Page 44 of Ruin
Two fire trucks idle nearby, their crews packing up.
Demetri's body is gone.
Someone from our crew already collected him, leaving nothing but a dark stain on the asphalt that the firelight turns amber.
I steer Selene past it. She sees it anyway and studies it without flinching.
The spray paint is on the surviving section of the loading dock door.
Red letters, Cyrillic script, dripping like they were written in a hurry.
Or written to look like blood.
Selene stares at the words for a long time.
Her jaw is set. Her hands are still at her sides. "They know about me," she says.
"They know you exist. They don't know what you are."
"What I am is a vulnerability." She turns to face me. "That's what Vincent's been telling you. That's why you put Lionel on me. Not just for protection. To make sure I don't become the crack they can break you through."
I don't deny it. She's too smart to lie for her own comfort.
"You're not a vulnerability," I say. "You're a complication. There's a difference."
"The difference being?"
"Vulnerabilities get you killed. Complications make you adapt." I look at the ruined warehouse, at the message dripping on the door, at the smoke still curling up into the night sky. "They think you make me slow. They think I'm distracted. They're wrong."
"Are they?"
I look at her. "You restructured my laundering operation in a matter of hours. You identified security gaps my own people missed. You turned Marco Salieri into an ally in a single meeting. The Russians aren't attacking because you make meweak. They're attacking because you're making me stronger and they can see it."
She processes this.
"Then we use that," she says. "Let them think I'm the weakness. Let them keep targeting the things around me while I'm rebuilding the infrastructure underneath. By the time they realize what I've actually done, their leverage will be gone."
This.
This is why I sent her to Harvard.
This is why I waited a year. This is why I let her walk onto a dock in the middle of the night and argue with me in front of my men.
Because she doesn't just accept the violence of this world.
She absorbs it, processes it, and turns it into strategy.
She watches a warehouse burn and doesn't cry or panic or beg me to let her go back to her safe little life.
She stands in the smoke and starts planning.
"The customs contact," she says, already moving forward. "The one using a personal email. That's an easy entry point for the Russians if they're monitoring our communications. I want it changed by morning. New protocols, encrypted channels, rotating addresses."
"Done."
"And Santos. The missing guard. If they took him alive, they're interrogating him. What does he know?"
"Warehouse locations. Some transport routes. Nothing about the inner circle."
