Page 74 of The Illusion of Power (Passion and Politics #1)

SELENE

E ye contact has always been kind of uncomfortable for me, but holding eye contact with someone when they can’t look away from you is something else entirely.

Technically, I could look away from Agent Harris.

I could close my eyes or stare at the water-stained ceiling above me.

I could count the lines of mortar between the bricks on the wall behind him, but then that would mean skipping the ones covered in his blood and brain matter and the ones I can’t see because his rotting corpse is in the way.

He’s been dead for days, how many I don’t know.

Jacob killed him right in front of me because he’d outlived his usefulness.

I’d never seen anyone murdered in cold blood before, but I didn’t even scream.

It was just another horrible thing happening in a space full of horrible things.

Plus, I wasn’t exactly sad to see the man go, not after he helped Jacob kidnap me and took great pleasure in finally letting his disdain for me be known.

He was almost worse than Jacob when it came to the whole racist monologue thing, but no one, and I mean no one, beats Leigh Anne.

Leigh Anne Davis, better known as the woman who accosted me in a restaurant bathroom back in Houston.

Now, that girl loves a monologue. Every time she comes into the foul-smelling room where they’re keeping me, she delivers one.

Sometimes they’re unprompted, sometimes I intentionally pull her into conversation just for the mental stimulation, but every time she delivers a speech.

I’m not in the mood for one today, but I have to risk it to ask her a question.

“Is there anywhere else his body can be?” I ask between sips of the water she’s dripping into my mouth from a dirty bottle. She glances at Harris and turns back to me, rough fingers holding my chin in place.

“No.”

“There has to be more to this building than this room. Why can’t you put him somewhere else?”

“Because I don’t want to.” She releases me, capping the bottle with a laugh. “God, you really are full of yourself, aren’t you? You’re going to die today, and you think you can make demands. No one here cares about your comfort, Selene.”

I pull against the restraints digging into my wrists and arch a brow. “I’m well aware, Leigh Anne.”

“Then act like it, bitch.”

In the last however many days, she’s called me everything but a child of God, so I don’t even flinch at that.

Honestly, I kind of appreciate the consistency because I know what to expect when I see her.

With Jacob, it’s always up in the air. He’s never nice, he clearly hates me too much for that, but he does volley between a child-like glee that’s the result of having pulled this whole thing off and a red-hot anger that ends with him hitting me.

My jaw aches at the thought of his last temper tantrum.

I’d made the mistake of asking him if he thought my death would change anything for his coward of a father, and he slapped me across the face, busting my lip.

That was right before we live-streamed my death announcement, and I haven’t seen him since.

Leigh Anne is cruel and impatient, but I’ll take her over him any day.

Not that I have many of those left.

I try to breathe through the panic rising up in me, but it’s so strong and insistent, I know I can’t defeat it on my own. I need a distraction, so I ask Leigh Anne the only question I haven’t yet.

“Why are you here?”

She pauses, her hand on the door, her feet lingering by Agent Harris’ head. Then she turns slowly, grimacing at me like I’ve poured salt in an open wound. “What?”

“Well, I know why Jacob is here, and I know why I’m here, to a certain extent, I even knew why Agent Harris was here, but out of all the awful things you’ve said to me, your reason for risking your life and freedom hasn’t been among them.”

Leigh Anne crosses her arms, top lip curling in disgust. “And you think I need to explain myself to you?”

“I think you like to talk, and right now I need a distraction before I have a panic attack and die before you and your boyfriend can make a public spectacle of my murder.”

Her answering smile is eerily happy. “I’ve dreamed of this day for years, you know.”

“You’ve dreamed of the day I die for years?

” Skepticism coats the question, even though it probably shouldn’t.

I don’t doubt the depth of Leigh Anne’s hatred for me, but I just find it hard to believe that she’s been waiting for years to see me dead.

Jacob? Yes, absolutely. But this girl, who can’t be any older than twenty years old—not much older than AJ would be had he lived—hasn’t lived enough life to be this angry at me.

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ears. “No. Jacob is the one obsessed with you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate you and everything you stand for, but your death means nothing to me.”

“Then why exactly have you been waiting for this day?”

Green eyes dance with mischief and madness. “Because today is the day I finally get to watch Agent Callan Drake and Agent Lance Beckham die.”

Oh, this conversation isn’t helping curb my panic at all.

I was prepared for more hate aimed at me.

For more vitriol and teasing about my impending death, but I wasn’t ready for this.

For the guarantee that my men will come here, for the revelation that the people holding me hostage want to see them die alongside me.

“What?” I gasp finally. “What did they ever do to you?”

