Ruin (Black Heart Romance presents Heaven & Hell #9)

Prologue

Three Years Ago…

SELENE

Icount the days the way some people count rosary beads.

Quietly, obsessively, each one a small act of faith in something I can't see, can't prove, and can't stop believing in.

Three hundred and sixty-five.

The number stares at me from the calendar on my phone while I finish my makeup in the bathroom mirror.

One year to the day since he put me in a car and sent me away with his collar locked around my throat and a command disguised as a choice.

I look different than the girl who left. I can see it in the angles of my face, the way I hold my shoulders, the steadiness in my eyes that wasn't there twelve months ago.

That girl was a raw nerve. All need and no spine. She would have crawled back after a week if pride hadn't held her upright.

I'm not her anymore. I'm not sure who I am instead, but the not-knowing doesn't scare me the way it used to.

The collar sits against my collarbone, warm from my skin. I touch it the way I touch it every morning—fingers tracing the diamonds, feeling the weight of it, reminding myself what it means.

What I thought it meant, anyway, before the x-ray.

That was three months ago. Pneumonia, or what I thought was pneumonia, bad enough that Emilia drove me to the ER in the middle of the night while I coughed until my ribs ached.

The doctor ordered a chest x-ray. Standard. Routine. The technician was a woman my age with tired eyes and a lanyard full of keycards.

"You'll need to remove the necklace, hon."

I reached for the clasp. The same clasp I'd never had a reason to touch, because taking it off meant failure. Meant I'd broken the one rule he gave me.

There was no clasp. Or rather, there was—but it didn't open. A mechanism I couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't release without a tool or a key I didn't have.

I stood in that radiology hallway in a paper gown with my fingers on the back of my neck and understood, with a clarity that made my vision narrow, that the test was never a test.

He locked it. Before he sent me away, before he told me the collar was my choice, before he framed a year of loyalty as something I earned—he locked it.

The choice was never mine. The devotion I'd been performing for twelve months, the daily act of keeping it on, the nights I lay in bed touching the diamonds and telling myself I was choosing him—all of it was fake.

I was an actress in a show I didn't know was scripted.

I was furious for about a week, then I wasn't and somehow it transformed into something worse.

He was afraid I'd take it off. That's what the lock means. Not ownership. Not control. Fear.

He was afraid that somewhere in those 365 days, I'd have a weak moment, a sane moment, a moment where the normal world pulled hard enough to make me unclasp the diamonds and walk away. So, he made sure I couldn't.

The most dangerous man I've ever met was afraid of losing me. And he couldn't even admit it, so he built a lock instead.

I stopped being angry after that and started being something else.

Not anger. Not love. Just the fact I know the most dangerous man in the city rigged a game because he was terrified of losing. And I'm the thing he was afraid to lose.

"Sel?" Emilia's voice from the living room. "You almost ready?"

"Five minutes."

"Where are you going, anyway? You've been weird all day."

"Just out. Meeting someone."

"Someone as in a date-someone?"

"Something like that."

She appears in the bathroom doorway, blonde bob and blue eyes and the look of concern she's been wearing since I was sixteen. "You look... intense. Are you okay?"

"I'm good, Em."

"You'd tell me if you weren't?"

"I'd tell you."

She studies me for a moment. Her eyes drop to the collar the way they always do—she's never asked about it directly, just accepted my vague explanation about it being a gift, something personal, something I don't want to talk about.

Emilia is good at not pushing. It's one of the things I love most about her, and one of the things that will eventually make it impossible to keep her close.

"Be safe," she says.

"Always."

I grab my jacket and leave before she can ask anything else.

Purgatory at night is exactly the way I remember it and yet the polar opposite at the same time.

The bass hits me before I'm through the door.

Deep, heavy, the kind of sound you feel in your teeth and your chest and the base of your spine.

Caged dancers overhead, amber light, bodies moving in the dark like something choreographed by instinct rather than thought.

The air tastes like expensive perfume and sweat. People come here to feel something they can't get anywhere else.

I felt it the first time I walked in here. The pull. The sense that the ordinary world had a door in it and I'd just stepped through it.

I feel it now, but differently. Not like a girl falling into something unknown. Like a woman returning to something she chose.

