The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(6)

Bodie kept me out all afternoon. By the time we got back to Ivy’s house, it was dark outside, and the orange car had been joined by another vehicle. This one, I recognized.

“Adam’s here,” I said.

“So he is,” Bodie replied evenly.

If I wasn’t already wondering about my newfound uncle’s presence at the house, the fact that Bodie had missed an opportunity to refer to him as “Captain Pentagon” or “Mr. America” would have tipped me off that this wasn’t just business as usual. Bodie had no shortage of nicknames for anyone—and he considered mocking by-the-books Adam Keyes to be one of life’s finer pleasures.

Ivy called Adam in. She texted Bodie and told him to keep me away from the house. As I climbed out of the car and made my way into the foyer, I turned that over in my head.

Bodie slanted his gaze toward me as he shut the front door behind us. “If I told you to go upstairs and forget about all of this, you’d end up ignoring me, so do us both a favor, kitten, and just try not to let Ivy catch you down here.”

With that advice imparted, Bodie made for Ivy’s office himself. I heard the door open and close—and then, nothing.

First Adam, now Bodie.

Whatever was going down, it had Ivy calling in the troops.





CHAPTER 5

I didn’t go upstairs. I stood in the hallway just outside of Ivy’s office, staring at the door. I could hear the murmur of voices behind it, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Ivy’s job—her clients, the things she did on their behalf, the lines she was willing to cross—that was a portion of her life she kept from me, as best she could.

Logically, I understood that Ivy’s line of work required a guarantee of confidentiality and discretion. I also understood—logically—that she wanted to protect me. The last time I’d been involved in one of her cases, I’d been kidnapped.

But no amount of logical understanding could mute the sharp ache in my chest that I felt staring at a closed door, knowing that Ivy was the one who’d locked me out.

Some days, it felt like my whole life had been a series of doors I’d never had a choice about closing.

Ivy had shut the door on being my mother when she’d given me to her parents to raise as their own. She’d locked that door when she’d agreed to lie to me and thrown the deadbolt for good measure when I was four years old and she’d handed me—tears streaming down her cheeks in the wake of our parents’ funeral—to Gramps.

She’d cracked the door open when I was thirteen and then slammed it in my face.

Ivy had chosen to leave me. She’d chosen to shut me out of her life. She’d thrown up walls between us, because living the lie that she was my sister was too hard.

Logical or not, fair or not, that was what I thought of every time Ivy locked herself in her office and locked me out. I couldn’t push down the violent feeling roiling inside of me that said she’d lost the right to have secrets when she’d kept the biggest one from me.

Grow up, Tess. I forced myself to turn away from the office door, but instead of going upstairs to the apartment Ivy and I shared, I turned and walked toward the conference room. Like Ivy’s office, it was technically off-limits.

I wasn’t a person who paid much attention to technicalities.

I tested the knob, then pushed the conference room door inward, stepping over the threshold. Weeks ago, Ivy and I had stood in this room, looking at a trio of photographs she’d tacked onto the walls.

Three men—including a Secret Service agent and the White House physician—had conspired to kill Henry’s grandfather, Supreme Court Chief Justice Theodore Marquette. It was in this conference room that Ivy had told me she thought there was a fourth person involved, a conspirator who was still out there and whose identity we did not know. For one night, Ivy had let me in. She’d stopped trying to lock away the parts of herself she thought weren’t safe for me to know. She’d recognized that whether she liked it or not, the two of us were the same.

I wasn’t any more capable of sitting by and watching something bad happen than she was.

Walking over to the conference table, I closed my eyes, trying to remember exactly where Ivy had been sitting when we’d had that late-night discussion. I tried to picture the list of suspects on the table beside her—a dozen or so names, among them William Keyes.

No one—not Asher, not Henry, not Vivvie, whose father was the White House physician who’d helped kill Justice Marquette—knew that Ivy suspected there was a fourth player, one who’d engineered the attack on Justice Marquette and gotten away from the whole ordeal unscathed. I hadn’t mentioned Ivy’s theory to my friends. For their own protection, I’d kept them—and would continue to keep them—in the dark.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.”

I turned to see Adam standing in the doorway. My brain automatically searched for similarities—between Adam and me, between the kingmaker and his firstborn son.

“I’ve never really excelled at doing what I’m supposed to,” I said.

Adam gave me a look. If he’d been protective before I’d learned that he was my uncle, he was worse now that I knew the truth. “Try harder,” he ordered.

Adam was the type who played by the rules. I’d gathered that my father—his younger brother—had not been.