The Fixer (The Fixer #1)(92)

Kostas had done it for his son.

If there was someone else—someone whose role had been ushering the nomination through, someone whose calls Kostas had been avoiding—what had that person stood to gain?

I didn’t speak a word of those thoughts to Henry. Or to Vivvie. Our lives were slowly getting back to normal. That first Monday back at Hardwicke, the gossip mill ran full force. Ivy’s name had been released as the hostage. Everyone wanted the inside scoop—but I’d managed to do a pretty good job dissuading people from asking me questions.

I was, in general, pretty good at dissuading.

I knew things were dying down when a student approached me claiming that someone was sabotaging her grades. No one outside of Vivvie, Henry, and Asher knew about my role in getting Ivy released, but there was no escaping the persistent belief that if you had a problem at Hardwicke, Tess Kendrick was the person to see.

A week to the day after my last text from William Keyes, I received a second. He’d held up his end of our bargain. It was my turn to hold up mine.

“Are you okay?” Vivvie asked me, the question taking me back to the way she’d asked, over and over, my first day at Hardwicke.

“I just received a royal decree from my grandfather that he’s picking me up after school,” I said. The word grandfather felt foreign on my lips, like maybe I wasn’t saying it right. Gramps was my grandfather, but William Keyes? He was one of the wealthiest men in the country. He was a kingmaker, a powerful enemy, a powerful friend.

His name was on Ivy’s list.

“What exactly did you promise the old chap?” Asher fell in beside us in the hallway on our way to the exit.

“Besides a press conference announcing my existence to the world?” I asked, giving no visible clue to where my thoughts had really taken me. “Weekly dinners, giving him a say in my education, letting him set up a trust fund for me, and—” I mumbled the rest of it.

“Did you say changing your last name?” Asher asked.

“You said once that your sister and Keyes didn’t get along.” Now it was Henry’s turn to join the conversation. “I do hope that was an exaggeration.” The two of us weren’t friends, exactly, but we’d been through something—he’d sat by me when I’d been waiting for news on Ivy; I was the only person he’d ever told about his father.

Sometimes, when I caught him staring at me, I thought maybe he knew my secrets, too.

“Not an exaggeration,” I told Henry. “When Ivy finds out I went to William Keyes for help, when she finds out what I promised him . . .”

That would have been an ugly conversation no matter what. But given that Ivy was still staying up nights, locked in her office, given that she thought there was another conspirator out there and my grandfather’s name was on her suspect list—she was going to kill me.

We hit the front corridor. Asher pushed the door open. “Ladies,” he said with a gallant half bow, “after you.”

I stepped out into the sunshine and stopped dead in my tracks. There was a limo waiting at the curb, and standing just outside the limo was William Keyes. The man the First Lady said excelled at holding a grudge. The one I’d been told was ruthless and dangerous. The one who valued family, who wanted a legacy.

The one who looked at me, across the pavement, with a hungry look in his eyes that told me that legacy might be me.

“Will you remember us when you’re fancy?” Asher asked me. I shoved him to one side. All around us, students were slowing to look at Keyes. It wasn’t the limo that attracted their attention. It was the man.

Asher’s sister honed in on the four of us like a missile zeroing in on its target. “That’s William Keyes,” Emilia told Asher. “What is William Keyes doing here?”

Henry, Asher, and Vivvie all darted their eyes toward me.

Asher was the one who broke the silence. “Have you met my friend?” he asked Emilia. “Tess Keyes.”

Emilia stopped dead in her tracks. Asher had spoken just loudly enough that several people overheard him. My good old buddy John Thomas Wilcox looked like he’d swallowed a worm.

Note to self, I thought, kill Asher. But a second later, I had bigger things to worry about, because apparently Bodie hadn’t come by himself to pick me up today.

Ivy had come with him.

“Incoming,” Bodie coughed, and that was all the warning I had before Ivy swooped down, intercepting me before I made it to the limo and the man who was standing there.

“Tess,” Ivy said calmly.

“Yes?”

“What is Adam’s father doing here?”

I looked to Bodie, who gave me a look that said, oh so clearly, that I was on my own.

“What is Adam’s father doing here?” Ivy repeated.

There was no way to sugarcoat it. “Apparently, he’s giving me a ride home from school.”

We’d acquired enough of an audience that Ivy lowered her voice. “And why would William Keyes do that?”

“Because he knows,” I said. “About Tommy. About me.”

Ivy had to have suspected that was what I was going to say, but that didn’t keep her nostrils from flaring slightly the moment I said it.

“We needed a pardon.” I said the words below my breath, so low that no one but Ivy could hear them. “I did what I had to do to make sure you came home alive.”