Page 127 of Ruin
"What do you want me to say?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. "That I'll leave him? That I'll walk away and go back to law school and pretend none of this happened? I can't, Em. It's not that simple."
"It is that simple. You get up, you walk out, you call the FBI. You tell them everything. You save yourself."
"Save myself from what? He is my life. This is my life. I didn't choose it, but I?—"
"Youdidchoose it." The words come out sharp. The first real anger she's shown, cutting through the grief like a blade. "You chose it every single day you didn't leave. You chose it when you put on that thing around your neck. You chose it tonight when you picked up a knife instead of a phone. Don't tell me you didn't have a choice, Selene. You had a hundred choices, and you chose him every time."
The silence after that is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
She's right. She's right, and I know she's right, and the knowing doesn't change anything because the choice is already made.
It was made before tonight, before the factory, before the knife, before the blood.
It was made in the dark of his office with his mouth between my legs and his collar on my throat and the quiet, devastating recognition that I am exactly where I want to be.
"I can't be in your life anymore," Emilia says. The anger is gone, already spent. What's left is exhaustion and grief and a love that's tearing itself apart because it doesn't know how to exist alongside what I've become. "I love you, Sel. I will always love you. You're my sister, and nothing changes that. But I can't watch you become this. I can't sit across from you at brunch knowing what I know now and pretend that the woman drinking mimosas with me didn't kill someone with her bare hands."
"Em—"
"And I'm scared of you." Her voice breaks on the word. "I'mactuallyscared of you, and I hate that, because I've never been scared of you, not once in all the years we've been friends, and now I look at you and I don't know who I'm looking at."
I reach for her hand. She doesn't pull away, but she doesn't hold on either.
Her fingers sit in mine, limp, and the passivity of it is worse than rejection. It's a hand that's already let go.
"What about your dad?" I ask. Because I need to know. Because Judge Hart is a thread I can't see the end of, and if Emilia tells him what she knows?—
"I won't tell him." She reads the fear on my face and something in her expression shifts. Sadness, maybe. That even now, even in this moment, I'm calculating. "Not because I'm protecting you. Because it would destroy him. He loves you like a daughter, Selene. Finding out what you've become...finding out what happened to your parents and who you're with...it would break him."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I'm not doing it for you."
She turns her face toward the wall. The conversation is over. I can feel it closing, the way you feel a door closing when you're on the wrong side of it.
I stand, but my legs feel hollow.
I lean down and press my lips to her forehead, the way Cassius pressed his to mine in the staging room before the rescue, and Emilia lets me but she doesn't lean into it.
She holds perfectly still, like a person enduring a touch they no longer want but aren't cruel enough to refuse.
"I love you," I say against her skin.
"I know," she whispers. "That's the worst part."
I leave the room and close the door behind me, stand in the hallway with my back against the wall and my hand pressed over my mouth and finally, finally let the sound out.
Not a sob. Something deeper. Something that comes from the place where Emilia lived inside me for years, the room she occupied in my chest that is now empty and echoing and will never be filled by anyone else because there is no one else.
There is no one left who knew the girl I was before.
Dr. Tate appears at the end of the hall. She sees my face and doesn't approach. Just nods once and goes back to the kitchen, and I'm grateful for the mercy of someone who knows when to leave a person alone with their wreckage.
The car Cassius sent is waiting outside.
I get in the back and Lionel drives.
I don't speak, don't look at my phone, don't do anything but sit in the dark with my fist pressed against my chest and watch the city slide past the window.