The bar is black marble, same as before. I find a seat at the far end and order a glass of Malbec. The irony isn't lost on me—the last glass of Malbec I held, I threw at David's wall.

That was a lifetime ago. A different woman's tantrum.

The wine arrives and I take a sip and let the room wash over me.

I'm early. Deliberately.

He said one year. He didn't say what time, which means he's testing whether I'll show up at dawn like a desperate thing, or at a civilized hour like a woman with options.

I chose nine o'clock. Late enough to prove I wasn't counting the minutes. Early enough to prove I was counting the days.

A woman at the other end of the bar catches my eye. Dark hair cut sharp at the jaw, cheekbones that look like they could open letters.

She's not drinking, not dancing. Working. Her eyes track the room with the kind of attention that looks casual until you notice it never stops.

When her gaze lands on me, it stays.

She looks at the collar first, then my face, then back at the collar.

I hold her gaze. She holds mine.

A moment passes, then she looks away.

"Miss Deveraux."

Peter. I'd know the voice anywhere—flat, polite, the verbal equivalent of a closed door.

He's standing two feet behind me with his hands clasped and his face arranged into the pleasant nothing that Cassius's men wear like a uniform.

"He's ready for you."

Three words. No urgency. No please.

Just the calm assumption that I'll follow, because why else would I be here on day 365 with his collar around my throat and Malbec on my tongue.

I leave the wine unfinished and follow Peter to the elevator. The dress is black and fitted and I chose it knowing he'd take it apart with his eyes before I opened my mouth.

The descent is the same. The air thickening, the temperature shifting, the sense of the world above falling away.

My heartbeat picks up and I let it. No point pretending I'm not nervous when my body has already decided to betray me.

The doors open and I'm in Hell.

Red light. Leather. The hum of soundproofing that makes everything feel muffled and close.

The smell of it—something dark and warm that I've been dreaming about for the last year and could never quite reconstruct from memory.

He's at the end of the corridor. Not in a room. Standing in the open, leaning against the wall beside the door where I first knelt for him, where I first called him Sir, where I first understood that the thing inside me that craved destruction had a name and the name was his.

He looks exactly the same.

Suit, no tie, top button undone. Gray eyes that take me apart before I've crossed half the distance between us.

He doesn't move toward me. He doesn't smile. He just watches me walk, and I can feel his gaze on my body like a physical thing, measuring every change, analyzing every difference between the girl who left and the woman who's coming back.

I stop three feet away. Close enough to smell him—sandalwood and whiskey and something underneath that's just him, just skin, just the scent I've been chasing in my sleep for a year.

"Three hundred and sixty-five days," I say.

"I know."

"Not one more. Not one less."

"I noticed."

"You look different," he says.

"I am different."

"Are you."

Not a question. A dare. Show me.

I reach up and touch the collar. His eyes follow my fingers the way they always follow my fingers when they're near his diamonds.

"I had pneumonia," I say. "A couple months back. Bad enough for a chest x-ray. The technician asked me to remove my necklace."

Something flickers behind his eyes. Faint. Gone fast.

"And I reached for the clasp," I continue, "and discovered there isn't one. Not one that opens without a key I don't have."

The corridor is quiet. The bass from above is a distant pulse, like a heartbeat heard through walls.

"You locked it," I say. "Before you sent me away. Before you told me keeping it on was my choice. Before you made me think that wearing it for 365 days meant something about my loyalty. You locked it."

He doesn't deny it, doesn't flinch, doesn't even break eye contact.

The man who runs an empire on the principle that denial is weakness just stands there and lets the truth exist between us without apology.

"Yes," he says.

"So, the test was rigged."

"The test was irrelevant. The collar was always staying on."

"Because you didn't trust me to keep it."

"Because you were always meant to be mine."

The words land in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

I feel them sink, feel the ripples spread outward into places I've spent a year trying to harden, and the thing that rises to the surface isn't anger.

He was afraid. This man who kills without flinching, who runs a city from the shadows, who has never once shown weakness in front of anyone—he was afraid that a twenty-three-year-old woman might take off a necklace and disappear.

