laugh about lately and is allowing herself this small one because she earned it.
"Emilia hasn't called," she says. The laugh is gone. The sentence sits between us, flat and heavy.
"I know."
"I check my phone every hour. Like a reflex. I don't even realize I'm doing it until the screen is already in my hand and the notification bar is empty."
I don't tell her about the fact my men are watching over Emilia. Don't tell her Emilia is seeing a therapist, or that she went back to work, or that she's safe. That information belongs to a different conversation, on a different night, when Selene is ready to hear it.
"She might come back," I say instead. "Not soon. Maybe not for a long time. But people who love each other the way you two do don't stay apart forever."
"You sound like someone who believes in happy endings."
"I believe in you. Wouldn't you say that's close enough?"
She presses her lips to my chest. Right over my heart. The gesture is small and fierce and I feel it in places I didn't know I had left.
We lie in the dark of Hell, in the room where the glass has gone opaque and the audience has moved on and the only witness left is the silence between two people who have shown each other everything and are still here.
She's not my creation. She's not my possession. She's not even my weakness anymore.
She's my equal. My partner. My queen.
And God help anyone who tries to take her from me again.
20
SELENE
The dream is always the same.
The corridor in the factory. Fluorescent lights buzzing. The smell of concrete and iron and something chemical I can't name.
I'm running, but the hallway stretches longer with every step, the doors multiplying, the walls narrowing, and I can hear Emilia screaming my name from behind a door I can't find.
I open every one. Every door leads to the same room—concrete walls, exposed pipes, a metal chair bolted to the floor.
Empty. The chair is always empty, and the screaming keeps going, and I keep running, and the blood on my hands is wet and fresh and dripping onto the floor in a trail behind me that I can't stop and can't outrun.
Then I find her. The last door. She's in the chair, but she's not bound.
She's sitting there freely, looking at me with those blue eyes that aren't swollen or bruised or scared.
They're clear. And sad. And she says the same thing every time, in a voice that's calm and steady and worse than any scream.
"I don't know who you are anymore."
I wake up with my heart in my throat and my hands gripping the sheets hard enough that my knuckles ache.
The bedroom is dark.
The city glows through the windows, and the clock on the nightstand reads 2:17 a.m. Cassius is beside me. Not asleep—I can tell by the quality of his stillness.
The difference between his sleeping silence and his waking silence is something I've learned to read the way I read everything about him now, in the small details that most people would miss.
He doesn't ask what I dreamed. He already knows.
