Page 38 of The Ruling Class (The Fixer #1)

By the time I got back to Ivy’s, it was dark. I let myself in the front door. The entire house was lit up like a Christmas tree, but there wasn’t another person in sight.

“Hello?” As much as I just wanted to make my way up the spiral staircase and climb into bed, I doubted putting this off until morning would make the coming confrontation any easier. I’d taken off and ignored Ivy’s calls for hours on end. She wasn’t going to be happy about that.

“Hello?” I called a second time. I walked back toward her office. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the otherwise silent house. Ivy’s office door was slightly ajar. I pushed gently on it. “Ivy?”

The door opened. The office was empty. I hovered at the threshold, like a vampire waiting for an invitation. I should turn around and go. But I didn’t. I stepped over the threshold and walked slowly toward Ivy’s desk.

It had been three days since I’d told Ivy everything I knew. She’d had three days to begin unraveling what was going on here. She’d been working, almost nonstop.

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.

If Henry had come to that conclusion, Ivy must have seen it, too. What had she been doing for the past three days? What had she discovered?

What did she know?

There was a thick manila envelope sitting in the middle of her desk. I hesitated for a second or two, then reached for it. Ivy wanted to keep me out of this, but I was already in too deep. Henry. Vivvie. This wasn’t some exercise for World Issues. It wasn’t a game.

I opened the envelope.

The first thing I saw was the edge of a photo. The second thing I saw was myself. Pictures. My brain processed what I was seeing. Of me.

This wasn’t evidence. It had nothing to do with the case.

My breath caught in my throat. I slid the photos out of the envelope.

There were dozens of them: me at twelve, my hair falling out of a thick braid; at sixteen, behind the wheel of Gramps’s truck; elementary school plays; middle school dances.

I didn’t even remember most of these pictures being taken. Gramps must have sent them to her. Thinking about my grandfather taking these pictures was enough of a punch to the gut. But knowing that Ivy had kept them? That realization knocked the wind out of me.

“There.” In my memory, Ivy sits on the edge of my bed, and I sit on the floor in front of her. She fixes my hair into a braid. I lean back into her leg.

She’d stayed with me for a few days, after our parents’ funeral. I’d almost forgotten that.

My hand is woven through Ivy’s. Another memory came viciously on the heels of the first. Ivy kneels beside me. My free hand finds its way to her face. I pat her cheek. It’s wet. Why is Ivy crying? I burrow into her side. She picks me up, pressing my head to her chest, breathing in my smell.

And then she hands me away.

“Tess?” a male voice called my name. I stuffed the pictures back in the envelope and made my way into the hallway a second before Adam rounded the corner. He was moving quickly, long strides covering the space between us in seconds flat.

“Are you okay?”

I’d been prepared to let Ivy yell at me. I hadn’t expected to have Adam staring down at me, worry giving way to anger on his face.

What did he have to be angry about?

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just needed some space. Where’s Ivy?”

“You needed some space, so you went radio silent and took off.” There was an edge in his voice. He turned his back on me for a moment and ran a hand roughly through his short brown hair. “Of course you did.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“Call your sister,” Adam ordered, turning back around and pinning me with a glare. “Now.”

I called Ivy. She answered on the first ring. “Where are you? Are you okay? Do you need me to come get you?”

I didn’t think she’d stop asking questions long enough for me to respond. “I’m at your place,” I said.

“Okay.” Ivy let out a breath and then repeated herself. “Okay. I’m on my way. Is Adam there?”

I glanced up at Adam, who was tracking my every move, like I might take off again any second. “He’s here,” I told Ivy.

She must have heard a hint of wariness in my voice, because the next thing she said was, “He’s a worrier. Try not to hold it against him.”

I eyed Adam, whose even features were set into an expression of uncompromising disapproval. “Roger that.”

Adam narrowed his eyes at me. “What did she say?” he asked suspiciously.

“Nothing,” I told him.

I could practically hear Ivy rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “Put him on.”

I handed the phone to Adam. He took it. “As far as I can tell, she’s in one piece,” he said, then paused.

“What makes you think I’m going to yell at her?

” Another pause. “I don’t yell … fine. I’ll be on my best behavior until you get here.

I won’t tell her that family doesn’t just take off, or that running away never solved anything.

” Adam might have been talking to Ivy, but his sharp blue eyes were on me.

“I certainly won’t tell her that if it were up to me, she wouldn’t be leaving this house again until she was thirty. ”

For a guy who’d met me only a handful of times, Adam did a good impression of my grandfather.

He and Bodie are Ivy’s family. I didn’t know how long they’d known each other, or what exactly there was between them. All I knew was that while I’d been in Montana with Gramps, they’d been here with her—probably for years.

Apparently, from Adam’s perspective, that made me family, too.

“I’m not supposed to yell at you,” he informed me when he hung up the phone, the muscles in his jaw taut.

“If it would make you feel better, I don’t really mind,” I offered.

Adam’s eyelid twitched. “Of course you don’t,” he said with a shake of his head. “You do realize that completely defeats the point?”

I was pretty sure there was no right answer to that question. “I was only gone for a few hours.”

Adam fixed me with a look. “This isn’t a good time for you to go off the grid—not even for a few hours.”

I thought about Ivy telling me to keep my mouth shut, about Henry pointing out that we couldn’t trust anyone—not the police, not the Justice Department, and certainly not the White House.

“Ivy hasn’t told the president or the First Lady what’s going on.” I studied Adam’s face as I said those words. “The only way any of this makes any sense is if Pierce had reason to believe that he would get the nomination.”

Adam’s poker face was even better than Henry’s. “Don’t take off again,” he ordered.

He’s not going to tell me anything. With a curt nod to acknowledge his words, I turned to go upstairs.

“This isn’t the time to jump to conclusions,” Adam called after me. His voice stopped me in my tracks. He measured his words, choosing each one carefully. “The president is rarely the most powerful person in Washington, Tess. He’s part of a system, a cog in a machine.”

“Are you saying you don’t think the president was involved?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Adam replied, “because Ivy told you to stay out of this. I am telling you to stay out of this.” The warning was clear in his voice.

If he had to make me stay out of this, it wouldn’t be pleasant.

“But if I was saying something, it would be that this isn’t simple.

Power is currency in Washington. And you don’t always know who’s holding the cards. ”

He was saying that the president wasn’t the only one we should be wary of. He might not even be the most likely suspect.

Not when there were people out there who made things happen behind the scenes.

People like Adam’s father.

That night, as I plugged my phone in to charge, I remembered the photo from the headmaster’s office.

I pulled up the shots I’d taken on my phone.

The first two were unusable, but the third one only had a minor glare.

I zoomed in and studied the men in the photo: three in the back row, two in the front, one off to the side.

Major Bharani. Judge Pierce. The Hardwicke headmaster. William Keyes. The fifth man, I didn’t know. And the sixth—he was standing slightly off to one side. The glare obscured his face, but the way he was standing, the general shape of his features—

Familiar.

I loaded the picture onto my computer and looked up every tutorial I could find on removing glare from photos. I cloned the picture. I adjusted the shadow. I played with the filters. The end result wasn’t pretty, but it was enough for me to confirm the man’s identity.

Six men. Five I recognize. I walked through them one by one. The doctor who killed Justice Marquette. The judge who paid him to do it. The headmaster of DC’s most exclusive private school. Adam’s father, who makes things happen behind the scenes.

And standing off to the side, staring straight at the camera:

President Nolan .