Chapter 20
SELENE
The dream is always the same.
The corridor in the factory. Fluorescent lights buzzing. The smell of concrete and iron and something chemical I can't name.
I'm running, but the hallway stretches longer with every step, the doors multiplying, the walls narrowing, and I can hear Emilia screaming my name from behind a door I can't find.
I open every one. Every door leads to the same room—concrete walls, exposed pipes, a metal chair bolted to the floor.
Empty. The chair is always empty, and the screaming keeps going, and I keep running, and the blood on my hands is wet and fresh and dripping onto the floor in a trail behind me that I can't stop and can't outrun.
Then I find her. The last door. She's in the chair, but she's not bound.
She's sitting there freely, looking at me with those blue eyes that aren't swollen or bruised or scared.
They're clear. And sad. And she says the same thing every time, in a voice that's calm and steady and worse than any scream.
"I don't know who you are anymore."
I wake up with my heart in my throat and my hands gripping the sheets hard enough that my knuckles ache.
The bedroom is dark.
The city glows through the windows, and the clock on the nightstand reads 2:17 a.m. Cassius is beside me. Not asleep—I can tell by the quality of his stillness.
The difference between his sleeping silence and his waking silence is something I've learned to read the way I read everything about him now, in the small details that most people would miss.
He doesn't ask what I dreamed. He already knows.
Not the specifics—I've never told him, and he hasn't asked—but the shape of it.
The way I wake up gasping, the way my hand goes to my throat, to the collar, checking that it's there the way you check for a pulse.
He pulls me closer. One arm around my waist, his chest against my back, his mouth near my ear.
He doesn't speak. Just holds me, and his heartbeat against my spine is slow and steady and eventually mine matches it, the way it always does, my body syncing to his whether I tell it to or not.
I don't fall back asleep. Neither does he.
We lie in the dark and breathe together, and somewhere around four or so, his hand finds mine and our fingers lace together, and that's how the morning finds us. Side by side. Holding on.
The light comes in gray and slow, and I extract myself carefully, sliding out from under his arm and padding barefoot to the kitchen. He'll sleep now, if I let him.
The middle of the night pacing has gotten better since I started sleeping in his bed, though he'd never admit the connection and I'd never point it out.
Coffee. Two cups. His black, mine light.
I set his on the nightstand where he'll find it when he wakes and take mine to the dining table where my laptop is still open from last night's work.
Three more assignments for Harvard and I'm done. The coursework has become background noise, something I do between the real work of restructuring an empire's finances, and my professors have no idea that the case studies I submit are drawn from actual criminal operations happening in real time.
My paper on shell company detection got the highest mark in the class.
It should have. I wrote it while dismantling Zhukov's.
My phone buzzes at eight. Not Cassius—he's in the shower. It's Marco.
There’s a problem at the Flatbush location. The manager Cassius installed two weeks ago is skimming. Small amounts, testing the waters, seeing what he can get away with under the new management structure. Marco found it in the weekly financials and wants to know how I want to handle it.
How I want to handle it. Not how Cassius wants to handle it. Me.
I finish my coffee and pull up the financial records.
The skimming is clumsy—inflated vendor invoices, round numbers that stick out like red flags in a column of legitimate transactions. Amateur work. The kind of theft that a smarter man would have hidden better and a braver man wouldn't have attempted in the first place.
I call Marco. "Pull his access to the accounts. Freeze his operating budget. And set up a meeting for this afternoon—him, me, and Lionel. At Purgatory."
"You want Lionel there?"
"I want Lionel visible. I'll do the talking."
A pause. Marco’s weighing whether to push back, run it past Cassius, or trust the woman who rebuilt his entire department's financial infrastructure in eleven days. "Done," he says.
The meeting happens at three. The manager—a thick-necked man named DeSoto who got the job because he's Lionel's cousin and not because he's qualified—walks in expecting Cassius and finds me instead.
I'm sitting at a table in the back of Purgatory, the club dark and empty in the afternoon, a folder of his doctored invoices open in front of me.
I don't raise my voice. I don't threaten.
