Page 231 of Sweet Ruin

I slide the photograph back into the envelope, fold the flap down, and put it in my lap with both hands on top of it.

“I’m keeping it,” I decide.

“Good.” He puts one hand over both of mine, over the envelope. “It’s yours.”

I sit there for a second and soak it all in. The banner drooping and the bad cake going stale and thirty-two years of birthdays that belonged to other people finally, finally behind me.

“Kane.”

“Mm?”

“There’s a mirror in your room.” I stand up. “Take me to it.”

41

DELILAH

He takes me up the stairs by the hand.

The mirror in his bedroom is double-width and double-height, the kind of extravagant monstrosity that only a six-foot-four man with too much money to blow could ever afford.

I’ve stood in here a dozen times and never once looked into it on purpose. I’ve angled my body away from it while I got dressed. I’ve hung a towel over the corner of it.

Kane drags it out into the middle of the floor. The feet scrape on the rug.

“Stand there,” he says, and points at a spot in front of it.

I do. He turns on the lamp by the bed and nothing else.

Then he undresses me from behind. He unzips me and pushes the dress off my shoulders and lets it fall, unhooks my bra with one hand, and crouches to take my underwear down my legs.

The whole time, I’m watching it happen in the glass.

My first instinct is to find the flaws.

“Eyes up,” he says when he catches me doing it. “Look at your face.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where you are.”

I look at my face. It’s flushed and my hair is a mess from the party and my mouth is open a little.

He stands behind me, puts one hand on my belly, and spreads his fingers.

“Do you know what I see?” he says against my ear. “I see the woman who walked into a room full of fifty people and burned her whole life down on purpose because she refused to be lied to.”

“Kane—”

“I’m not finished.” His other hand comes up and closes around my throat. “I see the woman who called a hundred customers on a landline and apologized for something she didn’t do. I see the woman who dumped two hundred dollars of buttercream because it wasn’t right. And I see this.” He runs his hand down over my hip and grips. “Which is mine, and which is perfect, and which I intend to have right now while you watch.”

“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a mirror.”

“Then look away and I’ll stop.”

Yeah fucking right.

He takes me on the rug in front of it, kneeling behind me, one arm hooked around my ribs holding me up, and he makes me keep my eyes open.