Authors: Lynn Barnes
THE LONG GAME (3 page)
I waited for the catch. “That’s it?” I said, when none was forthcoming. “Nominate you for student council president, and we’re even?”
Emilia gave a roll of her blue-green eyes. “No. You’ll nominate me, and then you’ll make sure I win, and
then
we’ll be
even.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “And how am I supposed to make sure you win?”
“How do you do anything?” Emilia shot back. “I’m not asking for a miracle here, Tess. I’m qualified for the job. I’m in good social standing. I have the right connections. And you know I’ll do a better job than John Thomas Wilcox.”
John Thomas was the horrible excuse for a human being who’d coerced the vice president’s
daughter into taking those pictures. After I’d stopped him from sharing them, he’d zeroed in on me as a target.
He was a predator and a coward, and even the sound of his name set my teeth on edge.
“John Thomas is your opponent?” I couldn’t keep my features from working their way into a scowl.
“One of them,” Emilia confirmed, thrusting out her chin. “In the past decade, Hardwicke has had only
one female student council president. My parents are dentists. His father is the minority whip.” Emilia stopped walking and turned to face me head-on. “I intend to win this, Tess.”
The last time Emilia had attempted to hire me, it was to keep Asher out of trouble. Putting her in office over John Thomas Wilcox seemed like a less Herculean task—not to mention more
enjoyable
.
“Fine,” I said. “I
help you win this election, and then we’re even.”
Emilia’s lips parted in a small smile. “Welcome to the campaign.”
It took Bodie less than ten minutes after he picked me up to ferret out the finer details of my day. For someone I was fairly certain had committed his share of felonies, Ivy’s driver could do an impressive soccer mom impression when it came to pumping information out of me on the way to and from school.
“I doubt ‘student council campaign manager’ was what Keyes had in mind when he
told you to get more involved at school.” Bodie flashed a smile at me.
“I agreed to Sunday night dinners and allowing him to publically acknowledge me as a Keyes,” I retorted. “Field hockey and debate were never a part of the deal.”
Bodie studied me for a moment, the way he always did when the subject of William Keyes came up. “If the old man starts to make noise about it,” he said, trying to
mask the fact that he was taking mental notes on my well-being for Ivy, “you can always tell him you’re taking a page from the Keyes playbook and trying your hand at calling the shots behind the scenes.”
I grimaced. The last thing I needed was for the Hardwicke populace to decide that I was some sort of kingmaker-in-the-making.
“It’s a favor for a friend,” I said. “That’s it.”
“You’re a Kendrick,”
Bodie told me, taking the turn toward Ivy’s house. “Favors for friends have a way of complicating themselves.”
Bodie slowed the car as we approached the driveway. In addition to being Ivy’s chauffeur, he was also her bodyguard—and mine. With casual efficiency, he surveyed the street in front of Ivy’s house, his gaze coming to rest on a car at the curb.
Since Ivy worked out of the bottom floor
of our sprawling DC home, clients came and went with a fairly high frequency, but this car didn’t fit the profile of Ivy’s typical client. Beneath the grime, the vehicle was burnt orange—and clearly used. The windows weren’t bulletproof. I doubted its owner had ever even considered hiring a driver.
I glanced over at Bodie, trying to get a read on him. Did he recognize the car?
As he pulled into
the driveway, his phone buzzed.
A text, almost certainly from Ivy.
Bodie read the message. A second passed. He put on his best poker face, then glanced back up at me. “How would you feel about ice cream?”
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.
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.
“Ivy has all her secrets locked away,” I said, turning back to the bare walls. “What does it matter if I come in here if there’s nothing left to see?”
Adam must have heard something in my voice, because he softened his own. “Tess—”
“I had dinner with your father last night.” Nothing shut Adam up faster than mentioning William Keyes. “He wants me to
get more involved at Hardwicke.”
Adam gave me a long, considering look. “Do you want to get more involved at Hardwicke?”
“I want to know who Ivy’s talking to in there.”
“Tess.” This time, there was an edge in Adam’s voice—a warning. “Ivy isn’t the only one who wants you kept out of this.”
This
as in her current case, or
this
as in the massive chunk of Ivy’s life from which I’d been barred?
“Tommy wasn’t a person who knew when to quit.” My uncle’s blue eyes held mine. “He wasn’t the type to sit back and think things through.”
“If he had been,” I pointed out quietly, “I wouldn’t be here.” I meant the words to sound flippant. They came out sounding rough.
“I loved my brother. And I see so much of him in you.” Adam’s voice was as rough as mine now. “I’ll be damned before I let you
get tangled up in anything dangerous ever again.”
I tamped down on the rush of emotion those words provoked. “Dangerous?”
Silence.
“Who’s in there with Ivy?” I asked again.
Adam kneaded his temple. “Like talking to a wall,” he muttered.
“I can hear you,” I told him. “I’m standing right here.”
He crossed the room until he was toe-to-toe with me. He placed two fingers under my chin, angling
my face up toward
his. “Don’t push me on this,” he said quietly. “You won’t like the result.”
I’d never met my biological father, but I couldn’t help wondering—if he were alive, if he were here, would he be saying those same words to me, that same quiet warning in his voice?
“Tell me you understand,” Adam ordered.
I understood that if my uncle was this serious about my steering clear, then
whoever Ivy was meeting with, whatever she was on the verge of doing—it was
big
.
“I’m waiting, Tess.”
I held out a moment longer before saying what he wanted to hear. “I understand.”
Adam removed his hand from my chin, trailing it lightly over the back of my head for a moment before stepping back. At his direction, I made my way out of the conference room. Just as I stepped into the hallway,
the door to Ivy’s office opened.
Adam was behind me in an instant, his hands resting lightly on each of my shoulders. If he’d had time, he probably would have steered me back out of the hall, but within a heartbeat, Ivy’s gaze landed on me. To an outside observer, her expression and posture would have seemed perfectly relaxed, but I could feel her struggling to hold on to that composure.
She
thought I was upstairs.
Bodie appeared behind Ivy and mouthed four words at me:
You had one job.
“Adam already read me the riot act,” I told Ivy. Before she could reply, I turned my attention to the man standing next to her. He was in his late twenties. His blond hair was just long
enough to be a little messy. His skin was suntanned. There was something familiar about the set of his features.
“It’s fine,” the man told Ivy. “I don’t bite.” The dark circles under his eyes spoke of sleepless nights, but his voice was wry.
Ivy’s not afraid of you
, I thought, studying the way that she stiffened at his words.
But she is afraid of something.
“I’m Tess,” I said, since no one seemed inclined to introduce me. After a beat, the man held out a hand.
Adam’s grip tightened slightly on my shoulders.
“Walker,” the man said.
The name triggered something in my brain, and I realized why he looked familiar—and who he resembled.
His mother.
I took his hand. “Walker,” I repeated. “As in Walker Nolan.”
The president’s youngest son.
Ivy refused to say a word about Walker Nolan’s visit. She left shortly after he did and still wasn’t home when I woke up the next morning.
What could the president’s son have said that would send Ivy straight to DEFCON 1?
Before Bodie dropped me off at Hardwicke, he put the obvious into words. “Don’t tell anyone—”
“That the president’s youngest son is in some kind of trouble?” I
filled in. “My lips are sealed.”
The night before, I’d stayed up late reading everything I could find online about Walker Nolan. Of the three Nolan sons, Walker was the only one to decline Secret Service protection. He was twenty-nine, stayed more or less out of the limelight, and had spent two years with Doctors Without Borders before his father had taken office. I didn’t need to be a political
genius to guess that any scandal involving the president’s son would dominate the news cycle going into midterm elections.