The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(3)
Weekly Sunday night dinners at the Keyes mansion had cemented my understanding of my paternal grandfather as a man with many allies and many enemies. More often than not, he considered President Nolan the latter. Every bump in the road for the Nolan administration was taken as incontrovertible evidence that Peter Nolan had never been the right man for the job.
I picked up my bishop and plunked it back down. “Check.”
“Bloodthirsty girl,” Keyes commented. “You get that from your mother. Patience,” he continued, eyeing the board, “is a Keyes trait.”
This was the way it was with him, drawing lines between the Kendrick blood in me and the Keyes.
“Did you know that the term kingmaker was first used to refer to the role the Earl of Warwick played in the struggle between Lancaster and York?” My grandfather resumed his lecture, but I knew his eyes missed nothing—not the effect that hearing Ivy referred to as my mother still had on me, not the positions of the pieces on the board. “During the Wars of the Roses, Warwick deposed not one but two kings.”
Kingmaker was what people called William Keyes. He wielded tremendous power and influence behind the scenes in the American political game.
“Warwick wasn’t just wealthy and powerful,” Keyes continued. “He was strategic.”
Power. Politics. Game theory. This was what passed for casual conversation in this house. William Keyes had two sons. One of them was dead; the other was estranged. I was his only grandchild. In his eyes, that meant his legacy rested on me.
“I’d like to see you showing a bit more initiative about becoming a part of the Hardwicke community, Tess.”
From the Wars of the Roses to high school extracurriculars in two seconds flat.
“I’m not really much of a joiner,” I said. That was an understatement.
“The debate club, a sport or two,” William Keyes continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “It’s high time you started making your mark.”
The prestigious Hardwicke School was a microcosm of Washington. The mark I’d made there, up to and including what I’d done for Jeremy Bancroft a few hours earlier, wasn’t the kind you could put on a résumé—or the kind my newfound grandfather would have approved of.
“The queen,” Keyes told me, returning his attention to our game, “is the most dangerous piece on the board.” His index finger trailed the edge of the black queen for a moment, before moving it forward. “Check.”
He was boxing me in.
I could see, already, how this was going to end. “You’ll have checkmate in three moves.”
The old man’s lips parted in a dangerous smile. “Will I?”
He’d gone into this game fully expecting to win it, just like he fully expected me to yield to his decrees about Hardwicke.
“Luckily for me,” I told him, my fingers closing around my own queen, “I’ll have checkmate in two.”
CHAPTER 3
Shockingly, I made it through my Monday classes without developing the slightest inclination to sign up for the debate team.
“Hypothetically speaking,” Asher said as he took the seat beside mine in our last class of the day, “if I told Carmen Seville that you could take care of a little problem involving a vengeful ex–best friend on the yearbook staff and some aggressively unflattering photo angles . . . would that be a bad thing or a good thing?”
Asher smiled when he said the words good thing. It was implied that I should find that smile persuasive.
Sliding into the seat behind him, Vivvie took one look at my face. “Bad thing,” she told Asher, correctly interpreting my facial expression. “That would be a very bad thing.”
“Allow me to rephrase,” Asher said. “If I had, by chance, volunteered your most excellent services—”
I stopped him there. “I don’t have services.” Seeing the skepticism clear on their faces, I clarified, “Yesterday, with Jeremy’s father? That was a onetime thing.”
Asher raised one eyebrow to ridiculous heights. “So when one of the seniors on the lacrosse team was hazing the freshmen and you surreptitiously recorded said hazing and uploaded it as an attachment to his college applications, that was . . . what, exactly?”
I shrugged. No one had been able to prove that was me.
“What about that rumor you squelched about Meredith Sutton going to rehab?” Vivvie asked.
That hadn’t been a rumor. It had been the truth—and no one’s business but Meredith’s.
“And that time that Lindsay Li’s boyfriend was threatening to tell her parents exactly how far they’d gone if she broke up with him?” Asher raised his other eyebrow. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he end up in military school?”
“Your point?” I asked.
“Their point is that you are a meddler.” Henry helped himself to the seat behind me. “An incurable, insatiable meddler. You simply cannot help yourself, Kendrick.”
And who was right there beside me yesterday? I refrained from pointing that out and turned around to face him. “I don’t meddle,” I said.
Unfortunately, all that did was set Vivvie and Asher up to chorus, “You fix!”
During my first week at Hardwicke, I’d inadvertently come to the rescue of the vice president’s daughter. At the time, I’d had no idea who she was—all I’d known was that she’d been humiliated by an older boy who’d talked her into taking some very intimate photos. When I’d heard the jerk was flaunting those photos, I’d lost my temper, stolen his phone, and issued a couple of pointed threats.