Page 16 of Lessons in Power

I didn’t question why Ivy had sent the police away. If someone had broken through her security, she wouldn’t want that to get out.

“What were they looking for?” I asked.

Ivy glanced toward the door, as if she could see through it. “Leverage.”

William Keyes waited for the police to leave before he approached the house.

“Wait upstairs,” Ivy told me.

She didn’t ask where I’d been when she’d arrived home. I wondered if the kingmaker would point out that if I hadn’t gone with him, I might have been here when someone broke in. And then I wondered if she would counter that it seemed awfully coincidental that he’d gotten me out of the house right before someone had broken in and torn her office apart.

Looking for something. Something to do with Walker Nolan.My mind was jumbled as I ascended the spiral staircase. I paused at the top but heard nothing.

Keyes met with Georgia Nolan. The president’s son knew this terrorist attack was going to happen. People are asking questions.

The thoughts came rapid fire, one on the heel of another, until Ivy appeared upstairs. Her gaze faltered for a moment when it landed on me.

“Is this the part where you get mad at me for the things I can’t tell you, or the part where I remind you that you can’t trustWilliam Keyes?” There was no edge in Ivy’s voice, no hint of anger or exasperation.

She sounded tired.

There were so many things I wanted to say to her. I wanted to tell her that she could trust me, that all keeping me in the dark accomplished was pushing me further away. I wanted to say that it wasn’t fair that she got to protect me, but I was expected to just sit back and let her, as Keyes had put it,play with fire.

I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t allowed to do this to me again. But she was tired, and she was here, and she was in one piece.

“This is the part where I do my homework,” I said softly, “and you order takeout, and we both pretend that everything is fine.”

CHAPTER 13

The next morning, things at Hardwicke were back to normal—more or less.

“Don’t look now,” Asher whispered. “But I believe you’re being paged.”

Vivvie immediately turned to look. Stealth wasn’t her strong suit. “I’d say that’s more of a beckoning,” she told Asher after a moment’s deliberation.

“A summoning, perhaps?” Asher countered, wiggling his eyebrows.

On the other side of the Hut, Emilia Rhodes narrowed her eyes at me and crooked her finger. Asher was right. I had been summoned. With one last glance at Asher and Vivvie, I gritted my teeth and went to see what Emilia wanted.

“We’re polling strong with the robotics club and the jazz band.” Maya Rojas ran her fingers along the tip of her straw as I took a seat at their table. “I can deliver the girls’ basketballteam, and Tess having nominated you seems to be carrying some weight with freshman females.”

“But,” Emilia prompted.

“However,” Maya said, hedging slightly, “Henry is also polling well with freshman girls. And sophomore girls. And most of the junior class.”

“And John Thomas?” Emilia was undeterred.

“He’s got strong support from some of the party crowd, as well as a large contingent of freshman and sophomore boys.” Maya’s mother was a pollster who crunched numbers for the president. Apparently, Maya had picked up a thing or two about the art of polling along the way.

“We need the underclassmen,” Maya said. “They don’t know any of the candidates that well, so their votes are the most up for grabs.”

Emilia turned her attention from Maya to me. “You’re the freshman whisperer,” she said bluntly. “Any suggestions?”

First period didn’t start for another ten minutes. That was ten minutes too many.

“I’ll get back to you on that one,” I said. It was too early for this.

Emilia opened her mouth to object, but before she could push out the words, her phone buzzed on the table.