Chapter 27 Selene
SELENE
Vomit splashes in the kitchen sink.
Hot, rancid chunks of a meal I can’t remember consuming stare back at me from the bottom of a stainless steel sink that, seconds ago, was spotless. I cleaned it myself, and if I look past the mess, I can remember what it looked like before it was ruined.
Just like I can recall what I looked like, what I felt like, before I found out the truth behind my son’s death. Before my grief was restructured, before the pain that runs like currents in the marrow of my bones was reshaped with Jordan’s words, made over by the dark verity of Aubrey’s soul.
A monster.
I married a monster. I made him a father. I bore him a child he turned into a sacrificial lamb, and I missed every sign that he was a butcher, that our home was a slaughter house.
My nails scrape against the underside of the marble encasing the sink. Strands of my hair cling to the faucet, caught in the fine grooves while I heave once again, spilling what little is left inside of my stomach.
It’s the only sound in the room.
No one moves or speaks, and I don’t know if I’m thankful for the silence or bothered by it. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters because my son is dead and his father, the man I loved, the man I married, the man I chose, killed him.
Killed him.
Our baby.
My baby.
My blood. My flesh. My bone.
A life that started with our love ended by his obsession with power. A body I built from scratch—hands, feet, fingers, toes, a precious face and my father’s nose—rotting in a grave and for what? For money? For dominion? For influence and notoriety? How could any of it be worth our son’s life?
The questions I mean to keep to myself flow out of my mouth.
They are met with nothing but silence, which is fine because I don’t want anyone interrupting me.
I don’t need a single voice or word of compassion getting in the way of the scream that builds inside of me, beating the bile up my throat and splitting the air.
It’s not enough.
I spin, feeling strands of hair pull and snap as I go, and, still screaming, grab the closest thing to me and launch it at the wall. It’s a glass vase filled with hydrangeas, and I watch the lovely purple petals explode into the air, raining down in a cloud of glass and water that lands at my feet.
Jordan flinches, and Sam steps between us, shielding her from me because I’m still screaming and looking for another thing to destroy.
He’s right to be concerned that the next thing might be her because she’s the closest thing to Aubrey in this room.
Glass crunches under my feet as I cross the space between the island and dining area, dragging water and crushed petals along with me.
The scream is nothing more than a low whine in the back of my throat by the time I’m in Sam’s face.
“Move.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am.”
“Get the fuck out of her way,” Cal barks.
I can’t look at him. I can’t meet the eyes of any of the people I love in this room because I don’t want to see. The judgment. The confusion. The questions about all the things I must have missed.
Sam looks at him though, and whatever he sees must be enough to scare him because he shifts out of my way, revealing Jordan’s sunken eyes and hollow cheeks.
She’s so thin, fragile almost, but it doesn’t stop me from drawing my hand back and bringing it down across her face.
My palm stings, but there’s no satisfaction in the pain.
I have this horrible, sinking suspicion that nothing will ever satisfy me again.
To her credit, Jordan takes the blow like a champ. She covers the imprint of my splayed fingers with her hand and glares at me as she turns her head back in my direction.
“I understand that you’re upset,” she rasps.
I slap her again, gripping her hair before she can recover and forcing her up out of her seat because I need her standing. Tears bloom in her eyes, skating down her cheeks as she searches for compassion that doesn’t exist inside of me right now.
“Is that all you have?” I growl. “White woman tears? My son is dead, Jordan. HE’S DEAD AND HIS FATHER KILLED HIM, AND YOU HAVE THE NERVE TO SIT HERE CRYING LIKE YOU’RE SOME KIND OF VICTIM?!”
“That’s enough,” Sam says, standing too close to me. “You’re upset. That’s understandable, but—”
“Step back, Granger.”
Cal is closer now, and Beck is radiating rage from not too far behind. I don’t know which one of them pulls Sam away, but he goes screaming. “She’s pregnant! Please don’t hurt her. She’s pregnant.”
“Sam!” Jordan gasps, cutting frantic eyes at him.