I show him the numbers, line by line, and watch the color drain from his face as he realizes that every shortcut he took is documented, dated, and traceable.
Then I tell him what happens next: he pays back what he took, plus interest, and he continues managing the location under a revised financial structure with weekly audits that report directly to me.
Or he doesn't, and the conversation moves from this table to a different room in the building. One with worse lighting and no exits.
He pays. Takes out his phone and transfers the money before I've finished my coffee.
Lionel, standing by the door with his arms folded, catches my eye on the way out.
The look he gives me is the same look he's been giving Cassius for twelve years.
Not respect exactly.
The acknowledgment that the person in front of him has the authority to ruin someone's day and the willingness to do it.
I tell Cassius about it that evening, over takeout at the kitchen island.
He listens and sets down his chopsticks. "You handled it without me."
"That's the idea. Isn't it? Partnership means I don't need your permission to manage what's mine."
Something crosses his face.
I've seen it before—the night I walked into the room uninvited, the night I interrogated Alexei, the moment I shoved Emilia out of the line of fire. It's the expression of a man watching something he set in motion exceed the boundaries of what he planned.
Not displeasure. Not quite pride. Something more complicated that lives in the space between wanting to control everything and learning to let go.
"DeSoto is Lionel's cousin," he says.
"I know. Lionel watched me do it. He didn't object."
Cassius picks up his chopsticks. Goes back to eating. "Good."
That's all he says.
Later, after he's gone to bed and the penthouse is quiet, I stand at the windows with a glass of whiskey I'm not drinking and think about DeSoto's face when he realized every dollar was accounted for.
About Lionel's nod. About the word "good" and how much weight it carried coming from a man who doesn't waste words.
I think about my mother, who spent her career holding powerful people accountable in courtrooms. I think about my father, who spent his making sure the system worked the way it was supposed to.
I haven't visited them since before I knew the truth.
Tomorrow. I have to go. It's been far too long.
The cemetery is in Queens.
Small, well-kept, the kind of place where the headstones are close together, the paths between them are narrow, and the trees have been growing long enough to provide shade that nobody asked for.
I haven't been here since before I knew.
The last time I stood in front of these graves, I was a different person. A girl who believed her parents died because the world is random and cruel and sometimes the people you love get taken for no reason at all.
I brought flowers that time. White lilies, because my mother loved them. I stood here and cried and told them I missed them and promised I was building a life they'd be proud of.
I don't bring flowers today.
I bring two coffees. Medium roast, one black, one with cream and two sugars.
The Sunday morning order, unchanged for as long as I can remember. Dad at the kitchen table with the newspaper, mom at the counter with her legal briefs, both of them holding cups that never seemed to empty because they kept refilling each other's without being asked.
The small, automatic kindness of people who have loved each other so long that the gestures become involuntary. Like breathing. Like a heartbeat.
I set the black coffee on Dad's headstone. The sweet one on Mom's. Keep my hands empty.
THOMAS DEVERAUX Beloved husband, father, servant of justice 1962–2015
CATHERINE MARIE DEVERAUX Beloved wife, mother, defender of the voiceless 1965–2015
I stand there for a long time. The wind moves through the trees and somewhere on the next row over, a sprinkler clicks and hisses in a lazy rhythm. The world is quiet the way it only gets in places where the dead outnumber the living.
"I know about him," I say. My voice sounds strange out loud, too small for the open air.
"I know who did it. I know why. I know every detail, because the man who pulled the trigger told me himself, sitting in his living room, drinking whiskey like confessing to murder was just another item on his evening agenda. "
The headstones don't answer. I didn't expect them to.
"And I'm with him. I'm with the man who killed you, and I love him, and if you could see me right now you'd..." I stop.
Swallow. The coffee is cooling on the stone, untouched, and the cream in mom's is separating the way it always did when she forgot to stir it.
"You'd be horrified. Dad, you'd try to prosecute him.
Mom, you'd try to save me. And neither of you would understand, because what I've become doesn't fit inside the world you raised me in. "
A jogger passes on the path behind me. Headphones in, oblivious. The normal world, three feet away, not noticing the woman talking to the dead.