Page 43 of Sweet Ruin

“Simply correcting the record.”

She breathes out. She’s been doing that this whole time, using her own breath to talk herself down off a ledge. It’s working, more or less. I can hear her getting ready to leave.

“Oh. Well, okay. Thanks, I guess.” Her feet shuffle on the tile floor. “Anyway… I should get out there before somebody sends a search party.” Then, faster, the way people say a line they’ve said a thousand times: “Not that I’m hard to find. Big girl, you know?”

She waits for the laugh.

But I’m not going to fucking laugh.

I let the joke wither and die, even as I feel her cringing in the silence.

I don’t pity her. I’m enraged on her behalf. Connor Boyd let a woman this powerful come to hate him? He left her behind for, what—some vapid fool of a sister?

I loathe him even more than I did before I arrived here tonight.

But that’s a problem to deal with later. Right now, there’s something else I’d like to address.

I look at the shimmering shape of this woman in the darkness. She’s still waiting for me to respond to her horrible joke.

All I say is…

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

She blinks. “Sorry?”

“That.” I gesture at her. “Whatever the fuck that was.”

“It was a joke,” she mutters defensively.

“Then it was a fucking terrible one. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend your⁠—”

“Offend me?” I interrupt. “You don’t have to give a damn about me, sladkaya. To you, I’m nothing but a mass in the darkness. And I don’t need or want or give a shit about your apologies. No—apologize to yourself.”

“For what? It’s true.”

“Wrong.”

Her chin rises up. “How the hell would you know?”

“Have we not been a foot apart for the last ten minutes?”

“It’s dark. You don’t even know what I⁠—”

“Do you think I don’t know what’s standing in front of me?”

She’s a fucking marvel. She’s an absolutely miraculous fucking marvel and yet she has no idea. Somebody in that living room has worked very hard to keep it that way.

Not many women would dare to do what she’s about to do.

I refuse to let the ghosts of her past talk her out of it.

“I…” But she doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes?”

“You… Nobody does that,” she says. “Nobody gives speeches to a stranger in the dark like that.”