Page 18 of Ruin
"Say it."
"I'm yours."
"Again."
"I'm yours.God, I'm yours."
The words dissolve into sounds.
I drive into her with a rhythm that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with the twelve months I spent staring at photos and pretending I wasn't counting the days until I could do this again.
She comes with her hands bound, face pressed against my desk, my name the only coherent word left in her mouth.
I feel her clench around me, feel the tremors run through her body, and the sight of her wrecked, restrained, wearing my collar over my desk in the heart of my empire, breaks me.
I pull out at the last second and finish on the small of her back. Marking her where the welts from my belt will bloom red by morning.
Territorial. Deliberate. Mine.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
We’re just breathing.
The office smells like sex and spilled whiskey and leather.
I unbuckle the belt, rub her wrists where the leather pressed grooves into her skin.
She stays bent over the desk for another beat, catching her breath.
Then she stands, smooths her dress down, and turns to face me with smudged lipstick and wrecked hair and an expression that shows me she’s satisfied and defiant.
"So," she says. "About those shell companies."
I smile. Genuinely. Maybe for the first time in a year.
She's perfect.
Later,while she showers, I call Vincent.
"The girl," he says. It's not a question.
"She handled the Gerald Fink situation."
Pause. "How?"
"Restructured his debt. Kept him alive, kept him useful, kept him terrified. In under two minutes."
A longer pause. I can hear Vincent recalibrating behind the silence. "That's...not what I expected."
"No." I look at the scratches on my desk where the whiskey glass dragged across the finish. At the belt still draped over the chair. At the scattered papers on the floor. "She's not what I expected."
"Cassius." His voice carries the weight of thirty years as my father's consigliere and mine. "If you're thinking of integrating her?—"
"I'm not thinking about it. I'm doing it."
"The Russians won't see her as an asset. They'll see her as a target."
"Then they'll learn the same thing I'm learning." I pick up the belt. Run the leather through my fingers. "She's not a target. She's a weapon."
