Chapter 31 Selene
SELENE
“Ithink I’m going to be sick.”
Everything stops.
Well, Cal and Beck stop, pausing on the stairs that lead up to the bedroom I shared with Aubrey for so many years, but the nausea refuses.
I pull in a breath through my nose and push it out in a quiet hiss through my teeth, willing my heart rate to slow.
When the breathing doesn’t help, I bend at the waist and study the disposable booties on my feet.
They’re an ugly gray color, connected to the white suit covering my body.
Spunbonded polypropylene.
That’s what it’s made of. I turn the words over in my head. The weight of the syllables drags me back into my body and keep me there. Relieved that the panic and nausea have subsided, I right myself and nod at the men in front of me, signaling that I’m good to continue. They both hesitate.
“We can—” Beck starts, his voice pitched low.
I shake my head. “No, it has to be now. It has to be today.”
He glances at Cal. As they have one of their signature silent conversations, I thank my lucky stars that the group of hookers Gambit sent to Aubrey as a gift for finally closing the Qatari military base deal necessitated the dismissal of his security detail.
Between that and Aubrey killing the cameras throughout the house to ensure his privacy, we couldn’t have asked for better circumstances.
All of which means, no matter what the two loves of my life decide, we’re going up these stairs, and today, we’re ending my husband’s life.
It only takes them seconds to wrap things up, but it might as well be hours given how slow time is moving. Cal warned me that it would be this way. That the moments leading up to the mission would make me feel like I was swimming in a tank of molasses while my blood buzzed and my heart raced.
Nothing could have prepared me for how accurate that description was.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up watching videos of AJ and staring at the clock that seemed to be moving at half speed.
Every second, a minute. Every minute, an hour.
Every hour, a lifetime. Beck had to force me to come to bed, carrying me over his shoulder while Cal followed us up the stairs asking how many orgasms it would take to get me to sleep.
“You’re sure you’re good?” he asks now, scanning my face.
“Yes.”
I’m not good. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and I think he knows that. Just like he knows I won’t be good until this is done. None of us will be.
Beck takes my chin in his hand. “It’ll be over soon.”
If peace can be found in a moment like this, it exists in the gentle way he cradles my chin. In the way Cal eases his way back down the steps and takes hold of Beck’s free hand and one of mine. In the whispered ‘I love you’s we utter before he turns his gaze back on the landing ahead of us.
“Stay close and quiet.”
We know Aubrey is here alone, but we move with caution.
Clearing rooms and closets on this floor the same way we did on the first. It’s strange, sneaking around in a house I used to call home, taking care not to leave a trace of myself in spaces I’ve existed in for most of my adult life.
But the strangest thing of all is crossing the threshold into what used to be my bedroom and seeing Aubrey’s sleeping form sprawled across the bed.
For a just a minute, my mind is caught between the past and the present. Between the blue-gray hue of this dawning day when I look at him with loathing and the bright warmth of a young sun on a Saturday morning when I watched him with a heart full of love.
I used to love him.
How fucking embarrassing.
Cal raises his gun, approaching the bed while Beck covers him from the door. I’m supposed to stand back, to stay out of the way and let them work, but I can’t be bystander in this.
I rush across the floor boards on the tips of my toes, stopping him at the foot of the bed with my hand on his shoulder.
When he looks at me, his features are tight with concentration.
I’ve only seen this version of him once, when they came to save me from Jacob Marsh, and I don’t know if I can reach past his tactical mind and get him to hear my needs.
He lifts a brow, asking for an explanation for the delay. My gaze drops to the gun in his hands, and he shakes his head immediately. I stretch my eyes, pleading silently only to be denied again.
“My dragon,” I whisper, reminding him of what I said to Beck when he let his desire to protect me override my need to take care of some things myself.
His worry is palpable when he relinquishes the gun, but I can’t focus on that right now.
I can only focus on me. When they insisted on teaching me to shoot—a skill I didn’t want to acquire for obvious reasons—both of them said the only thing I should be thinking about when there’s a gun in my hand is the power I’m wielding.
So that’s where my mind goes, to the weight of the metal and the heat of Cal’s palm still lingering on the grip.
To my index finger curved around the trigger, resting there but not applying pressure.
