Loving Her Body

retrieval mission

POV: Selene

I managed to get to Athena's place quite quickly, finding Cooper already standing outside the gates, leant against his car. He immediately walks over to me, asking why I called him to be here in such a rush.

"Athena has Elise," I shortly state, ensuring my handgun is fully loaded, Cooper passing me a few extra bullets.

"Are you sure?" He asks, seemingly surprised at my confidence.

"Yes, I'm sure. She proved that herself," I snap, barely controlling my rage. "I'm going to deal with Athena inside. You search the grounds and try to find Elise. Get her out and to safety first and foremost. Don't concern yourselves with me," I announce to the swarm of men Cooper managed to enlist for this on such short notice.

They all salute and I hear the unsynchronised clicks of guns being loaded before I push open the gate that, not to my surprise, is already unlocked. Athena knows I'm coming for Elise and I full well know that she has prepared during the time I've taken to get here. She isn't stupid, and she certainly won't go down without some kind of fight. A fight that I'm willing to go through for Elise.

I just need to keep my head and try not to let my rage and protectiveness over Elise dilute my decisions now. Athena takes too much of my energy to deal with - but I have Cooper to deal with finding Elise so I should be able to focus on just Athena and making her suffer for what she's done.

No one gets to touch my girl like she did, and they especially don’t dare to do it in front of me without receiving the harsh consequences.

I take a deep breath before stepping through the gate, Cooper instantly splitting off, commanding some of the other men her wrangled up to go in opposite directions and to take no mercy, while he splits off to the right, his gun in hand as he storms off.

Cooper is rarely this serious but he knows when something is serious enough for him to put away his cheery and optimistic attitude and exchanging it for a hard and stoic expression that won’t shift until he's certain everything is settled. I've sent him for Elise because I know he'll control any rage he does have when he finds her and will comfort her more than I can right now. Besides, I don't trust him to effectively take care of Athena in a satisfying way.

I already have so many ideas of what I'll do to that bitch to make sure she pays for whatever new trauma she's imposed on Elise. I'd prefer not to kill her just yet. It would be too easy of a way out for her after what she's done.

She almost killed Elise and now I know for sure Elise is traumatised by how broken she looked earlier - all because of that hideous woman that deserved to be killed long ago.

I should've done more when I suspected she was responsible for Elise getting severely wounded. I shouldn’t have let her walk free and given her the chance to get her horrid hands on Elise again. All of this is my fault. If I just hadn't taken Elise to that party Athena wouldn't have known she was still alive and I would've had more time to search into the situation before this happened.

No, I made my mistakes much earlier than that. I made the firstmistake when I enticed her to become my assistant and allowed her to crawl her way into my life. If only I'd controlled myself more back then. I wouldn't have gotten closer with her and she wouldn't have become my weak spot. I would still be the cold, hard woman I was before that only used others for my own benefit - but Elise has changed me too much to go back to that, and I certainly can't abandon her now.

I know once I save her, if we manage to save her, which I hope we do, things won't be easy for quite some time. There'll be a mess about Athena and I don't know the damage she's truly done to Elise yet and how that will affect our relationship.