It was all suddenly important because life was no longer about surviving, it was about living. And he wanted to revel in it all because…
She’s mine.
Eliza Meadows is really and truly mine.
It was mindboggling. Unbelievable. Too good to be true, and yet…
He placed a soft kiss on the crown of her head, dragging in the scent of her.
I guess the rich girl and the poor boydosometimes fall in love outside of sappy rom-coms and cheesy romance novels,he admitted with a silent chuckle, feeling warm and light in ways he hadn’t in…well…forever.
A snippet from the Persian poet Hafez ran through his mind.
“The sun never says to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.”
That’s how he was going to love Eliza. Not like his father had loved his mother, but wholly, freely, without artifice or selfishness.
And the best part? He would get to build an incredible, awful, amazing, ordinary life with her.
How extraordinary is that?
Epilogue
Washington D.C.
Bishop crossed the room and grabbed the television remote from the coffee table. He thumbed up the volume and then sat on the edge of the sofa, blinking in astonishment at the news anchor as she reported on a breaking story.
“The senate minority leader, Chuck Reynolds, was found dead inside his jail cell this morning. Senator Reynolds was recently arrested on charges of insider trading and murder-for-hire. He was denied bail because the prosecutor insisted he was a flight risk. Authorities are saying the cause of Senator Reynolds’s death is a suspected heart attack, but they will know more once they have the coroner’s report.”
“Convenient he’s dead,” the president said from beside him and he lowered the television’s volume.
The president. What a strange idea.
He had known Sandra J. Stevens since she was eighteen years old and went by the name Sandy Waterhouse. It was incongruous to think she was the leader of the free world, the most powerful person on the planet. Especially because he knew she cried at Hallmark movies and ate entire sleeves of Oreo cookies dunked in milk when she got overstressed.
The president.
It was a position that should have been his. But the world had been turned on its ear since his younger days in politics. Men like him, men who preferred the status-quo, who liked the idea of an America run by powerful men and populated by nuclear families, had fallen out of fashion.
Now the voters wanted politicians who looked like them. They wanted their leaders to reflect the actual populace of the country which meant all three branches were chock-full of women, people of color, and those who wanted to raise the minimum wage until the person flipping hamburgers full-time could actually make a reasonable living.
The woke mob, he thought with derision.They’re taking this country to hell in a handbasket.
By god, he wasn’t going down without a fight. It wasn’t possible to turn back time, but history repeated itself.
That’s what he was after.
A repeat of history.
The Roman republic fell when Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Augustus, became ruler of Rome. Augustus shifted power away from a representative democracy and claimed imperial authority for himself. And what happened after that?
The fucking Roman empire, that’s what. Nearly 500 years of global authority and dominance.
That’s what Bishop was after. Power. Dominance. An American ruler who would crush all progressive thought regarding workers’ rights, racial justice, and equality between the sexes. A like-minded autocrat who would make the country what it was always meant to be.
All-powerful. Ferocious. FEARED.
“Convenient in that it means we will all be spared the spectacle of his trial,” he said now, waving away the water bottle the president offered him. “But inconvenient in that he got away scot-free.”
