34. Sean
SEAN
When the gun clears David’s jacket, my pulse slows.
Not speeds—slows. The old reflex kicks in like a switch. I let gravity take my weight into the wall, absorb the tremor in my legs, count a long four in, hold, four out. The world narrows to the shape of a black muzzle and the faint tremble of fabric where his sleeve lifts with his breath.
The barrel is pointed at Bailey.
I don’t move. I don’t dare. If I break cover, if I crash through the window or kick in the door, David’s finger might twitch. A twitch is all it takes to end her.
So I hold.
Bailey stands in the middle of it, rigid, face pale but chin high, hands clenched hard enough to blanch her knuckles. She looks like something cut from marble and heated from the inside.
Friedburg stumbles back, cane clattering. Shock scrapes his features clean of charm. An old man suddenly very small in his own house. His mouth works but he doesn’t speak.
David is a statue, locked from jaw to hip. He’s trying to look calm, but I see the live wires under his skin, the vindictive heat inside his eyes. The gun in his hand doesn’t look separate from him. It looks like the truest thing he’s ever held.
Bailey stands tall, brave. But brave won’t stop a bullet.
Movement ghosts along the far windows. At first I chalk it up to flames playing tricks, but then I catch the profiles. Broad shoulders. Precise feet. No wasted motion.
Huck. Wesley.
David’s trigger finger rides the curve like he’s never done more than pose with a prop. Pad on the metal, not the crease. I watch that finger like it’s the only thing in the world.
I measure my options and then discard them one at a time. Door is loud. Glass is louder. Any crash starts him. Startle equals squeeze. Squeeze equals Bailey on the floor with me a second too late to matter.
So I wait, and I hate it.
Bailey takes a breath you can’t see unless you know her. A tiny lift under her collarbone. She doesn’t know we’re here. She thinks she’s alone. And she still refuses to cower.
God, I love her.
David licks his lips. “You never appreciated me, Bailey. Not once. I gave you everything. And what did you give me back? Complaints. Whining. Always acting like you were owed more than what you got. You were the worst submissive I’ve ever had.
Always testing. Always pulling away. Always crying your safewords when things got a little messy. ”
The word “safewords” lands like a bruise. A deliberate swing. He’s dragging consent language into a place it doesn’t belong, trying to frame cruelty as kink and her survival as performance. My stomach turns.
David takes a step, the muzzle coming with him. “Do you know how humiliating it is? To have a wife who can’t handle what’s expected of her? Who plays the victim when she’s the problem? I carried you. I gave you a home, a name, a career. You owe me.”
He glances sideways to pull Friedburg in. “You know me. You’ve known me for years. You’ve seen what I’ve built. Is this what I get? After everything I’ve done for her? For you?”
Friedburg swallows, voice papery. “David…a gun?—”
“I wouldn’t need a gun,” David snaps without looking away from Bailey, “if she told the truth for once.”
Bailey’s chin angles up. “The only thing I owe you is the truth.”
David’s smile is a small, cruel thing. “Truth? You don’t know what that word means.”
She takes a single step. My chest tightens. The gun tracks her like a needle finding center. But she doesn’t break. “The truth is, the only reason you ever got mad at me was because you were terrible at everything you do.”
The air goes thin. Even the fire quiets.
She doesn’t stop. “You were a lousy husband, a worse partner, and an even worse businessman. The only thing you’ve ever had going for you is a family name attached to a fortune you didn’t earn.”
I want to get my hand over her mouth and drag the last part back down her throat before it comes out. Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s a lit match.
“And do you want the real truth, David?”
As much as I admire the tenacity, now is not the time.
She leans forward. “You never once made me come.”
Silence falls like a dropped curtain.
For a beat, no one breathes.
Then David’s face fractures. Not much. Just enough to show what’s underneath. His mouth twitches, his eyes flash something animal and male and stupid. The hand on the gun jerks a half inch before he clamps down harder. His knuckles go the color of old bone.
“Careful,” I whisper to the glass, to her, to anyone who’ll listen in my head. Pride swells hot in my chest, and fear spikes colder and sharper.
David’s stance is trash. He’s got his weight stacked wrong and his elbows locked, which means recoil will throw him off if he fires. But at six feet? He can still land the shot.
Friedburg tries to step forward, an old reflex toward mediation. He’s about to say something performative— Let’s all calm down —and I want to reach through the glass and choke it back into him. This is not his stage. He made the stage possible, yes. But he is not in this play anymore.
“Stay back,” David snaps, flicking the muzzle at him without looking. “This is between husband and wife.”
The word husband tears something in me I thought scar tissue had fixed. I taste dirt and cordite and a thousand bad rooms. I see a woman in another country behind another pane of glass. Different decade, same posture. Same barrel.
Bailey doesn’t flinch. “You gave me bruises,” she says, and for a beat her voice shakes, a hairline crack you’d miss if you didn’t know where to look.
“And you gave my daughter the kind of memory that wakes her up at night. My son…he’s in pain.
Not because of his arm. Because he knows who you are. You don’t get to call that love.”
Friedburg’s eyes slice to David. You can see the math finally doing itself in his head, ugly numbers resolving to an answer he doesn’t want. “David…she’s saying things I cannot ignore.”
“You’ll ignore them because I paid you,” David shoots back, too fast, too loud, the polish flaking. “Because everything I’ve done has been for my family. For her. For this industry. She’s rewriting history because she likes the attention she gets when she cries.”
“Stop calling me a liar,” Bailey says. “I’m done living in your version of the world.”
I have a list of things I will do to this man the second the barrel points anywhere else. It’s a long list and most of it will leave marks.
Wesley shifts a millimeter to open his hips. He’s making himself a hinge, a pivot, so if I go, he can go on an echo and we don’t crash into each other. Huck loosens his hands. It looks like nerves. It isn’t. It’s to make sure he doesn’t break the bones he’s going to catch.
“Here’s your problem, David,” Bailey says quietly.
“You built your whole life on people not telling the truth to your face. Tonight isn’t going to be like those other nights.
Tonight, you will not win. Do what you want.
Shoot me. Be done with it. You’ll never get away with any of it.
Greg’s gate logs everyone who comes here.
His staff know you’re here too. You lost everything the moment you walked in that door with a gun in your pocket.
” She levels her shoulders, glaring dead into his eyes.
“You needed a gun to scare a woman and an old man. You’re pathetic.
You’ve always been pathetic. That’s why you hit your wife.
That’s why you broke my son’s arm. Because you’re weak, and you know it. ”
I feel the line hit his bones.
His jaw quivers. The gun dips a fraction, then whips back—panic glued onto rage. He draws breath like he’s going to spit a word he can’t take back. His hand twitches. “You ungrateful?—”