Page 73 of Ruin
"Shut up."
"The girl hiding in that panic room didn't just witness murder. She witnessed absolute power. The power of life and death, of control over other people's fates. And some buried part of her wanted that power for herself."
"Shut the fuck up."
"That's why you came to Purgatory. Not just because you were broken, but because you were hungry. Hungry for the darkness you'd tasted that night. Hungry to feel what it was like to have that kind of control."
"SHUT UP!"
She raises the gun again, both hands wrapped around the grip, tears streaming down her face.
The barrel is aimed directly at my heart now, finger on the trigger.
"You don't get to psychoanalyze me!" she screams. "You don't get to explain why I am the way I am! You made me this way!"
"I revealed what was already there."
"You destroyed everything good in me!"
"Ifreedeverything real in you."
"There's nothing real about this! Nothing real about us! Everything was a lie!"
"Not everything." I lean forward, ignoring the gun. "The way you felt when I touched you—that was real. The way you responded to pain, to pleasure, to power—that was real. The way you looked at me like I was salvation and damnation combined—that was the realest thing I've ever experienced."
"It was all based on lies!"
"It was based on truth. The truth of who you really are, underneath all the therapy and grief and desperate attempts to be normal."
"I was normal before you destroyed my family!"
"You were broken before I ever touched you. I just helped you accept it."
We stare at each other across three feet of space that might as well be an ocean. She's everything I made her—beautiful and terrible and perfect in her destruction. And she's holding a gun on me while wearing my collar, the contradiction of our entire relationship distilled into one impossible image.
The silence stretches between us, heavy with years of manipulation and months of genuine feeling.
She's struggling with something, some internal war I can see playing out across her features.
"Tell me about the year I was gone," she says finally. "Tell me you weren't watching then, too."
Fuck. I should lie.
Should tell her that year was her own, that she was free from my influence.
But I'm tired of lies, tired of carefully constructed deceptions.
"I watched."
Her face crumples. "Everything?"
"Every day. Every decision. Every man you almost slept with but couldn't because he wasn't dangerous enough."
"You had me followed."
"I had you protected. Do you know how many men tried to hurt you that year? How many attempted assaults, muggings, harassment situations that never escalated because my people were watching?"
"How many?"
