All Chapters of His Ruin: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

ARMANI *Who are you?* Eight months and she picks tonight to ask. Not a random Tuesday. Not after one of those late conversations where something almost real slipped through before one of us pulled it back. Tonight. When her fiancé had brutally thrust inside her best friend in doggy style and her father had looked her in the eye and told her it didn’t matter. Tonight was when Drisana Varma finally wanted to know who I was. I watched her through the camera I planted by the nightlight at her door. Positioned to cover the entire room. She thought the laptop camera was the only one. She had taped over it three weeks after I let the ring habit slip, my one moment of sloppiness in eight months, a mistake I wouldn’t repeat. She checked the tape religiously every night before bed, pressing her finger against it like a small private ritual. It almost made me smile every time. She was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, phone in both hands, lower lip caught between her teeth

ARMANI “Will you be my boyfriend?” I stared at her. If I said that didn’t catch me off guard I’d be lying. It was so sudden. There she goes again. Amusing me without doing too much. She stared back with her chin up like whatever she had just asked was completely normal. The courage of this woman was something else. I looked away first. I pulled my hood further forward. “I—” I cleared my throat. “What?” “You heard me. Will you be my boyfriend?” She asked again. “But—But I don’t know you.” “Duh…I know that.” She shifted her weight. “It’s not going to be real. It’ll be a fake relationship. I just need someone to play the part for a while. My ex won’t leave me alone unless there’s someone else in the picture.” Your ex who is already handled. Your father who has never listened to anything that inconvenienced him. But go on. “That’s—” I scratched the back of my neck. “I’m not good at fake.” “Trust me, it’s not that deep. We pretend. I pay you. Nobody gets hurt.” “

Armani I stared at her message on the screen. See you in class tomorrow, Rian. She knew. Not suspected or guessed. She fucking knew. I sat completely still in my chair and pressed my thumb hard into the scar on my left hand until the skin split and stung. I thought I still had weeks left to mess with her, to watch her slowly unravel without her realizing who was pulling the strings. But she’d moved first. Or maybe she was bluffing, trying to force my hand. Which one is it, Dri? Bluff or real? Either way, you just made my cock hard. I had a glitch in the camera feeds earlier today. Someone had been poking at the signal. Could’ve been Enzo. Could’ve been one of the crews I burned last year. Or it could be her. I’d gone through her phone and laptop again last night. Nothing. No searches, no messages to friends, no late-night digging. Everything is clean. I leaned forward and pulled up the live feed. She was moving around her room holding a phone with a black case I’d

Armani She was asleep beside me, breathing soft and even, and I was losing my fucking mind. The silk scarf she had found earlier still sat in the drawer like evidence. I had watched her go very still when she saw it. She had pretended nothing was wrong, but I saw the slight tremble in her fingers. That fear mixed with defiance made my blood run hot. I turned onto my side and studied her in the dark. The way her hair spilled across the pillow. The rise and fall of her chest under my shirt that she had borrowed. She had no idea how many nights I had imagined her exactly like this, in my bed, wearing my clothes, breathing my air. My cock was hard again. Painfully so. I wanted to wake her up with my mouth between her thighs. I wanted to hear her gasp my real name when I made her come. I wanted to ruin the careful control she was clinging to. Instead, I stayed perfectly still and kept watching her, as I had for years. * I was sitting in the wooden chair by the window, workin

Armani The city lights blurred below me as I took another drag from the cigarette, the smoke burning my lungs in a way that almost felt good. Up here on the rooftop, the cold breeze did nothing to cool the fire in my blood. I replayed the night in my head. The man Enzo sent to test my loyalty. The way his neck had snapped under my hands when he asked too many questions about Drisana. The blood on my shirt. The way I had washed it off downstairs like it was nothing. All of it should have mattered more. It should have reminded me why I was here, to destroy the Varma family from the inside. To deliver Drisana’s secrets to Enzo on a silver platter. Instead, all I could think about was the woman sleeping in my bed twenty floors below. My cock was still half-hard just from the memory of her in the shower earlier. Naked. Wet. Perfect. The way her breath had caught when our eyes met through the steam. The way she had screamed at me while her nipples stayed tight and her thighs pressed tog