Page 35 of Ruin
"I used to wear one of those," she says. Quiet. Almost casual, except for the stillness in her body that tells me it's anything but. "Different man. Different city. Didn't have diamonds."
The air between us changes. I don't push. Don't ask. Just hold her gaze and let the silence carry what words would ruin.
"His didn't have a lock," she adds. "Didn't need one. I was too scared to take it off." She picks up her glass, finishes the last of the whiskey. "Yours has a lock?"
"Yes."
"But you're still here."
"I'm still here."
She nods and sets the glass down.
Whatever door she opened, she closes it now—gently, deliberately, the way someone closes a door they'll open again when they're ready.
"Thursday," she says. "Same time. I'll bring the Clement files."
"I'll be here."
She walks back into the crowd and disappears, and I stand at the elevator with whiskey on my tongue imagining the struggles she's been through.
She didn't tell me the story. Then again, she didn't need to. The shape of it was in her eyes, in the scar tissue of a woman who survived something that should have killed her and built a life on the other side of it.
Someone who sees what I am, and more importantly someone who understands it.
I head back downstairs to check on Cassius and notice the men are still in the room.
At the sight of me, the room empties.
Candles burn low. The table is littered with glasses and folders and the debris of a power structure being quietly reorganized.
Cassius hasn't moved from his chair, and I head back over to mine and take a seat.
The twins close the doors on their way out. The lock clicks. The soundproofing swallows the noise from the corridor, and suddenly it's just us and candlelight and the afterglow of something that felt like war and victory at the same time.
"Well?" I say.
He looks at me. The look is different from the one he gave me in his penthouse office, different from the one in the car, different from the one over Gerald Fink's trembling body.
This one has heat in it.Realheat. The kind that starts in the eyes and burns downward.
"Come here," he says.
I don't move. "Ask nicely."
The corner of his mouth twitches. "That wasn't a request."
"Everything's a request when I'm wearing this dress."
He stands, slowly, unbuttons his jacket and drapes it over the chair.
He walks toward me with the unhurried confidence of a man who knows exactly what's about to happen and isn't in any rush to get there.
I stand to meet him.
The slit of the dress falls open.
His eyes track the line of my thigh, and his hand follows a second later.