So, he cheated because he couldn't risk losing.

"You could have just asked me to stay," I say.

"I don't ask."

"No. You lock collars and call it destiny."

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something darker. Something that says he knows exactly what he did and he'd do it again.

Somehow, I'm certain the only thing he regrets is that I figured it out.

"You're here," he says. "Locked collar or not. You walked through that door tonight, sat at that bar, followed Peter into this elevator. You're here because you want to be. The lock didn't do that."

He's right. That's the worst part. He's right, and I came back anyway.

"I want you beside me," he says. The shift is subtle, but I feel it—the conversation turning from what happened to what happens next. "Not for three nights. Not as a visitor in my world. In it. Working for me. With me. Building something that lasts longer than either of us."

"And in your bed."

"That's not negotiable." His eyes darken. "It never was."

"What if I said no?"

"You won't."

"But if I did."

"Then you'd walk out of here and I'd let you go, and we'd both spend the rest of our lives knowing you lied."

The truth of that sits between us, undeniable and heavy.

"Say yes," he says. It's not a command. Not the Sir voice, not the tone that drops my stomach and makes my knees want to fold.

It's something I haven't heard from him before.

A request made by a man who doesn't make requests, offered to a woman he locked a collar on because he was too proud to ask her to stay.

"Yes."

"Good." He doesn't move yet. Holds the space between us like he's savoring it. "There are things I need you to learn before you're ready for what I have in mind. Things this world can't teach you."

"Like what?"

"Like how to take apart a man's empire without touching him. Like how to walk into a room full of wolves and make them think you're one of them." His eyes move over my face, reading something I can't see. "I'm going to make you as feared as I am, Selene."

"And if I'm already dangerous?"

"Then you'll be unstoppable when I’m through with you."

He moves first, or I move first, or maybe we move at the same time—I don't know and it doesn't matter.

His hand is on the back of my neck, fingers wrapping around the collar, and he pulls me into him.

My hands land on his chest and I feel his heartbeat through the fabric, fast, faster than a man who controls everything should ever let his heart beat.

His mouth finds mine.

He's not gentle, and he’s certainly not careful.

A year of being apart collapses into a single point of contact, his lips against mine, and the sound I make is involuntary, animalistic, the sound of a body getting something it's been starving for.

He kisses me like he's reclaiming territory.

His tongue parts my lips and I open for him, and the taste of him—whiskey and heat and the faint copper edge of a man who bites—floods my mouth and my chest and the space behind my eyes where I've been replaying the last night we had together.

His fingers tighten on the collar, pulling my head back, exposing my throat, and his mouth drags from my lips to my jaw to the place just below my ear where my pulse is hammering so hard he can probably feel it against his tongue.

"A year," he says against my skin. The words vibrate through my throat and down my spine and into the place between my hips that has been aching since the elevator doors opened. "You made me wait a year."

"You sent me away."

"And you came back." His teeth graze my earlobe. His other hand finds my hip, grips hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow, pulls me flush against him.

I can feel what this is doing to him—hard against my stomach, undeniable—and my body responds with a heat that has nothing to do with the red lights and everything to do with the man who is holding me like I'm something he won and something he stole and something he'll never let go of again.

I grab his shirt to pull him closer and kiss him back hard.

He presses me against the wall.

The concrete is cold through the back of my dress and he is hot against the front of me. The contrast makes me gasp into his mouth.

His thigh presses between mine and I grind against it before I can stop myself, and the low laugh he makes against my lips is the laugh of a man who just confirmed something he already knew.

"Still mine," he murmurs.

"Still yours," I breathe. "But we're going to talk about that lock."

"Later."

"Cassius—"

"Later." He kisses me again, slower this time. Deep, thorough, the kind of kiss that isn't a beginning but a promise. His hand slides from the collar to my jaw, tilts my face up, holds me exactly where he wants me while his mouth takes its time relearning mine.

When he finally pulls back, his forehead rests against mine.

His breathing is uneven. His hand is still on my jaw, thumb tracing my lower lip, and his eyes are the color of smoke and steel and every dark thing I've ever wanted.

"Welcome home, little wolf," he says.

And the thing is—standing in Hell, it actually feels like home.