Chapter 18 #2
"I held your hand at your parents' funeral," she says when I'm finished.
Her voice has gone quiet. Not angry quiet.
Broken quiet. "I sat next to you in that church and I held your hand and I felt your whole body shaking and I thought, I will never let anything hurt this girl again.
I will protect her for the rest of my life. "
"Em, please—"
"My dad took you in. He gave you a bedroom and a seat at our table, and he treated you like you were his.
He cried the night you got your acceptance letter, did you know that?
He sat in his study and cried because he was so proud of you.
And now you're..." She gestures at me. At the black clothes.
At the collar. At my hands, scrubbed raw and still not clean. "This. You're this."
"I know what I am."
"Do you? Because the Selene I know, the one I grew up with, the one who wanted to be a prosecutor so she could put people like your boyfriend in prison...that Selene would be horrified."
"That Selene is gone."
"No, she's not." Emilia's eyes are streaming now, tears tracking through the bruises on her face, and she doesn't wipe them away.
"She's in there. I can see her. She's in there right now, looking out at me through your eyes, and she's screaming, Sel.
The girl I love is screaming, and you won't let her out. "
The words hit me in a place I didn't know was still exposed.
Below the armor, below the collar, below the woman who walked into a factory tonight and did what needed to be done.
They hit the girl who slept in Emilia's guest room and wore an ugly purple friendship bracelet and thought that if she could just be good enough, work hard enough, build a life clean enough, the grief might eventually become something she could carry instead of something that carried her.
That girl isn't gone. Emilia's right.
She's in here, somewhere behind my sternum, and she's screaming.
"What do you want me to say?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. "That I'll leave him? That I'll walk away and go back to law school and pretend none of this happened? I can't, Em. It's not that simple."
"It is that simple. You get up, you walk out, you call the FBI. You tell them everything. You save yourself."
"Save myself from what? He is my life. This is my life. I didn't choose it, but I—"
"You did choose it." The words come out sharp.
The first real anger she's shown, cutting through the grief like a blade.
"You chose it every single day you didn't leave.
You chose it when you put on that thing around your neck.
You chose it tonight when you picked up a knife instead of a phone.
Don't tell me you didn't have a choice, Selene.
You had a hundred choices, and you chose him every time. "
The silence after that is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
She's right. She's right, and I know she's right, and the knowing doesn't change anything because the choice is already made.
It was made before tonight, before the factory, before the knife, before the blood.
It was made in the dark of his office with his mouth between my legs and his collar on my throat and the quiet, devastating recognition that I am exactly where I want to be.
"I can't be in your life anymore," Emilia says.
The anger is gone, already spent. What's left is exhaustion and grief and a love that's tearing itself apart because it doesn't know how to exist alongside what I've become.
"I love you, Sel. I will always love you.
You're my sister, and nothing changes that.
But I can't watch you become this. I can't sit across from you at brunch knowing what I know now and pretend that the woman drinking mimosas with me didn't kill someone with her bare hands. "
"Em—"
"And I'm scared of you." Her voice breaks on the word. "I'm actually scared of you, and I hate that, because I've never been scared of you, not once in all the years we've been friends, and now I look at you and I don't know who I'm looking at."
I reach for her hand. She doesn't pull away, but she doesn't hold on either.
Her fingers sit in mine, limp, and the passivity of it is worse than rejection. It's a hand that's already let go.
"What about your dad?" I ask. Because I need to know. Because Judge Hart is a thread I can't see the end of, and if Emilia tells him what she knows—
"I won't tell him." She reads the fear on my face and something in her expression shifts.
Sadness, maybe. That even now, even in this moment, I'm calculating.
"Not because I'm protecting you. Because it would destroy him.
He loves you like a daughter, Selene. Finding out what you've become.
..finding out what happened to your parents and who you're with. ..it would break him."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I'm not doing it for you."
She turns her face toward the wall. The conversation is over. I can feel it closing, the way you feel a door closing when you're on the wrong side of it.
