Page 39 of Ruin
My heels click against the corridor floor.
Past the rooms where darkness lives behind every door. Past the elevator. Past the main floor of Purgatory, where the musicstill pounds and the dancers still twist, and the world above has no idea what just happened in the basement.
The car is waiting. Peter at the wheel.
I slide into the back seat and Cassius follows.
The city lights blur past the tinted windows as we pull away from Purgatory, and I catch my reflection in the glass.
Red dress. Diamond collar. Eyes that don't look away.
Days ago, I walked back into this world.
Tonight, I made it mine.
6
Cassius
She's rewriting my empire in red ink.
I watch from the doorway of the penthouse office as Selene sits cross-legged on the floor surrounded by files, a laptop balanced on one knee, her hair twisted up with a pen holding it in place.
She's been at this for six hours.
No breaks. No complaints. Just the quiet intensity of a woman dismantling a machine so she can rebuild it better.
"Your real estate portfolio is bleeding," she says without looking up. She knows I'm here. She always knows. "You're running rental income through three separate LLCs that all feed into the same holding company."
"Those structures have worked for eight years."
"They've worked because nobody was looking, Cassius." She finally glances up. No makeup today. One of my shirts hangs off her shoulder, and her bare legs are tucked beneath her. She looks like she belongs here more than I do. "I'm restructuring into seven entities with staggered formation dates across fourstates. Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Different registered agents, different banking relationships, no shared officers."
I lean against the doorframe. "That's a lot of paperwork."
"That's a lot of not going to prison."
She turns back to her laptop and keeps typing. I could watch her work for hours.
There's something about the way her mind operates that reminds me of watching a blade being sharpened.
Each pass more precise than the last. Each edge more dangerous.
My phone buzzes.
It’s Vincent:
Dock shipment arriving at 1a.m. Harris confirmed.
I pocket the phone.
Tonight's delivery is the largest we've moved in three months.
Twelve crates through the port, routed through our customs contact, offloaded at Warehouse Nine.
Standard operation. The kind I've run a hundred times without thinking twice.
But nothing feels standard anymore. Not with Zhukov’s people pressing at the edges of my territory, testing seams like engineers looking for stress fractures.
