Page 121 of Ruin
The blade catches him in the side of the neck.
Not where she was aiming—she was aiming for his chest, the biggest target, the thing directly in front of her—but he was turning away from her, flinching from the unexpected sight of a woman running at him instead of runningfromhim, and the knife found the soft gap between his jaw and his collar where the skin is thin and everything important is close to the surface.
It goes in deep. Deeper than she intended, pulled by momentum and body weight and the fact that she didn't know to stop the thrust once the blade made contact.
She crashes into him and they both stagger, his legs buckling, her weight carrying them forward, and then he's falling and she's falling with him because her hands are locked on the knife handle and she doesn't know to let go.
They hit the concrete together. He lands on his back.
She lands on top of him, on her knees, hands still wrapped around the knife that's buried in the side of his neck, and the blood comes immediately.
Not a trickle.
A rush, dark and hot, pulsing out around the blade and over her fingers and down her wrists and pooling on the concrete beneath them both.
The corridor goes quiet.
Lionel finishes the first man. I don't see how. I'm too busy watching Selene.
She's kneeling on a dead man's chest with her hands still wrapped around the handle of the blade.
Her fingers are red to the wrist.
The blood is spreading in a dark, uneven circle beneath them, soaking into the knees of her tactical pants, and she's looking down at what she's done with an expression I will carry with me until I stop breathing.
Not horror exactly. Not shock, not in the clinical sense. Something rawer than either of those.
The look of a person meeting a version of themselves they didn't know existed until thirty seconds ago.
She's staring at her hands, at the blood, at the man beneath her who was alive and is now dead because she ran at him with a knife, a scream stuck in her throat, and no plan beyond making him stop pointing his gun at Emilia.
Her mouth is open. Not screaming. Not speaking. Just open, like the air she's breathing isn't reaching her lungs properly.
Her whole body is trembling—not the fine, controlled tremor of adrenaline burning off, but a deep shaking that starts in her shoulders and moves down through her arms into the hands that are still gripping the knife because her fingers have locked and she doesn't know how to tell them to release.
I want to go to her. I want to kneel in the blood beside her and pry her fingers off the handle and take her face in my hands, tell her that it gets easier, that the first one is the worst, that the weight of it will settle into something she can carry.
But all of that would be a lie, because it doesn't get easier.
You just get better at pretending it doesn't matter.
Five seconds. She stares at her hands for five seconds. I count them because counting is the only thing I can do from this distance.
Then something shifts in her face.
I watch it happen.
The shaking doesn't stop, but something behind her eyes hardens, or closes, or goes to a place where the shaking can't reach.
She looks at the man beneath her, looks at the blood on her hands, looks at the knife.
She pulls the blade out.
The sound it makes is wet and wrong, and she flinches at it.
A full-body flinch that tells me she's feeling every second of this even as she forces herself to move through it.
She wipes the blade on her pants with hands that won't stop trembling.
