Page 106 of Ruin
“Perfect. Leave.”
She blinks at me, then looks for confirmation from Vin, who shrugs and sighs. Then she nods again and scurries down the hall.
Vin whistles low. “Cold, brother.”
I don’t answer, and he stands taller, giving me his serious look, the one that means I’m about to get a lecture.
“You don’t have to fuck anyone or kill yourself with work or get another fucking degree to get to a place where you can enjoy life again. But you have to do something. You can’t keep living like this. It’s been almost a year since you guys split, and the New Year’s Eve gala is coming up again in a few weeks.”
I shake my head. “No fucking way.” If Giovanna is there, there’s no fucking way I’m keeping my hands off her.
“No, you’re going. I need you there to help me finesse some people who could be useful in our upcoming war.” He smacks me in the chest. “In the meantime, do what you have to do to find your purpose again.”
Giovanna is my purpose. But I hear what he’s saying. I give him a short nod, and his eyes light up, happy that I’m actually listening to him.
**
Standing in front of the apartment I bought for Giovanna on the Upper West Side, I suck in a deep breath and steel myself. I haven’t been back here since Gi left. For the first few weeks, I drank myself into a stupor at my suite in Dragovari Tower until Vin and Matti came and pulled me out, put my knife back in my hand, and put me back to work.
There’s no such thing as healing after being with Giovanna. But I have tools I’ve never had before: every social coping mechanism that Gi taught me, I’m using. I smile when people bore me. Nod when I don’t care about what they’re saying. Come up with pithy small talk when I’d rather be just about anywhere else.
Now, in front of the building where she began the process of crushing my fucking life, I search for the right coping mechanism to apply: pretend to be okay, to be normal, until I get through it.
It’s time to reclaim our home.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get Giovanna back, but I will be here, in our home, waiting just in case. Not rotting in Dragovari Tower.
With the turn of the knob, the apartment opens like a wound. The air is stale, like it’s been holding its breath for the past year. Every step echoes too loud. It’s too still, too quiet.
As I move through the rooms, I feel like an intruder in an alternate dimension. This version of me shouldn’t be here, and I consider turning around and walking back out the door, handing the keys to a realtor and never looking back. But I keep moving. My chest is tight, but my stride is even, measured.
In the bedroom, the smell of her perfume is gone. There’sa layer of dust on everything, the bed sheets and blankets are rumpled, and the chair I sat in watching her sleep that last night is still in its place.
Touching nothing, I walk through, feeling like a ghost. Then I see it. The ring I gave her. The one she said she’d give back to me at the altar one day.
It dangles from the chain she broke off her neck that night, a perfect circle of metal heavy enough to crush my soul. I pick it up, and the air leaves me.
I tell myself it’s just a circle, perfect geometry, my specialty, a closed system with no escape. I taught Gi about systems like that, how everything feeds back into itself, how some loops you can’t break without tearing the whole thing apart. But here I am holding our loop, perfectly intact, while the relationship it represents is destroyed.
It’s cold in my palm. I close my fist around it, then open my hand, close again, then open, again and again. I stare at it like this, disappearing and reappearing in my hand, for far too long.
I slide it onto my finger. Not my ring finger on my left hand that made Giovanna lose her shit all those years ago, but the ring finger on my right. It’s heavy, solid. An anchor.
I’ll wear it until she finds her way back to me. Until I make her see reason. Until I have her back in my bed where she belongs.
47
Giovanna
Christmas Day in the city feels quieter than I expected. Snow and ice have started to crust the edges of Bleeker Street, muffling the usual noise, and I sit cross-legged on my couch with a blanket wrapped around me. The apartment is dark except for the glow of my laptop and the Christmas lights on the tree that reflect off the open bottle of wine on the coffee table beside me.
It’s cozy, quiet. Peaceful. So much better than the childhood worth of Christmases I spent when my parents would go on separate vacations and leave me with staff.
It’s the first Christmas I’ve chosen to spend in the city, away from Long Island. It’s also the first Christmas without Tommy, and I couldn’t risk going back home and running into him.
The last time I saw him was here in my apartment, my blood dripping from his knife. He didn’t speak to me when he left, and I haven’t heard from him or seen him since. I still have the sheets stained with my blood folded in the back of the closet, though I don’t use them. I don’t need to. Thescar on my inner thigh is enough, a secret pressed into me, keeping him close even as I work hard to pretend that he is a part of my past.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table, and for some reason, though I haven’t heard from him in months, my heart leaps. Is it Tommy? It is Christmas, after all. Maybe—