My fingers relax, and I stumble back, staring at the stomach Jordan now has a protective hand over. Suddenly, I’m lost in a sea of memories, drowning in flashes of a past that was never real, every image once colored in love now tarnished.
I swallow, tasting the remnants of my regurgitated meal. “How far along?”
“Who cares?” Monique mumbles. She’s slouched down in her seat, tears streaming down her face that she doesn’t bother to wipe away.
It’s such a clear demonstration of grief, a tangible representation of the promise she made months ago to carry the weight of my son’s loss with me.
Neither of us knew then that we’d be starting the process all over again.
“Eleven weeks,” Jordan whispers. “We were keeping it quiet until I made it past the first trimester.”
“Makes sense why you’ve looked so awful lately. Between the pregnancy and guilty conscience, it must feel like you’re being eaten alive.”
An embarrassed blush rides high on her cheeks. “I didn’t know what he was, Selene. When I started working with him, I thought he was like every other candidate. Entitled. Egotistical. A little sadistic, maybe. But I had no clue he was…”
“Capable of killing his own child.”
She nods, lips trembling. “He didn’t tell me the truth about AJ until the night of the debate. Do you remember?”
“I remember saying Sanders would keep digging and you telling me that there was nothing left for him to find.”
The look Cordelia and Aubrey shared that night passes through my mind, reminding me that I knew Jordan was wrong. I just had no idea how wrong.
“I believed it when I said it,” Jordan insists.
“I know you did. How long did they wait to tell you the truth?”
“Not long. After you went back to bed, Cordelia forced Aubrey to fill me in. He was almost…excited to tell me what he’d done.
How Gambit laid it all out for him, explaining that killing Aubrey Jr. would raise his profile immediately, that suddenly voters would know him, like him, feel for him in a way they hadn’t previously.
The school shooting angle was an added bonus, allowing them to take it from a regular tragedy to a political issue he could build a career off of. ”
“I was in the next room.”
A wave of nausea sweeps through me, but I push it down, knowing it doesn’t matter now.
That it wouldn’t have mattered then. My knees are weak, and they shake as I return to my seat.
Monique grabs my hand immediately, but I still can’t look at her.
Jordan lets out a weary sigh. She looks tired, but she remains standing, leaning against the back of the chair I pulled her out of.
“It didn’t matter to them, Selene. Cordelia said it was the only way I would understand the gravity of what we had to do next.”
“Get rid of Sanders.”
“Yes, they knew you were right about him digging deeper. I was adamant that if Sanders had caught even a whiff of what they’d done he would have put all of his focus on that instead of the affair.”
“Absolutely. He probably wouldn’t have gone public, though.”
“No,” Jordan agrees. “He would have used it to take Aubrey off the board completely. Maybe even parlayed it into a lifelong blackmail situation.”
“And I would have never known the truth.”
“Probably not.”
“How did they do it?”
The question comes from Cal, and now that I finally have the courage to look at him, I’m able to see that neither he nor Beck are holding on to Sam anymore. They’re all standing back, giving Jordan and I space to talk. Sam is still fuming about me abusing Jordan, shooting daggers at me from afar.
“Langham injected him with something while he was drinking his morning coffee on his patio,” she says. “I didn’t ask for specifics, and they didn’t offer any. After they sent me to pay off the coroner to leave the puncture wound behind his ear off of the report, no one ever mentioned it again.”
“How do they know each other?” Monique asks.
“I think he went to college with Phineas or something? I don’t know. They’re thick as thieves, though, and Phineas trusts him implicitly.”
Beck snorts derisively. “He would have to in order to send him to assassinate a President.”
“It’s not just trust,” Jordan says, some unnamed emotion swirling through emerald eyes. “It’s a shared sickness. Phineas takes great pleasure in pulling people’s strings, but Langham is the one he sends to sever them, and he loves it. The violence. The fear….”
I can’t reconcile the man she’s describing against the one who I met that day outside of Beaumont High. The one who appeared genuinely sad at my son’s funeral. How had I missed it? The darkness lurking inside of him? Inside of Aubrey?
Monique gestures at Jordan’s throat. “Langham is the one who did that to you.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re really on the outs with them,” Mo replies. “And now you’re here hoping Selene can save you from the monsters you gladly climbed in bed with.”
