A Harmless Little Ruse (Harmless #2)(42)

Damn it.

Now I remember why I kept coming back to Salma.

Because she’s right.

“They’re threatening her. Directly. Cut her brake lines and nearly caused a crash. Now Blaine’s sniffing around her at her father’s declaration rally. Hell, he weaseled his way into getting Harry to endorse him for Harry’s old House seat. They text threats to her and make it look like it’s coming from a phone she bought. It’s all manipulated, calculated, and it’s impervious. We can’t figure out how they’re doing it. Someone on the inside is helping them. They’re sharks circling to find the right time to bite. I cannot introduce yet another element of complexity to this situation.”

“You’re not introducing it. You’re identifying it. Acknowledging it. By doing so, you help to remove the power the past has over both you and Lindsay.”

“Power?” I lean forward, shoving a hand through my hair again. “They have no power over me. I’ve systematically stripped their influence out of my life.”

“You wouldn’t be sitting here if that were true, Drew.” She taps the newspaper. “And they wouldn’t have been able to do this.”

All I can do is blink. I freeze, as if I’m trapped in my body, paralyzed. Blood rushes to my head, away from my heart, flowing into my fingers and toes.

My chest stops moving.

The world stops.

“Look,” I say, the word coming out of my mouth with so much effort. Instead of thinking in sentences, I’m working with syllables here, one at a time, chained together to form words that link with other words to make my thoughts come out. I inhale, then exhale, and say, “If that is true, then four years were wasted.”

“Why do you think that?” she asks kindly.

“Because I spent all this time getting ready for Lindsay. Making sure she’d always be safe.”

“Are you sure it was Lindsay you were protecting?”

“What?” Anger pours through me like my skin is just a mold, and fury fills it.

“I don’t think you were only trying to make the world safe for Lindsay. You were working to make it safe for you, too.”

“Of course I was,” I scoff. “I am,” I stress. The air conditioning clicks on, making me jerk. The sound surprises me, the deep whine of the system hurting my ears. I’m holding my breath and I let it out, my respiration inconsistent, the feeling that I can’t catch my breath becoming overpowering.

“Not as a byproduct, Drew.”

I frown. “Lindsay’s safety is always more important than my own. I’d die for her.”

Salma nods. “And that is admirable, but who would die for you?”

She might as well throw a brick at my face.

Because suddenly, my mother and father’s faces fill my mind. How they looked at the viewing at their funeral.

How their brakes failed.

Oh, God. They victims, too. How far does all of this go?

Did my parents die because of me? Because of some strange fixation Blaine, Stellan and John have on destroying my and Lindsay’s lives?

Bzzz.

The room makes no sense suddenly, as my emergency phone goes off. Salma glares at my jacket, sitting on the couch.

“You know I have a ‘no cell phone’ policy, Drew.”

“I know. It’s turned off. That’s my Code Red phone. It only goes off when there’s a life-or-death emergency.”

Fuck.

I leap up, rifling through the cloth, the pocket edge ripping as I grab the phone and answer.

“Foster,” I bark.

“Drew. This is bad.” It’s Paulson.

“Lindsay?”

“She’s fine,” he says, but his voice sends a cold ribbon of panic down my spine. “It’s you I’m calling about.”

“Me? What about me?”

“That guy who works for Bosworth – Marshall. He’s claiming he has intelligence that proves you’re the one sending the threatening texts to Lindsay.”

“What? What the hell?”

“I know it’s bullshit. But the tracing report got into the hands of Blaine Maisri’s camp. They’re threatening to leak this to the press. It’s one hell of a set-up. We need to do damage control for you.”

Damage control.

My entire life is turning into nothing but damage control.

Bzzz.

My phone vibrates in my hand. Incoming text. Salma gives me a look of studied frustration. I know this is sacred space. I know I’m supposed to work on my issues.

Trust me.

I know.

But this situation just went FUBAR and the ante just got upped to the Nth degree.

I ignore Mark as he tries to get my attention, and I look at the text.

Don’t play if you can’t win, it says.

I go numb.

Another text. It’s a video. The picture has the Play symbol in the middle, a frozen image of me, naked, on my side with a mask over my head.

A video.

There’s a video of me from that night?

“Paulson,” I snap. “Full press.”

Dead air fills the line.

He hasn’t just hung up on me.

Mark’s gone to start a series of procedures that threaten to destroy everything I know.

But all in the service of saving Lindsay.