I don’t see her having many opportunities to encounter either man. She doesn’t seem like the type of person who runs in the same circles they do, so I’m genuinely interested in how their paths crossed and what they did to make her hate them so.

Her expression turns grim, and I swear I see flickers of sadness beneath everything else. “They killed my brother.”

Considering how absolutely vile she was in reference to my son, I have a hard time mustering up condolences, but I do it. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She rolls her eyes. “No, you’re not. You just hope acting like you are will make me move Harris’ body, and it won’t.”

“I’ve already given up on that. What was your brother’s name?”

Logically, I know Cal and Beck have taken lives. Their work with the Bureau all but guaranteed it, but putting a name and the face of a relative to an unconfirmed number on their body count lists sends chills up my spine.

“Chester Davis.”

I suck in a sharp breath of recognition, remembering the name from Beck’s file specifically. “He was the shooter, the one who tried to kill President Warner.”

“The one who died trying to free this country from the tyranny of one of you liberal snowflakes.”

“Scott Warner isn’t liberal. Most of his policies are oppressive and heavily steeped in racism, take for example?—”

Leigh Anne holds up a hand, taking away my chance to educate her. “I don’t care! My brother is dead, and those agents are responsible. They killed him for having the balls to believe in something.”

“Nooo, they killed him for trying to assassinate a President. You don’t get a free pass for that, Leigh Anne, even if you really, really think he should be dead.”

She lunges for me, fingers wrapping around the arms of the rolling desk chair I’ve been tied to for days. Her breath is hot on my face, and it stinks of garlic and tomato sauce. Those bastards have been eating pizza while I’ve been sitting here, starving and looking at a dead man.

“Listen, you can say whatever you want to say. It won’t change the fact that you and your precious agents are going to die when they get here. Do you hear me? We’re going to kill all of you and leave you in this room with Harris to fucking rot.”

Bile rises in my throat at the image, and she bares her teeth in a threatening smile.

“Not so tough now, are you?” she asks, shoving the chair back so it hits the wall behind me with a thud that makes my head ache and my vision blur. Leigh Anne backs away, heading for the door again, stopping once again when I hit her with another question.

“How do you know they’ll come?”

Every day that I’ve been here, I’ve wished for them.

I’ve waited and watched and prayed that they would come bursting through the door and take me away from this place, but now the promise of their arrival makes me wish they would stay far away.

I don’t want them here. I don’t want my fate to be theirs.

I don’t want to have to watch them lose each other or suffer through losing them, even if I only live that harsh reality for a few brief seconds before being released into the oblivion of eternal life.

Leigh Anne grins, hooking a thumb over her shoulder to point at Harris. “You didn’t think he was our only man on the inside, did you?”

She slams the door, leaving me to ponder the question. I know that I’m close to losing my sanity when I start talking to Harris.

“Who else were you working with?” I ask, staring at him as if he could give me an answer, as if he could do anything other than lay there and…. wait . As I look at Harris, my mind interposes the image of Charlie lying in the alley, hurt and alone.

I don’t remember seeing her like that, not really, but Beck had explained to me before that our brains can hold images our memories don’t.

Now, I’m running through the events of the afternoon my life changed yet again.

I went down first after being struck in the head.

When I woke up, I was in the back of the black SUV I’d seen idling by the door.

Harris was behind the wheel when we came outside, so it had to have been Leigh Anne who hit me.

He was still behind the wheel when I came to.

She was hopping in the passenger seat, cackling like a hyena as he drove away.

At some point, I must have looked out of the window at Charlie.

She was sprawled out in the alley, her arms at awkward angles around her, her hands empty.

She didn’t draw her weapon? I close my eyes, breathing deeply and immediately regretting it when I get a lungful of decaying flesh.

Even with my stomach turning, I’m able to find an answer to my silent inquiry.

No, Charlie didn’t draw her weapon.

She didn’t pull it out in the alley, and now that I think of it, I never saw it in her hands as we moved through the hallway that led to certain doom.

I don’t know much about standard operating procedures across national law enforcement agencies, but I do know that anytime an officer or agent is moving through a space, they’re supposed to assume there’s a threat around every corner.

That means they have to be prepared to engage at a moment’s notice, and having your weapon in hand, or at least having your hand on your holster, is the best way to make sure you are.

Charlie did neither.

She moved through that hallway like she wasn’t worried about encountering danger at all. Like she knew it was safe, and the only way she could have known that was if…

“Shit,” I curse, kicking myself for only now putting it together when it was so obvious. Her sudden appearance at the polling center with no backup. Her weird reaction to the bracelet. Her lies of omission regarding her undercover status within Jacobs’s organization. “Charlie is involved.”

And Jacob is going to use her to get Cal and Beck here.