Her succinct summary makes Jordan’s hackles rise. “I’m here to help, Monique.”
“But all you’ve done so far is hurt, Jordan. You’ve broke my best friend’s heart with these stories—”
“They’re not stories!” She yanks her collar down, baring her neck once again.
“Langham almost killed me. That’s the truth.
Aubrey conspired with Cordelia and Phineas to have his son killed.
That’s the truth. They assassinated a fucking President to keep him and everyone else from finding out. THAT’S THE TRUTH!”
“You’re here to cover your ass,” Monique shoots back. “That’s the truth too.”
Frustrated, Jordan shifts her attention back to me. “Marsh is dead.”
The revelation lands like a bomb, sending shock waves through the entire room.
Everyone besides Sam and me begin shouting questions.
Jordan deals with this inquisition much better than she did the one during the press conference, probably because she’s not lying.
She explains, mostly to Cal and Beck because the majority of the inquiries are coming from them, that Phineas wasn’t on board with Aubrey’s idea to break Marsh out to take care of me.
He wanted Langham to do it, but Aubrey was insistent, saying that they needed someone with a clear motive, not another mysterious death.
Of course, things didn’t go to plan, and Phineas ordered Woodard and Garrison to kill Marsh because he kept demanding more money for a job he wasn’t motivated to complete.
“They posed his body on White House grounds. The story will run tomorrow, and they’ll say that he was killed while attempting to breach the perimeter to get to you.”
I rest my elbows on the table, holding my head in my hands. “What happens now? Do I wake up with Travis Langham on top of me with his hands around my throat?”
“That’s not going to happen,” Beck assures me.
“No,” Jordan says. “What happens next is you do the one thing I can’t.”
“Expose them.”
A heavy sigh from Monique follows my words.
I know she’s suppressing the urge to launch into a speech about white women depending on Black women to be brave enough to dismantle the systems they’ve benefited from their entire lives.
I understand her frustration. Jordan could easily expose the world she’s been a part of for so long.
She could take the recordings she’s dangling over my head and go straight to the press.
They’d believe her before they’d ever believe me.
“Listen, Selene. I wouldn’t be bringing this to you if I felt like there was anyone else who could take them on and not be bought, bribed or killed in the process.”
I drop my hands, staring into her earnest expression. “Like they bought you.”
She rears back. “Selene, I—”
“You don’t get points for being here, Jordan.
You don’t get an award for running to a trusted adult when the wolf you brought home and hid under your bed decides it wants to eat you for dinner.
You are complicit in all of this, and maybe you didn’t know everything at first, but when you found out, you did nothing. ”
“I’m doing something now.”
“WHEN IT’S TOO LATE!” I shout, slamming my fists on the table.
“Too late for Sutton and President Sanders and whoever else they’ve hurt along the way.
” My chair flies out from under me as I stand, voice shaking, heart pounding with the injustice of it all.
“It is too late for my baby, Jordan, but congratulations on being able to save yours. Maybe the prison guards will let you hold them before they carry it away and send you back to your cell.”
Her eyes go wide, and Sam steps forward now, wrapping an arm around her shoulders as the image I’ve just painted sends her into hysterics.
I want to laugh, to ask her if she really thought there was any amount of information she could give, any plea she could make that would spare her from the hell I’m about to rain down on all of them.
Maybe she thought the news of her pregnancy would save her, but somehow knowing she’s carrying new life while the one I nurtured and grew in my womb was stolen from me by a man she’s protected for months makes it all worse.
My palms twitch with the desire to slap her again. Sam must see the desire because he urges her back.
“Let’s go,” he whispers. No one tries to stop them as he guides her out of the room, but just before they disappear from view, Jordan pauses.
“I’ll send the files,” she says, wiping away tears that don’t move me at all. “They’ll be in your inbox before the end of the night.”
“Great.”
“And Selene?” I arch a brow, urging her to continue. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
A bitter laugh breaks the tension in the room. “Oh, Jordan. Your apology isn’t worth a God damn thing to me.”