Chapter 18
SELENE
The safe house is a brownstone in Carroll Gardens that belongs to no one on paper.
Two bedrooms, a kitchen that hasn't been updated since the eighties, and a bathroom with a lock that actually works.
Cassius owns it through so many layers of shell companies that even I couldn't trace it back to him, and I've been tracing his shell companies for weeks.
Emilia is in the bedroom at the end of the hall, and the doctor is with her.
Cassius made a call from the car before we arrived, and a woman was waiting when we pulled up.
Dr. Maren Tate is in her mid-forties, with calm eyes, steady hands, and most important—no questions about the blood, the tactical gear, or the girl being carried through the door by two men who looked like they'd just been through hell… because they had.
A female doctor. He chose a woman.
The detail lodges in my ribs like a shard of something I can't identify.
He thought about Emilia's trauma, about what it would mean for her to be touched and examined by a man after being hurt by men, and he made a different choice.
It's such a small thing. Such a human thing, from a man I've spent weeks trying to convince myself isn't human at all.
I stand in the hallway outside Emilia's door and listen to the murmur of Dr. Tate's voice. Low, soothing, professional. The occasional sound of Emilia crying, muffled, the thin, exhausted crying of someone who has been doing it for days and doesn't have the energy left to sob.
Lionel is by the front door. Cassius left an hour ago to deal with the aftermath—the bodies, the scene, whatever cleanup a man like him does after a night like this.
He didn't kiss me goodbye, didn't touch me. Just looked at me with those gray eyes and said, "Stay with her. I'll send someone for you when she's settled."
Then he was gone, and the brownstone felt smaller and colder without the space he takes up in a room.
I go to the bathroom.
The mirror is small and spotted with age, mounted above a sink with rust stains around the drain.
The woman looking back at me is someone I've been meeting in stages over the last two weeks, and each time there's less of the old version and more of whatever this is.
Tactical vest, unzipped but still on. Black shirt underneath, stiff with sweat and something darker at the cuffs. The collar at my throat, catching the weak overhead light.
Blood under my fingernails.
I turn on the faucet and the water runs cold, then warm, then too hot, and I hold my hands under it and scrub.
Soap from a dispenser that's probably been here since the house was last used.
I scrub my palms, between my fingers, the creases of my knuckles.
The blood comes off in thin, rust-colored streams that spiral down the drain.
Except the bit that’s under the nails.
It's dark there, wedged into the cuticles, staining the half-moons at the base of each nail bed.
I dig at it with my thumbnail, with the edge of a towel, with the corner of a bar of soap that crumbles against the pressure.
It doesn't come out. Not all of it.
There's a shadow under my right index finger that I can't reach, and after five minutes of trying I stand there with my hands dripping and my chest heaving and accept that I'm going to sit with Emilia with a dead man's blood still on me.
I strip off the vest, leave it on the bathroom floor.
The shirt underneath is black enough to hide what's on it, and I roll the cuffs up past my wrists so the stains don't show.
The hallway is quiet. Dr. Tate's door opens and she steps out, closing it gently behind her.
"How is she?" I ask.
"Dehydrated. At least two cracked ribs, heavy bruising on the face and torso, abrasions on both wrists from the restraints.
No signs of sexual assault." She says the last part watching my face, and I realize she was waiting to deliver that specific piece of information and watching to see if I needed it. I did.
The breath I release feels like the first full one I've taken in hours.
"She's asking for you," Dr. Tate says. Then she pauses.
Folds her hands in front of her. Chooses her words the way a surgeon chooses an incision point.
"She's also scared. Not of what happened to her.
She's scared of you, Selene. Whatever she saw tonight, it's sitting on top of her right now, and she's trying to reconcile it with the person she's asking for. Be careful with her."
I nod. I can't speak. If I open my mouth, the thing that comes out won't be words.
Dr. Tate squeezes my arm once. Brief, professional, kind. Then she walks down the hall to the kitchen, and I hear her putting on a kettle, and the normality of the sound almost breaks me.
I push open Emilia's door.
