Page 106 of Ruin
Selene listens with the focus I've seen her apply to legal documents, to case files, to the evidence wall that she built in her apartment to map my sins.
She asks questions—mostly about the money. Where it's flowing, through what entities, who's signing off on the corporate filings. The operational stuff she listens to without interrupting, absorbing it, but when Marco slides her a financialsummary she reads it in under a minute, her eyes moving across the columns with a speed that makes him blink. That's her territory, and she knows it.
Then the phone rings.
Not my phone. Theotherone.
The encrypted burner I carry in my inside pocket, the one that routes through six proxy servers and exists for communications that can't be traced.
The number has been given to fewer than ten people, and half of them are in this room.
The one I reserve for communications that don't go through Vincent, don't go through the organization, don't route through any system my people touch.
A direct line that only exists for the kind of conversations I don't want recorded, even by my own team.
The last time it rang, someone was trying to sell me information about a federal investigation.
I bought it and the investigation disappeared.
The room freezes. I pull the phone from my jacket.
The screen shows an incoming video feed, source masked, routing through a chain of international servers that my tech team will spend hours trying to unravel.
I accept the feed and set the phone on the table, screen facing up, so the room can see what I'm seeing.
The screen fills with a room.
Concrete walls. Exposed pipes. Industrial lighting that casts everything in a harsh, flat white.
And in the center of the frame, bound to a metal chair with zip ties cutting into her wrists, is a woman I recognize from surveillance photographs.
Emilia Hart.
Her blonde bob is matted with blood on the left side, plastered to her cheek.
One eye is swollen nearly shut.
Her lips are cracked and there's a cut above her eyebrow that's been bleeding long enough to stain the collar of the blue blouse she was wearing when they took her.
She's shaking. Not the adrenaline tremor of someone fighting back, but the deep, bone-level shaking of someone who has been terrified for a long time and has run out of energy to hide it.
Behind me, I hear Selene's chair scrape against the concrete floor.
A figure moves into the frame.
Masked, gloved, shoulders that suggest military training.
When he speaks, the accent is thick and unhurried.
A man with no reason to rush.
"Mr. Wolfe. I bring greetings from Kirill Zhukov." He places a hand on Emilia's shoulder. She flinches so violently the chair rocks. "You know this woman, yes? Friend of your Selene. Daughter of Judge Hart, who was so helpful to your father once upon a time."
The camera pans left.
Slowly, deliberately, making sure we see everything.
Taped to the wall behind Emilia, arranged in a neat grid like photographs in a gallery, are surveillance images.
