The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(11)

Going to a school that was more secure than most government facilities had a strange effect: at Hardwicke, students were more aware of the potential for wide-scale attacks, but they’d fostered in us a deep-seated belief that it couldn’t happen here.

Some of our classmates had been shaken by today’s attack. Others, like John Thomas, had been more able to shrug it off. But Henry was right—it would always be different for people like us.

The closer you’d been to death, the easier it was to feel him breathing down your neck—and the necks of those you loved.

“I can still see Ivy with that bomb strapped to her chest.” I hadn’t told that to anyone. I turned to look out the window to keep Henry from seeing the expression on my face. “Sometimes,” I continued softly, “I wake up in the middle of the night, and for a second, I’m back in that basement with a rogue Secret Service agent.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Henry gave me tit for tat. “I’m the one who found my father.”

I didn’t turn to look at Henry. If I’d been looking at him, he wouldn’t have said the words.

“That’s what I thought about when I heard about the attack,” Henry said. “That’s what I saw. My father was just . . . lying there, on the floor. His eyes were open, but . . . empty. I wasn’t supposed to be home that weekend. None of us were. And when I found him . . .”

My eyes found their way to his, drawn by magnetic force.

“I left,” Henry said. “I just . . . I left. And I got the call a few hours later about the crash.”

The crash that Ivy staged.

Grief was like a set of stacking dolls, each subsequent trauma encompassing all of those that had come before. At four, I hadn’t known how to mourn my parents—Ivy’s parents, really. But I’d mourned them at thirteen, when Ivy had walked out of my life, and at fifteen, when Gramps had started to slide. I’d felt it again and again and again these past months.

No one had died today in the bombing. But we hadn’t known that, not at first.

Henry swallowed. I could see him locking down his emotions, hiding them, even from himself. “Tess. What I just told you—”

“Stays between us,” I said. Henry Marquette didn’t trust easily. We had that much in common. “I can keep a secret,” I said.

I was already keeping so many. What was one more?





CHAPTER 11

When we got to Ivy’s house, there was a car parked across the street. Unlike Walker’s, this vehicle fit the profile I’d come to associate with many of Ivy’s clients—dark-colored, tinted windows, driver standing just outside. I scanned the front lawn, and my eyes came to rest on the car’s owner.

William Keyes.

Henry caught my gaze and cocked his head to the side, a silent Everything okay?

I had no idea who Keyes was waiting for—Ivy or me. Either way, I gave a brisk nod. “His bark’s worse than his bite.”

Henry gave me a look. “I severely doubt that is true.”

“Either way,” I said, “William Keyes won’t do more than gnash his teeth at me.”

I was a Keyes.

“Is this the point where you ask me to steal his car as a distraction?” Henry asked, arching an eyebrow at me. “Or did you have another felony in mind?”

“Very funny,” I told him, reaching for the door.

“I could walk you in,” Henry offered, his voice softer this time.

I opened the car door. “Relax, Sir Galahad,” I told him with an eyebrow arch of my own. “I can take care of myself.”

I slammed the door and went to face the music—whatever that music might be.

“Theresa.” Keyes stood with his back to the front door. My first name had also been his late wife’s. Growing up, Ivy and Gramps had only called me by my given name when I was skating on thin ice. I didn’t know what to read into the fact that William Keyes was using it now. “Where is she?”

That was less of a question than a demand. The she in question could only be Ivy.

“Nice to see you, too,” I muttered.

“Were the circumstances different, I would happily spar with you, my dear, but this is not a game, and I am not playing. Where is Ivy?”

“I don’t know,” I said, glad, for once, that Ivy had kept me in the dark.

“You have a cell phone.” That was a statement, not a question. “Call her.” Keyes gave the order like he was God, setting down an eleventh commandment.

I folded my arms over my chest and leveled a narrow-eyed stare at him, all too similar to the look he was aiming at me. “Why?”

“Because,” he snapped back, “she’ll pick up your call.”

I wanted to refuse out of principle, but Ivy would want to know that Keyes had come to our home. And I wanted to know what exactly he was so dead set on saying to her.

I took out my phone and dialed. Ivy picked up on the third ring.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I told her. “But I’m not alone. A certain someone was waiting for me when I got home for school. Tall. Cranky. Overly fond of the Earl of Warwick.”

Keyes snatched the phone from my hand. “You will tell me what you are playing at here, Ivy.”