I stand, but my legs feel hollow.
I lean down and press my lips to her forehead, the way Cassius pressed his to mine in the staging room before the rescue, and Emilia lets me but she doesn't lean into it.
She holds perfectly still, like a person enduring a touch they no longer want but aren't cruel enough to refuse.
"I love you," I say against her skin.
"I know," she whispers. "That's the worst part."
I leave the room and close the door behind me, stand in the hallway with my back against the wall and my hand pressed over my mouth and finally, finally let the sound out.
Not a sob. Something deeper. Something that comes from the place where Emilia lived inside me for years, the room she occupied in my chest that is now empty and echoing and will never be filled by anyone else because there is no one else.
There is no one left who knew the girl I was before.
Dr. Tate appears at the end of the hall. She sees my face and doesn't approach. Just nods once and goes back to the kitchen, and I'm grateful for the mercy of someone who knows when to leave a person alone with their wreckage.
The car Cassius sent is waiting outside.
I get in the back and Lionel drives.
I don't speak, don't look at my phone, don't do anything but sit in the dark with my fist pressed against my chest and watch the city slide past the window.
I reach into my pocket.
The collar key is there, small and brass and warm from my body heat.
I've been carrying it since the night Cassius slid it under my apartment door. Through the brunch with Emilia. Through the move to the penthouse. Through the knife scene and the office and the war room and the factory. Through all of it, this key has been in my pocket, and I haven't used it.
I close my fingers around it and hold it tight enough that the metal bites into my palm, and I think about what Emilia said. You chose him every time.
She's right.
I did.
The penthouse is dark when I arrive.
Not empty—I can feel him before I see him, the way I always can, like a frequency my body is tuned to whether I want to be or not.
He's on the couch in the living room.
Whiskey in hand. No lights except the city coming through the windows, and he's a silhouette against the skyline, all sharp edges and shadow.
He watches me come in, and his eyes move over me once.
The black clothes. The rolled-up sleeves. The collar.
My face, which I'm sure looks like something that's been through a war because it has.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't ask how it went or whether Emilia is okay or what she said.
He just waits. The way he waited the night I held a gun to his chest. The way he waited in the office when I crossed the room in his shirt.
Cassius doesn't chase. He holds still and lets me come to him, because he knows, he has always known, that the coming is the choice.
I take the key out of my pocket.
He sees it.
His eyes drop to my hand, to the small brass shape between my fingers, and something crosses his face that's too fast to name. Not fear, exactly. Anticipation. The held breath of a man watching a coin spin in the air.
I walk to the couch, set the key on the coffee table between us. Deliberate. Where we can both see it.
"Emilia is gone," I say.
"I know."
"She can't be part of my life anymore."
"I know."
"You took everything from me." I'm not angry.
The anger burned out somewhere on the drive, used itself up, and what's left is something quieter and more honest and harder to fight.
"My parents. My innocence. My best friend.
My ability to pretend I'm a good person.
" I reach out and trace the scab on his throat from the knife—healing now, a thin dark line that will probably scar. "You've taken everything I had."
"I know."
"And I'm still here." I look at the key on the table.
At the collar on my throat. At the man in the dark who is watching me with an expression that is, for the first time since I've known him, completely unguarded.
"In your home. In your life. Wearing your collar.
With the key right there and the door right there and every reason in the world to walk through it. "
"What does that say about you?" he asks. Not a taunt. A genuine question. Maybe the most genuine question he's ever asked me.
"It says I'm done pretending." I straddle him.
The whiskey glass is in the way, so I take it from his hand and set it on the side table without looking, without breaking eye contact, because if I look away I'll lose the nerve and I can't afford to lose the nerve.
Not tonight. "It says I'm done fighting a battle that's already been won. "
His hands settle on my hips. Gentle. Waiting.
The same way they settled on me in the office, letting me lead, letting me decide the pace and the pressure and the terms.