Page 22 of Ruin
Just a door opening that won't close again. I've been in his world for three days, and I've just been handed keys to the kingdom's back office.
I finish my wine and don't let my hand shake.
The afternoon is a blur of logistics.
Vincent walks me through the legitimate business portfolio.
The galleries, the restaurants, the real estate arm, the import/export company that moves art and antiquities and occasionally things that aren't art or antiquities.
He's methodical, precise, and grudgingly thorough. He doesn't waste words and he doesn't repeat himself, and by the third hour I realize he's not briefing me…he's onboarding me.
Peter drives us between locations. The gallery first—sleek white walls, enormous canvases, a manager named Diane who takes one look at me standing next to Cassius and rearranges her entire body language from casual to deferential.
Then the import warehouse at the docks, where shipping containers sit in rows like steel coffins and men in work boots stop talking when we enter.
Then a restaurant in Midtown—different from Cavallo, louder, more casual, a place where cash moves under the table during weekend brunch service.
At each stop, the same thing happens. People see me. They look at the collar. They look at Cassius. They recalculate.
I'm not arm candy. I'm not a girlfriend being given a tour. I'm asking questions about invoice structures and customs paperwork and quarterly tax filings, and every answer I get, I file away and cross-reference with what I already know.
By the time we leave the last restaurant, Vincent is walking beside me instead of behind me.
Small thing, yet an enormous shift.
"You'll need your own office," he says as we reach the car. "I'll have something set up in the suite by tomorrow."
The suite. Cassius's private office space. Multiple rooms, high security, the nerve center of everything that matters. Not a desk in some back room. A seat at the table.
"Next to his?" I ask.
Vincent gives me a look that says he's still deciding how he feels about that. "Adjacent."
Peter opens the car door for me.
As I slide in, he says quietly, so only I hear, "Paul owes me fifty bucks."
"For what?"
"He bet you'd last a week before Vincent shut you out." Peter almost smiles. "I bet you'd have him eating out of your hand by day three."
"And?"
"And you did it in an afternoon."
I don't smile, but something warm settles in my chest, and I tuck it away for later.
The call comesat nine p.m.
I'm in Cassius's bedroom at his penthouse—our bedroom now, apparently, given that a second set of toiletries has materialized in the bathroom and half the closet has been cleared for the clothes he had tailored in my exact measurements.
He's in his office, on a call with someone whose voice carries the clipped cadence of bad news.
I don't eavesdrop, not yet…but then my phone buzzes.
The screen reads Emilia, followed by a string of heart emojis that feel like they belong to a different lifetime.
I stare at it for three rings. Four.
