Chapter 11
SELENE
Ihaven't slept.
The gun is on the nightstand where I left it after he walked out.
Loved. Love. I don't know which tense applies anymore.
The ceiling of my apartment has a crack in it that runs from the light fixture to the corner above my closet.
I've been staring at it for six hours, mapping its path the way I've spent the last week mapping the path of a murderer through my life.
Both routes are jagged. Both lead nowhere good.
Dawn comes in pale and gray through the curtains I forgot to close.
The evidence wall catches the early light, and for a second, all those photographs and documents and red-ink connections look almost beautiful.
Like art. Like one of the pieces in his galleries, hung for show while the real business happens behind the frame.
I need to move.
I need to shower, eat, function like a person who hasn't just had her entire reality dismantled by the man who built it.
The bathroom mirror is still cracked from where I threw my father's coffee mug two nights ago. My reflection stares back at me in fragments. Fitting.
The collar is still on.
I touch it the way I've touched it a thousand times, fingers finding the diamonds automatically, tracing the warm metal along my collarbone.
My body knows this collar the way it knows breathing, and the familiarity of it makes my throat close.
I can't get it off.
The clasp is locked, has always been locked, and the key is wherever Cassius keeps the things that belong to him.
In a safe. In a drawer. Somewhere in that penthouse where I slept beside him and whispered that I loved him and didn't know I was lying in the bed of the man who orphaned me.
The shower is too hot.
I turn it that way on purpose.
Let the water scald my skin until it's pink and stinging, and I scrub with a washcloth until my arms are raw.
Trying to wash him off.
The smell of sandalwood. The ghost pressure of his hands.
The places where his mouth has been that my nerve endings still remember with treacherous precision.
I catch myself pressing my fingers into the bruise on my left hip.
Faded now, yellowish green at the edges, but I can still feel the shape of his thumb from our last night together.
The tender one. The night I told him I loved him while he moved inside me with a gentleness that made me believe, truly believe, that I was the center of his universe.
My stomach lurches.
I press my forehead against the tile and breathe through the nausea until it passes.
When I step out, I avoid the cracked mirror.
I towel off, pull on jeans and a cashmere sweater, and tuck the collar under the fabric where it sits against my sternum, hidden but present.
A secret pressed to my skin.
The evidence wall watches me from the living room.
All those faces. All those names.
My father's handwriting on legal pads, neat and precise, the penmanship of a man who believed that documentation could save the world.
But it didn't save him.
My phone is face-down on the kitchen counter where I left it last night.
I flip it over and the screen lights up.
Fourteen missed calls.
All from the same number.
And one text, from a different number entirely.
Emilia: SELENE MARIE DEVERAUX. You have cancelled brunch THREE times. I’m not accepting a fourth. Saturday. Mimosas. Seventh Street. If you don’t show up I am filing a missing persons report and I am NOT joking. Love you.
Saturday. That's today.
I read the message twice and something in my chest loosens a fraction.
Not much. Just enough to remind me that there are still things in my life that aren't stained with blood.
Emilia, who has been texting me variations of this message for weeks.
Who doesn't know that the reason I keep canceling is because every time I think about sitting across from her, I have to calculate which lies to tell and which truths to swallow, and the arithmetic is getting harder.
But right now, with the gun on my nightstand and the evidence on my wall and fourteen unanswered calls burning a hole in my phone, Emilia's voice in my head is the only thing that might calm me.
I type back: I'll be there. Eleven?
Her response is instant: Eleven sharp or I'm sending Dad with a search warrant.
The restaurant on Seventh is all exposed brick and hanging plants and reclaimed wood tables, the kind of place that serves sixteen-dollar avocado toast and calls orange juice "fresh-pressed citrus."
The mimosa pitchers are bottomless, which is the actual draw and the reason Emilia has been obsessed with this spot since we were twenty-one and thought day-drinking was a personality trait.
She's already at our usual table when I arrive.
Blonde bob freshly cut, blue eyes bright, wearing a sundress that probably cost forty dollars and looks better on her than anything in my designer closet looks on me.