She's propped against the headboard with pillows behind her back and a glass of water on the nightstand.
Someone found her clean clothes—a sweatshirt and loose pants, soft things, the sort of clothes you wear when your body has been hurt and you need the fabric to be gentle.
Her face is worse under the bedroom light.
Both eyes blackened, the cut above her brow held together with thin white strips.
The bruise on her jaw has spread since the factory, purple blooming into yellow at the edges.
She looks small in the too-big sweatshirt. Small and broken and so far from the girl in the sundress at the mimosa brunch that the distance between those two versions of her feels like a physical gap I could fall into.
"Hey," I say from the doorway.
"Hey." Her voice is hoarse. Scraped raw from crying, or screaming, or both.
I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. Close, but not touching. Giving her the space to decide how near she wants me.
She decides, reaches for my hand, takes it, holds it, laces her fingers through mine, and the contact sends a crack through something I've been holding together all night.
Her hand is cold and small and her grip is weak, and I hold on carefully, aware of the bandages on her wrists, aware of the bruises I can't see, aware of the shadow under my fingernail where a dead man's blood is still lodged.
"You came," she whispers.
"Of course I came."
"I kept telling myself. Every time they—" She swallows. Closes her swollen eyes. "Every time it got bad, I said Selene is coming. Selene will find me. She won't let this happen to me."
"I found you."
"I know." She opens her eyes. Looks at me. And there it is—the thing Dr. Tate warned me about. The fear. Not the residual terror of captivity. Something different, something that's pointed at me, and the shape of it is the shape of the questions she hasn't asked yet.
We sit in silence for a long time.
We hold hands in the quiet, yet we've never been this far apart while sitting this close.
"The men who took me," she says. Not looking at me now. Looking at our joined hands. "They talked. A lot. The first day they mostly just... did what they did. But after that, when they were bored, they talked."
I don't say anything. The cold in my stomach is spreading upward.
"They said you were with a man named Cassius Wolfe. That he runs a criminal organization. That he owns territories and businesses and people." She pauses. "They said he killed your parents, Sel."
The room tilts. Not dramatically, not the way it does in movies when someone gets bad news. Just a small, quiet shift, the world adjusting itself around a truth that's been spoken aloud by someone who shouldn't have it.
"They said he murdered Judge Deveraux and his wife, and then he spent years grooming their daughter to be his.
..they used a word I don't want to repeat.
" Her voice is shaking now. Not with anger.
With the effort of holding herself together while the thing she's saying takes her apart.
"And then I watched you come through that door in body armor with a knife on your leg, and I looked at that necklace you always wear and I finally understood what it was, and you were so calm, Sel.
You were so calm in that room with those dead men on the floor, like it was. ..normal for you."
"Em—"
"And then the hallway." Her eyes find mine, and what's in them is worse than anything the Russians did to her face. "You killed that man. I watched you do it. I was three feet away and I saw your face when you...and you didn't hesitate. You didn't even think about it. You just..."
She can't finish. Her hand is trembling in mine, and I realize she's not gripping me anymore.
She's enduring the contact. Letting me hold her hand because some part of her still loves me enough to allow it, even though the rest of her is screaming to pull away.
"Is it true?" she asks. "About your parents?"
I could lie. I've been lying to her for so long that one more would slide out without friction, would settle into the space between us like all the others, invisible and load-bearing and slowly rotting the foundation of everything we are.
I don't lie.
"Yes."
The sound she makes is small. Not a sob, not a gasp. Just a small, hurt sound, like someone pressing on a bruise to see if it's real.
"And you're with him."
"Yes."
"You're with the man who killed your parents."
"Yes."
"Selene." She pulls her hand free. Not fast, not angry. Slow and deliberate, the way you'd set down something fragile you've decided you can't carry anymore. "How long?"
I tell her. Not everything—not Hell, not the details of what happens behind closed doors, not the specifics of what I've done or what he's done to me. But enough. The organization. My role in it. Harvard. How long it's been. The return.
She listens. Her swollen face is very still, the way faces get when the person behind them is processing something that doesn't fit inside any framework they have for understanding the world.