Page 1 of Ruin
PROLOGUE
Three Years Ago…
SELENE
Icount the days the way some people count rosary beads.
Quietly, obsessively, each one a small act of faith in something I can't see, can't prove, and can't stop believing in.
Three hundred and sixty-five.
The number stares at me from the calendar on my phone while I finish my makeup in the bathroom mirror.
One year to the day since he put me in a car and sent me away with his collar locked around my throat and a command disguised as a choice.
I look different than the girl who left. I can see it in the angles of my face, the way I hold my shoulders, the steadiness in my eyes that wasn't there twelve months ago.
That girl was a raw nerve. All need and no spine. She would have crawled back after a week if pride hadn't held her upright.
I'm not her anymore. I'm not sure who I am instead, but the not-knowing doesn't scare me the way it used to.
The collar sits against my collarbone, warm from my skin. I touch it the way I touch it every morning—fingers tracing the diamonds, feeling the weight of it, reminding myself what it means.
What Ithoughtit meant, anyway, before the x-ray.
That was three months ago. Pneumonia, or what I thought was pneumonia, bad enough that Emilia drove me to the ER in the middle of the night while I coughed until my ribs ached.
The doctor ordered a chest x-ray. Standard. Routine. The technician was a woman my age with tired eyes and a lanyard full of keycards.
"You'll need to remove the necklace, hon."
I reached for the clasp. The same clasp I'd never had a reason to touch, because taking it off meant failure. Meant I'd broken the one rule he gave me.
There was no clasp.Or rather, there was—but it didn't open. A mechanism I couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't release without a tool or a key I didn't have.
I stood in that radiology hallway in a paper gown with my fingers on the back of my neck and understood, with a clarity that made my vision narrow, that the test was never a test.
He locked it. Before he sent me away, before he told me the collar was my choice, before he framed a year of loyalty as something I earned—he locked it.
The choice was never mine. The devotion I'd been performing for twelve months, the daily act of keeping it on, the nights I lay in bed touching the diamonds and telling myself I was choosing him—all of it was fake.
I was an actress in a show I didn't know was scripted.
I was furious for about a week, then I wasn't and somehow it transformed into something worse.
He was afraid I'd take it off. That's what the lock means. Not ownership. Not control. Fear.
He wasafraidthat somewhere in those 365 days, I'd have a weak moment, a sane moment, a moment where the normal world pulled hard enough to make me unclasp the diamonds and walk away. So, he made sure I couldn't.
The most dangerous man I've ever met was afraid of losing me. And he couldn't even admit it, so he built a lock instead.
I stopped being angry after that and started being something else.
Not anger. Not love. Just the fact I know the most dangerous man in the city rigged a game because he was terrified of losing. And I'm the thing he was afraid to lose.
"Sel?" Emilia's voice from the living room. "You almost ready?"
"Five minutes."