She waves with both hands like I might miss her in a half-empty restaurant.
"You came!" She's on her feet and hugging me before I can sit down, squeezing hard enough to make my ribs hurt. She smells like vanilla perfume and fabric softener and normalcy. "I was so going to drive to your apartment and drag you here by your hair."
"I said I'd come."
"You said that last Saturday too. And the Saturday before that." She pulls back, holds me at arm's length, studies my face with the unsubtle scrutiny of someone who has known me since I was sixteen and grief-stricken and sleeping in her guest room. "You look tired."
"Thanks."
"I mean really tired. Like, haven't-slept-in-days tired. Are you eating? You look thinner."
"I'm eating." Another lie. They're stacking up. "Work has been intense."
"Work." She says it the same way she's been saying it for weeks, with a little eyebrow lift that means she doesn't believe me but won't push. Not yet. "Okay. Fine. Work. But you're here now, and this pitcher has our names on it."
She pours me a mimosa and launches into the latest Tyler saga before I've taken my first sip.
Tyler wants a destination wedding. Tyler's mother wants a cathedral. Tyler's sister has opinions about bridesmaid dresses that Emilia describes as "aggressively pastel."
The waitress brings avocado toast and eggs Benedict, and Emilia attacks her plate.
The details wash over me, warm and inconsequential, and I let them.
I let Emilia's voice fill the space in my head that's been occupied by surveillance footage and autopsy reports and the sound of Cassius saying "I eliminated the threat" like he was discussing a line item in a budget.
Like it didn’t matter to him at all, when they were my entire world.
The restaurant fills around us.
Couples splitting pancakes, girlfriends splitting gossip, a toddler two tables over smearing yogurt into his own hair while his mother pretends not to notice.
Normal people living normal lives, and I sit among them with champagne and orange juice in my glass and a crime lord's collar tucked beneath my sweater and a loaded gun waiting for me at home.
"So I told her, Margaret, if you put me in peach taffeta I will set the church on fire. And she laughed, but I don't think she understood that I was serious."
"You were not serious."
"I was partially serious. The taffeta part was non-negotiable." She tops off my mimosa. "Okay, your turn. Tell me something. Anything. I feel like I haven't actually talked to you in weeks."
Because you haven't.
Because the woman you've been talking to is a performance, and the real one is sitting across from you right now with a locked collar under her sweater and her father's blood on her lover's hands.
"I told you. Work stuff. The transition back from Boston has been a lot. New responsibilities."
"Right, the private sector thing. The consulting firm." She air-quotes it. She's never fully bought the cover story, but Emilia's particular brand of loyalty means she trusts me enough not to dig. "Are you at least happy? Like, does the work make you happy?"
The question is so earnest it almost cracks me open.
"It's challenging," I say. "That's enough for now."
"Enough is not happy, Sel."
"Enough is what I've got."
She reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Her fingers are small and warm and she squeezes once, the same way she squeezed my hand at my parents' funeral.
No words. Just presence.
Just Emilia, showing up and holding on and refusing to let go, even when I make it hard.
"Whatever's going on," she says, "you know I'm here, right? You know you can tell me anything."
The words sit on my tongue: He killed my parents. The man I've been with, the man I told you was a boyfriend, a consultant, nothing serious, he put a bullet in Dad's head and a knife in Mom's chest and then he had the audacity to make me fall in love with him.
He orchestrated my entire life.
Every school, every job, every apartment.
He watched me grieve the people he murdered and he waited until I was broken enough to rebuild into something useful.
And I still can't take off his collar.
"I know," I say instead. "I know."
She studies me for another beat, those blue eyes sharper than people give her credit for.
Then she lets it go, picks up her mimosa, and shifts gears.
She’s been my friend for years and learned that I'll talk when I'm ready, and pushing only makes me retreat further.
"Okay, speaking of weird and stressful." She takes a long sip. "Dad has been so strange lately. Like, jumping-at-the-phone strange. Locking his study door, which he never does."
My fingers tighten around my glass. "Strange how?"