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,feelfor 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, givingJordan and I space to talk. Sam is still fuming about me abusing Jordan, shooting daggers at me from afar.
