HIS RUIN

CHAPTER FIVE

Enzo Crest smiles at her when they meet and every professional instinct Ann has fires simultaneously.

She recognizes the type before he finishes crossing the room — the one who does the feeling so the other one doesn't have to. The one who watches while everyone else performs. The one who has spent years in proximity to power and learned that the most useful thing he can be is the person who actually understands what is happening in the room. She has encountered versions of him before. They are always the most dangerous person present and always the least acknowledged for it.

She recalibrates her approach mid-handshake.

"Ann Turano," he says. "I've heard about you."

"Good things, I hope," she says. Warm. Easy. The version of herself most likely to disarm.

"Interesting things," Enzo says.

His eyes are doing the same thing his brother's eyes do — that focused quality of genuine assessment — except where Damien's attention feels like being studied, Enzo's feels like being read. Like he is not just cataloguing information but drawing conclusions and she is already several steps behind the conclusions he has reached.

"Interesting how?" she asks.

"Damien doesn't bring people into the inner workings quickly," Enzo says pleasantly. "He's brought you in quickly."

"We have compatible business interests."

"Mm." He picks up a glass from a passing tray and holds it without drinking. "You're very good at that."

Ann keeps her expression warm. "At what?"

"Becoming what the room needs." He says it without accusation, without edge, with the specific casual delivery of someone stating an observation rather than launching an attack. "Most people perform for rooms. You — transform. It's quite something to watch."

The words land somewhere beneath her sternum and stay there.

She has been performing for rooms since she was seventeen years old. She has been so good at it for so long that she stopped noticing the performance — stopped feeling the gap between what the room needed and what she actually was. Nobody has ever named it. Nobody has ever looked at her performance and seen the performer underneath with enough clarity to describe it back to her in twenty-three words over a drink they aren't even drinking.

She laughs lightly. Redirects. Says something clever about the nature of consulting work and the necessity of adaptability and Enzo listens to all of it with that same pleasant, unconvinced expression.

When she leaves the room she can feel his attention on her back all the way to the door.

That night Ann sits at her kitchen counter with a glass of water she doesn't drink and thinks about what he said.

Becoming what the room needs.

She turns it over. Examines it the way she does not usually examine things about herself because examining things about yourself is a vulnerability and vulnerabilities are things she was trained out of systematically and completely.

But the question comes anyway, quiet and persistent and entirely unwelcome —

What would she be if the room didn't need anything?

She has no answer.

She has not had an answer to that question in ten years.

She goes to bed and lies in the dark and listens to the city outside her window and wonders, for the first time in a very long time, whether there is anything left of whoever she was before Mara found her and made her into something exceptional.

She does not find out tonight.

She is beginning to suspect she will not be able to avoid finding out for very much longer.