Chapter 12
CASSIUS
Seven fucking days.
Seven days since she held a gun to my chest and I told her the truth about who I am.
About what I did.
About every carefully constructed lie that held us together like sutures in a wound that was never going to heal clean.
Seven days, and I haven't slept more than forty minutes at a time.
The penthouse feels wrong without her.
Too much space. Too much silence of the wrong kind.
The kind that's empty instead of full, the kind that exists because something's been subtracted rather than chosen.
I pour whiskey at midnight and stand at the windows watching the city breathe, and the glass reflects a man I barely recognize.
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.
Something involuntary and sharp, like a muscle seizing.
She still wears it.
After everything—after the gun and the truth and every reason in the world to rip it off and leave it on the floor—she tucked it under her sweater and walked out the door with my diamonds against her skin.
She met Emilia at a restaurant on Seventh.
I watched her hug the Hart girl, watched her sit down and pick up a mimosa and smile like a woman whose world hadn't just caved in.
She's a better liar than I gave her credit for.
From the camera angle on the street, I could see the tension in her shoulders, the way she held her glass too tightly, the micro-expressions that someone who didn't know her would miss entirely.
But Emilia wouldn't catch them.
Emilia sees what Selene wants her to see because Selene learned from the best how to show one face while wearing another.
Two hours later, she was back in the apartment.
Sat in her car for six minutes before going inside.
Then nothing. Just her, on the bed, holding her phone against her chest in the dark.
I know because I watched. I watched all of it.
I toggled between running an empire and watching a woman grieve on a surveillance feed, and if that makes me a monster, then the word lost its meaning long before I earned it.
Vincent comes to my office with the expression he wears when he's about to say something I won't want to hear.
"Zhukov hit the warehouse on Thirty-Eighth," he says, settling into the chair across from my desk with the deliberate calm of a man delivering a casualty report. "Took the whole shipment. Left three of our men in the hospital and one in the morgue."
"Who?"
"Danny Reeves. Twenty-six. Two years with us. Good soldier."
I file the name. Every name gets filed. "And the message?"
Vincent slides his phone across the desk.
A photograph of the warehouse wall, spray-painted in Cyrillic that I can read well enough.
The translation doesn't require fluency.
Your wolf lost her teeth.
I stare at the words until they stop being words and become something else. A detonation point. A line crossed.
"They know," I say.
"They know something happened between you and Selene. Whether they know the specifics..." Vincent shrugs, but his eyes are sharp. "They have someone watching your building. Or hers. Or both."
"Both." I've already run the analysis. The Cyrillic message is pointed. Personal. Zhukov doesn't write personal messages unless he has personal intelligence. "They're mapping her movements."
"It's worse than that." Vincent reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a phone.
He slides it across the table.
The screen shows a photograph—a man sitting in a parked sedan outside Selene's apartment building. Dark jacket, cigarette, telephoto lens on the passenger seat. The timestamp is two days ago.
"Peter spotted him. Watched him for seven hours before we pulled him.
He'd been photographing everyone coming in and out of her building for at least a week.
Had a folder in his glovebox—shots of Selene at the grocery store, Selene at the coffee shop on her corner, Selene getting into her car. " Vincent pauses.
My hand tightens around my whiskey glass.
"The man is no longer a problem," Vincent says. "But he wasn't working alone. We found his phone with check-in texts to a Brighton Beach number. He was reporting her schedule daily."
The glass in my hand is going to crack if I don't set it down. I set it down.
"Which brings me to the conversation you don't want to have." Vincent leans forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. "She's exposed. Alone in that apartment with no security, no infrastructure, no one watching her back except your cameras. And cameras don't stop bullets."
"I'm aware."
"Then do something about it. Bring her back in or cut her loose, but this limbo is going to get her killed. Or worse, it's going to get her taken, and then Zhukov has leverage that makes everything else irrelevant."
He's right. I know he's right.
The strategic calculus is obvious: she's a vulnerability in the field, unprotected, connected to me in ways that any competent intelligence operation could exploit in hours.
Bring her inside the perimeter or accept that she's a liability.
But the strategic calculus doesn't account for the fact that the last time I saw her, she was pointing a .38 at my chest with tears running down her face and a steadiness in her hands that told me she'd actually considered pulling the trigger.
It doesn't account for the look in her eyes when I told her about her parents.
Like watching someone fall from a great height and knowing you're the one who pushed them.
"I'll handle it," I say.
"When?"
"Tonight."
Vincent studies me for a long moment, reading whatever's written on my face with the fluency of thirty years' practice.
Then he stands, buttons his jacket, and walks to the door.
"For what it's worth," he says without turning around, "I've never seen you like this. Not once. And I've known you since you were twelve years old and too angry to cry at your mother's funeral."
He leaves and the door clicks shut behind him.
I sit in the dark office and finish my whiskey and think about a woman holding a phone against her chest three miles away, and then I pick up my keys.