The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(77)

Adam and Ivy hadn’t been happy when Priya had used me to send a message to them. And now that she’d brought me to see a known terrorist? Put me in a room with that terrorist?

This wasn’t going to be pretty.

“She didn’t have a choice about bringing me,” I said, trying to get Adam and Ivy to focus on me. “Just like I didn’t have a choice about coming.”

They have Vivvie.

I willed Ivy to remember that, willed Adam to ask himself what lengths he and Ivy would have gone to if the terrorists had still held me.

“Get Tess out of here,” Ivy told Adam, clipping the words.

“Is it done?” I asked, stepping back and away from them before Adam could reach for me. “Daniela? The files? The foreign prisoners?”

Everything else Senza Nome asked for—is it done?

Ivy held up a USB drive. “My files,” she said.

Or at least, the version she was giving Senza Nome.

Ivy inclined her head slightly. “It’s done.”

The door opened behind us. All four of us whirled in the direction of the sound. Daniela Nicolae stepped out into the evening air, her hands cuffed in front of her body, an armed guard on either side.

“President Nolan will be sworn back in within the hour,” one of the guards told Ivy. “You need to move.”

Priya was the one who heeded that instruction, stepping forward to take the USB drive from Ivy. “I’ve received an ultimatum of my own,” she said, her voice steady. “I have to be the one to deliver their demands. I go in.”

“You won’t come out,” Ivy told Priya. The resulting silence indicated Priya’s acceptance of Ivy’s words, both as truth and as inevitable.

Stone-faced, Ivy nodded to the guards. They transferred Daniela Nicolae to Priya’s custody. Seconds later, the guards were gone.

They were never here. Vice President Hayden was never here. This exchange never happened.

“Come on, Tess,” Adam said, stepping up beside me.

I swallowed. “I can’t.”

Ivy understood before Adam did. She always thought three steps ahead. “No,” she said fiercely. “Tessie. Theresa. No—”

There was a blur of movement, and Ivy crumpled. Adam caught her just before she hit the pavement. Priya stood over them. She’d knocked Ivy out, and now she had a gun in her hand.

“I am sorry,” she told Adam. “Truly. But Tess comes with me.”

Adam lowered Ivy’s prone form to the ground. He stood. Priya fired a warning shot to one side.

“Tess.” Adam addressed me, ignoring Priya, ignoring her gun. “Come to me.”

My throat tightened. “I can’t.”

Adam saw now what Ivy had seen instantly: Priya wasn’t taking me against my will. He saw in my face that I’d known all along that it would come to this.

“I’m sorry,” I told Adam. “If there was a way . . .” My words came at an uneven pace, my breathing ragged. “I wish there were a way, Adam, but I can’t just step back and let people die. Tell Ivy—”

“Tess—”

I spoke over his objection. “Tell Ivy that I forgive her. For leaving me in Montana, for lying to me—for everything. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her that I had to do this, okay? Tell her . . .”

I love her.

He could hear it in my voice. They all could. I stared at Ivy, lying prone on the pavement, her face peaceful.

“Tell her,” I said, “that I am my mother’s daughter.”

I nodded at Priya, and she stepped forward, placing herself between Adam and me, her gun still pointed directly at him. I turned to go. I heard Adam step forward. “You won’t shoot me,” he told Priya.

A second later, I heard his body hit the ground.

I whipped back around. There was no gunshot, I told myself frantically. Priya didn’t shoot him.

Daniela stood over Adam’s body, her hands still cuffed. “He was right,” she told Priya. “You would not have shot him.”

How did she—

Priya trained her gun on Daniela, and I remembered Vivvie’s aunt telling me that pregnant or not, Daniela Nicolae could take me.

“He will be fine,” Daniela said, stepping over Adam’s body. “Now, are we doing this, or aren’t we?”

I tried not to think, in that moment, that Priya didn’t know—not really, not fully—what this entailed.

The dove. Madrid.

I couldn’t let myself go there. I couldn’t think about the plan—my plan.

Priya lowered her weapon, but never took her eyes off Daniela. “Let’s go.”





CHAPTER 61

“There’s no way I’m letting a minor put herself back on the chopping block.” The FBI agent who’d greeted me when I was released was the same one we needed to let us back through the gate now.

It had taken us twenty-three minutes to get to Hardwicke and another twelve to arrange this meeting. Feeling suffocated by that tally, I laid my phone on the table in front of us. “You don’t have a choice.”

I’d received another text on the way here. Another video. As I watched, the FBI agent hit play. I’d seen the video, but I made myself watch it again. A girl this time. A senior. I couldn’t place her name, but I knew she’d applied early to Princeton.