Page 19 of Ruin
Vincent is quiet for a moment. "What do you need from me?"
"Set up a meeting. Full organization. Tomorrow night." I fold the belt and set it on the desk. "I'm introducing them to their queen."
The shower cuts off in the other room.
Through the open doorway, I can see steam curling into the bedroom, and then she steps out with a towel around her body, collar still on, water dripping down her collarbones.
She catches me watching and doesn't look away.
A year ago, she would have blushed. Now she drops the towel. I end the call without saying goodbye.
She walks to the closet—my closet, now apparently hers—and starts going through the clothes I had tailored for her.
Dresses, suits, silks in blacks and deep reds.
She holds a dress up against her body, checks herself in the mirror, discards it, and tries another.
"Vincent thinks you're a liability," I tell her.
"Vincent hasn't seen what I can do yet." She selects a dress. Blood red. "He will."
"The organization won't accept you overnight."
"I don't need that long." She turns to face me, the dress draped over her arm, completely naked except for the collar. "I need one meeting."
There it is again. That certainty.
I killed her parents when I was twenty-seven, put a bullet in her father and a knife in her mother because Judge Deveraux was building a case that would have brought down everything my father built.
The girl was barely sixteen, asleep upstairs while I worked. I wore a mask. She never saw my face.
And now she's standing in my bedroom, naked and dripping wet and planning her coronation, and she has no idea that the man she just fucked built his empire on her family's graves.
The thought should bother me.
It doesn't.
What bothers me is the realization settling into my bones like concrete: if she ever finds out, she won't just leave me.
That girl would try to destroy me.
And the woman standing in front of me now? The one who dismantled Gerald Fink with a smile?
She might actually succeed.
I push the thought down, lock it in the same vault where I keep the memory of that night—the blood, the silence, the shadow of a teenage girl in an upstairs window.
"Tomorrow night," I tell her. "My full organization will meet us."
She smiles. It's sharp enough to cut glass.
"I'll wear the red."
I watch her disappear into the bathroom to finish getting ready, and two thoughts collide in my chest with enough force to crack a rib.
She's everything I always wanted, and she's the one thing that could end me.
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