Page 65 of Lessons in Power (The Fixer #2)

The occupation of Hardwicke made international news. So, too, did the takedown. All the terrorists had been either apprehended or killed.

Or at least, that was how the story went.

As far as the world was concerned, Daniela Nicolae had served as a double agent, helping the SWAT team infiltrate the building and take down her cohorts inside. Both she and her unborn child had been killed in the process.

The United States government had their victory. The Hardwicke parents had their children back. And I had another truth—another secret—I didn’t want to know.

I wondered if it was the weight of secrets like this, as much as the fact that they served as a protective measure, that had made Ivy start keeping her files. She uploaded her secrets to the program. Maybe that meant she didn’t have to carry them inside.

“Raise your arm over your head. Now rotate it away from me.”

Grinding my teeth, I did as the doctor asked. I had a hairline fracture in my jaw, one hell of a headache, and a shoulder that the doctor subsequently informed me had not been dislocated, but that wasn’t very happy either.

I felt it. I felt all of it—all the pain, all the terror, all the ways this could have gone differently—now that the ordeal was over.

“What’s the verdict, doctor? Will our patient live?”

At some point, when I’d been caught up in the treacherous tangle of my own mind, Adam had entered the exam room. The doctor narrowed her eyes at him.

“Are you her father?” she asked.

Ivy was off running interference with the media, keeping them away from the hospital—away from Henry, away from Anna Hayden, away from me. If she’d had her way, Ivy never would have left my side.

“Uncle.” Adam answered the doctor’s question about being my father. I could see the woman on the verge of telling him she could only speak to my parent or legal guardian.

I spoke up. “Close enough.”

Adam kept his face carefully blank as the doctor rattled off the details of my condition, but I knew him well enough to see the emotions underneath. He was the closest thing I had to a father, the closest thing I would ever have, with Tommy dead.

Soon enough, the doctor left the two of us alone. Adam came to stand in front of me. After a long moment, he sat beside me on the exam table. He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t ask me how I was doing. He just sat there, and I leaned into him.

His arm wrapped around me, and I cried—deep, bone- shuddering sobs that racked my body and his. He held on, held me, and when I stopped crying and straightened, wiping the back of my hand roughly over my tear-drenched face, he didn’t say a word.

“I’m sorry Daniela knocked you out,” I said, beaten at my own game by his steady silence.

In reply, Adam raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you?”

“Not really,” I admitted, managing a small smile. “But I’m sorry it was necessary.”

Adam snorted. “I hear you’re grounded until you’re forty,” he said, pushing back any urge he might have felt to tear into me himself.

“I’m pretty sure Ivy was exaggerating,” I said.

Adam’s other eyebrow joined the first. “Are you?”

The door to the hospital room opened. I expected it to be Ivy or Bodie, who’d promised to bring me a snack, but instead, William Keyes stood there. He hadn’t changed clothes since the last time I’d seen him. His thick white hair was disheveled. He’d aged a decade in a day.

“You are unharmed?”

Those were the exact same words he’d said to me before, but this time, there was more raw emotion woven through them than I’d ever heard in his voice.

I wondered if he believed, as the rest of the world did, that Daniela and the baby had been killed.

Given everything I knew about the man, if he hadn’t uncovered the truth yet, he would soon.

“I’m going to be okay,” I said. I meant it. I almost meant it.

“If I thought I would not be murdered on the spot,” the kingmaker said, coming toward me, “I would turn you over my knee for going back into that building.”

I wasn’t sure if Keyes was concerned about being murdered by Adam or Ivy or me. Beside me, Adam glowered.

I felt a grin tug at the edges of my lips. “You sound like my grandfather,” I said. “My other grandfather.”

William Keyes had never liked being reminded that Gramps had raised me and loved me and made me the person I was, but this time, he seemed to take the reference in stride.

“You’re a horrible girl,” Keyes said, coming to stand right in front of me. “A reckless, stupid, irresponsible, horrible girl. And I …”

He looked at Adam, then back at me.

“I could be a better man,” he said hoarsely. “For you.”