“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 helovesit. 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 pleashe 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.
