Page 62 of Ruin
Did he consider what would happen to his sixteen-year-old daughter when the monster finally came calling?
With trembling fingers, I flip through more pages.
Bank records showing massive amounts of money flowing through Wolfe-controlled businesses.
Photographs taken with long-range lenses of meetings in dark alleys, handshakes between criminals and city officials.
Witness statements from people too scared to testify but brave enough to speak off the record.
And there, paper-clipped to a surveillance report with a red "PRIORITY" stamp, is a photograph that makes my blood freeze.
It's grainy, taken at night with what must have been a powerful telephoto lens, but unmistakable.
A tall figure in expensive clothes entering the back door of what the report identifies as Judge Romano's residence.
The timestamp shows February 3rd—eleven years ago, just hours before Judge Romano was found dead in his study.
But now that I know what to look for, I can see him clearly.
The height, the build, the predatory way he moves through the darkness.
It's Cassius. Unmistakably, undeniably Cassius.
My father had been building a pattern.
Judge Romano. Judge Kowalski, and then it would have been him.
This photo proves that my parents' murder wasn't an isolated incident—it was part of an elimination of judges who wouldn't cooperate with the Wolfe family business.
The notation at the bottom of the surveillance report, written in the detective's careful script, confirms what I already know:
Suspect observed entering via rear access at 11:23 p.m. Judge Romano's body discovered the following morning. No signs of forced entry.
He had a key, or knew how to get in.
Just like he probably knew exactly how to get into our house.
I sink onto my couch, staring at the photograph until the edges blur with tears I refuse to shed.
All this time, I thought the masked figure from my nightmares was some faceless monster, a boogeyman created by trauma and fear.
But he was real.
He had a name, a face, a life.
A body I've worshipped with my mouth and hands and desperate need.
The memories flood back now that I've stopped fighting them.
Details I'd repressed, pushed down into the dark corners of my mind where they couldn't hurt me anymore.
The killer's height—I remembered looking up at him from my hiding spot in the panic room, how he seemed to fill the doorway like some dark angel of death.
His build—lean but powerful, moving with the deadly grace of a predator who's never encountered anything he couldn't kill.
Exactly like Cassius moves through Hell, through his empire, through my body with that same lethal confidence.
His presence—even through the security cameras, I could feel the violence radiating from him like heat from a forge.
