Page 37 of The Ruling Class (The Fixer #1)

Henry Marquette drove a hybrid. When he pulled up to the curb next to me, Asher was sprawled across the backseat, leaving me no choice but to crawl into the front.

As I shut the door, I caught sight of my reflection in the window.

My hair was falling out of its ponytail, flyaway pieces stuck to my forehead with sweat.

I couldn’t make out enough of my face to tell if it betrayed how close I’d come to crying.

No more. I was done with this. Tears were useless. Crying was useless. I focused on Henry—and the unalterable fact that I was screwed .

From the second I saw the set of Henry’s features—the tense jaw, the down-turned lips, the eyes that betrayed the mix of emotions swirling in his chest—I knew that I wouldn’t be able to lie to him. Henry wasn’t a problem . He wasn’t a fire to be put out, or a situation to be handled.

He had a right to know.

“Someone once cautioned me against making assumptions,” he said. He had a death grip on the wheel, his eyes locked on the road. “So you’re not going to make me assume, Tess. You’re going to tell me if that was just the pina coladas talking, or if Asher …”

Was telling the truth . My brain finished his sentence as if it were my own.

I swallowed, then summoned my voice. “Four days ago,” I said quietly, “Vivvie Bharani told me that she thought her father had killed a patient.”

“My grandfather.” Henry’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

I nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at me— wouldn’t look at me.

“Talk,” Henry said roughly. “Every detail, every suspicion, every single thing you know, Tess.”

The phone. The voice on the other end. That voice’s identity. I told Henry everything. Not just for him. For me. I kept picturing Vivvie’s father lifting a gun to his temple. I kept picturing his blood splattered on a wall.

Secrets came at a cost.

So I told Henry. Maybe a part of me wanted his anger. I wanted him to lash out. I wanted him to blame me, the way I blamed myself.

“Asher knew?” Henry almost choked on those words. I glanced back at Asher—self-destructive, loyal Asher, who’d been Henry’s best friend since they were kids.

“He wanted to tell you.”

I could see Henry thinking, But he didn’t . “I don’t suppose it occurred to any of you—or to your sister, for that matter—to take this to the police.” That wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“Ivy’s working on it.” That was all I could say, all she’d told me.

“You might trust your sister to work on this,” Henry said, his voice soft, with a lethal thread of steel. “But I most certainly do not.”

A fuller understanding of what my telling Henry meant slammed into me like a semitruck broadsiding a car.

Henry despised Ivy’s occupation. He believed that when she “fixed” things, she left destruction in her wake.

I’d known he wouldn’t be able to sit on this information.

I’d known that, and I’d told him everything anyway.

Because I had to.

“Do what you have to do,” I told Henry, “but remember that if it wasn’t for Vivvie, none of us would know what really happened. She’s the only reason there’s anything to work on , and it cost her everything.”

Her father. Her home. The naive certainty that there were people in this world that you could count on not to blacken your eyes.

I leaned forward, so that I could see all of Henry’s face, so that out of his peripheral vision, he might catch a hint of mine. “Whatever you do with this information,” I told him, “whoever you trust with it, you better make sure they can protect her.”

Ivy hadn’t even told the president. To protect Vivvie. To protect me.

Henry absorbed my words. “You said there were two numbers on the phone?” he asked after an extended silence.

He would catch that.

“The other number was disconnected.” I wondered if Henry was coming to the conclusion that I had reached: that in order for Vivvie’s dad to kill his grandfather, someone had to get Justice Marquette into surgery first.

Did they poison him somehow?

“Do you know where your grandfather was that morning?” I asked Henry. “Or the night before?”

Without warning, Henry pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road.

He killed the engine, his fist wrapped tight around the keys.

“I can find out,” he said, and then, moving briskly, he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.

I stared after him as he walked a few feet away, his head bowed, every muscle in his shoulders and back tensed beneath his shirt.

“Henry’s not big on public displays of emotion.” Asher followed that statement with a noise halfway between a whimper and a moan. I turned to face him. I waited for a rush of anger at him for blabbing, but it didn’t come.

“You would have told him eventually,” I said. I’d been living on borrowed time.

Asher pressed the heel of his hand to his head and made another moaning sound. “I’m the screwup in the Henry-Asher friendship. Always have been.”

I wasn’t sure if Asher thought he’d screwed up by telling Henry or by keeping it from him in the first place.

“So what you’re saying,” I said, in an attempt to bring some of the old light back to Asher’s eyes, “is that Henry is used to having to rescue you from your own drunk self.”

Asher shook his head, then winced, clearly regretting that action in his current condition. “I’m not normally an imbiber,” he said. “But there was a lot going on. Oblivion sounded nice.” He closed his eyes, but apparently there was no oblivion to be found. “Vivvie?” he asked.

“Haven’t heard from her.”

The driver’s side door opened, and Henry climbed back in. He took in the fact that Asher was awake, but didn’t comment on it.

“My grandfather didn’t have a history of heart problems,” he told me instead. “We need to figure out what, if anything, can mimic the symptoms of a heart attack.”

“Are we thinking what as in what poison ?” Asher asked.

Henry didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell if that was because he wasn’t speaking to Asher, or if he just had nothing to say.

“We?” I asked finally. They’d both used the word.

Henry answered my question with a seemingly unrelated statement.

“It wasn’t a good plan.” Everything about him was hyperfocused, intense—it just took me a moment to figure out what he was focused on.

“If the plan was to kill my grandfather so that Pierce could assume his spot on the Supreme Court, it wasn’t a good plan.

” He curled his fingers into a fist, then uncurled them.

I wondered if he even realized he was doing it.

“You saw the handout Dr. Clark gave us,” he continued.

“There are dozens of potential nominees. The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination. ”

You’ll get your money when I get my nomination.

“And the only way,” Henry continued, “that Pierce could possibly be that sure was if he had someone on the inside.”

The inside of the nomination process.

The inside of the White House.

“Ivy hasn’t told anyone,” I said, thinking out loud. “Not the president, not the First Lady …”

Henry clamped his jaw down, then forced it to relax.

“You were right when you said that I needed to think about who I could possibly hand this information over to, Tess. If there’s even a chance that this goes as high as the West Wing, we can’t trust anyone.

Not the police. Not the Justice Department. No one.”

“So where does that leave us?” I asked.

Henry’s chest rose and fell slightly with each breath.

He was completely in control of himself in a way that he hadn’t been when he left the car.

“I know where it leaves me. I’m going to figure out who had access to my grandfather before his so-called heart attack ,” he told me. “And you’re going to go home.”