Page 84 of Ruin
Unshaven. Shirt untucked.
Eyes that look like they've been carved out and put back in at slightly the wrong angle.
I don't leave messages.
Messages are records, and records are liabilities, but I call.
She doesn't answer. Not once.
The empire doesn't care about heartbreak.
The empire needs decisions, and I make them the same way I've always made them, because the alternative is the kind of paralysis that gets people killed.
I sit in meetings and read quarterly projections and authorize shipments and sign off on construction permits for the Cavallo expansion, and not a single person in the room would know that the man behind the desk is checking a surveillance feed under the table every few minutes.
She's in her apartment. She's barely moved since I left.
I had cameras installed years ago, after the arrangement began.
Four of them, positioned to cover every room, hardwired into a private feed that routes through three encrypted servers before it reaches my phone.
I told myself it was for her safety. Protection.
A reasonable precaution for a woman connected to a man with enemies.
And it was. It is.
But protection doesn't require watching someone sleep, and I've been doing that for longer than I'll ever tell her.
On the first day, she sat on the kitchen floor for three hours with her back against the cabinets and her arms around her knees, staring at nothing.
She didn't eat. Didn't shower. Didn't even touch her phone.
On the second day, she cleaned.
Obsessively cleaned, scrubbing surfaces that were already clean, reorganizing cabinets that didn't need reorganizing.
The kind of activity that isn't really activity but a body trying to outrun a mind it can't escape.
She stopped once to stand in front of the evidence wall with her arms crossed, studying the photographs and documents like she was memorizing them.
Then she went back to scrubbing the kitchen counter.
That night, I sent Lionel to her building with an envelope.
No note. Just the key to the collar, slid under her door in the middle of the night.
I watched her find it the next morning.
She stood in the hallway holding that small brass key in her palm for a long time, turning it over with her fingers the way she turns over problems in her mind.
Then she set it on the kitchen counter and walked away.
She didn't take the collar off.
On the seventh day, she left.
I watched her get dressed—jeans, cashmere sweater, collar tucked beneath the neckline—and my chest did something it's not supposed to do.