And then, when Aubrey rolls to his side, positioning himself perfectly for me to line the barrel up with his forehead, it goes completely quiet.
I allow the muzzle to ghost over his skin, pressing lightly but not hard enough to leave a mark. Aubrey flinches awake, and I take four measured steps back, knowing that it’s important to stay out of his reach.
“What the fuck?” he mutters, throat clogged with anger and exhaustion. He scrubs at his eyes, blinking hard to make sure I’m real.
“Good morning, Mr. President.”
“The fuck are you doing here?”
He starts to sit up, everything about his posture suggesting he’s about to lunge at me, but Beck cocks his gun. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Aubrey freezes, neck rotating slowly as he takes in his surroundings. He tries to hide it, but I see the flickers of fear in those blue eyes when they finally land on me. “What is this, Selene?”
“You don’t know a reckoning when you see it?”
He throws his head back, laughing loudly. “A reckoning? Please. At best, this is a case of breaking and entering. At worst, it’s your signature on a death warrant for you, your boyfriends and everyone you love.”
I glance at Cal, smirking. “I hope you’re prepared to pay up, Drake.”
“I’m always prepared, pet.”
Aubrey grimaces at the exchange, and Beck laughs. “We made a bet. Selene and I knew you’d start with throwing around empty threats, but Cal thought you’d beg for your life first.”
“Do you want to know what the winner gets, Aubrey?”
“No, Selene. I want to know what Phineas is going to think when he finds out your pledge of allegiance was a farce.”
“You can ask him when he joins you in hell.”
“Joins me in…” The cackle he lets out cuts his sentence in half. He slaps a hand to his chest when he recovers. “Joins me in hell. That’s a good one.” He cards his fingers through his hair. “You’ve gotten funnier, Sel.”
“And you’ve gotten even more dense, Aubrey. I didn’t think it was possible, and yet, here I am, explaining something to you that should be quite obvious.”
“Which is?”
“That you’re going to die today.”
There it is again, that flicker. It stays longer this time, lingering in his irises as he eases himself into a sitting position and tosses the sheets back. The smell of sweat and bodily fluids waft up from the mattress, and I scrunch up my nose, disgusted.
“Still got an aversion to great sex, huh?”
“No, we have plenty of that,” I retort, splitting a satisfied smile between my men. “I just have an aversion to you.”
“Is that why you want me dead, dear?”
“Among other things.” I use the gun to gesture for Aubrey to stand. “On your feet.”
He groans, stretching languidly once he’s up to draw attention to the fact that he’s naked. “Is this the part where you take me out into the yard and shoot me like a sick dog?”
Every time Aubrey finds himself in a situation he is not in control of, he resorts to behavior like this.
Fishing for information using questions that make it seem like he doesn’t care while everything about his demeanor conveys that he does.
Knowing that he won’t stop talking until I give him something, I decide to gift him with the full truth.
“Oh, no, this is the part where you wash your face, brush your teeth, take a shower and get dressed for the day then go downstairs, put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”
As much as I want to be the one to take Aubrey’s life, as badly as I want to beat him and bruise him and subject him to the same awful torture AJ faced, I know that I can’t.
There cannot be any signs of foul play. Cal, Beck and I discussed our options at length, playing around with various possibilities.
Ultimately, we landed on a staged suicide. It’s the only way to be free of Aubrey and keep ourselves out of prison. It’s also the only way to trigger the chain of events that will allow me to take everyone else in his orbit out.
“No one is going to believe I killed myself,” Aubrey says.
He’s in the bathroom now, freshly showered with his toothbrush hanging from his mouth and a towel wrapped around his waist. I’m just as surprised by how long it took him to formulate a response to my instructions as I am by how well he’s following them.
Cal and Beck haven’t even had to step in.
They’ve been hanging back, standing just inside the doorway watching and listening but saying nothing.
“People take their lives every day, Aubrey. You’re not above suicide.”
“Sure, but why would I off myself when my life is so fucking good?”
White foam gathers at the corners of his mouth as he brushes, I wait for him to spit and rinse before responding. “The guilt got to you.”
“The guilt?”
“Yes, over what you did to AJ.”
“If you tell anyone about that, Gambit will have your head.”