Page 97 of Ruin
A few inches, enough that the light falls across the hallway in a narrow wedge, and through the gap I can see him at his desk.
Whiskey in hand.
Monitors glowing blue with surveillance feeds from the docks, the warehouses, the city that he watches the way other men watch television.
He's not wearing a suit.
Just a black T-shirt and dark pants, bare feet on the hardwood, and the informality of it does something to me that I resent deeply.
Cassius in a suit is armor.
Cassius in a T-shirt is a man, and the difference between those two things is the difference between hating him from a safe distance and wanting him from a dangerous one.
I push the door open and he looks up.
We stare at each other across the dark room.
His eyes move over me once—the shirt, my bare legs, the collar at my throat catching the blue light from the monitors—and his expression doesn't change but his hand tightens on the whiskey glass.
I cross the room. Slowly.
Each step is deliberate, each one a decision I'm making with full awareness of its weight.
I sit on the edge of his desk, facing him, knees together, arms crossed over my chest.
A barrier that we both know is temporary, and the knowing makes it worse.
"I'm not here because I forgive you," I say.
"I know."
"I'm here because I can't sleep and the guest room smells like nothing."
"And my room?"
"Smells like you." I look away. Fix my eyes on the surveillance feeds because they're easier to face than he is. "I hate that I know what you smell like."
He stands, moves toward me with that walk, that unhurried predator's stride that makes the space between us feel like it's shrinking faster than his feet are moving.
He stops when his thighs press against my knees, but doesn't otherwise touch me.
Just stands there, close enough that his body heat bleeds through the thin cotton of the stolen shirt.
"You could leave," he says. "I told Lionel to let you pass if you tried."
"Did you?"
"No." The honesty is blunt, unapologetic. "But I would have, if you'd actually gone for the door."
"So, I'm a prisoner who's allowed to think she's free."
"You're a woman who's stayed a few nights in a house with an unlocked guest room and a phone full of contacts who could get her out." His hand finds my knee. Just rests there. Warm through the bare skin. "That's not captivity, Selene. That's a choice. A choice I’ve given you."
I uncross my arms.
It’s not an invitation.
Instead, a lowering of defenses that I'm too tired to maintain and too honest to pretend I want to.
