Page 58 of The Ruling Class (The Fixer #1)

Something dripped onto my face. Liquid. Cold. My head tilted to one side. Another drop. Awareness hit me like a sledgehammer. My eyes flew open. The Secret Service agent. Ivy.

I scrambled backward, jamming the heels of my hands into the pavement. It took me a moment to register the fact that I was alone. Outside. Safe , I thought, choking on the realization.

Ivy wasn’t safe.

My cheeks were wet—with tears, with drizzling rain. It was dark out—nighttime. How long? I pushed myself to my feet, my heart thudding. How long was I out for?

Kostas had Ivy. And if the president didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to kill her.

I stumbled out of the alley, pausing when I reached the street. Looking up, I could see the outline of a tall, thin building rising to a point in the distance. The Washington Monument. I was in DC.

Ivy’s not. He has her. Where does he have her? My brain wouldn’t slow down. It wouldn’t stop stacking questions, one on top of the other.

“Miss?”

I almost couldn’t hear the word over the cacophony in my head. Kostas has Ivy. She traded herself for me. I’m safe. Safe. Ivy’s not. He has Ivy—

“Miss.” A man reached out to grab my arm.

I jumped back, my hands held out in front of my body, a last line of defense against whatever might come. “Don’t.” The word that exited my mouth barely sounded human.

Calm down , I thought.

He has Ivy .

Calm down.

Have to find Adam. Have to find Bodie. He has Ivy.

Calm down.

“Are you all right?” the man asked.

I slammed the door on the rush of thoughts beating a rhythm against the inside of my skull. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to put together a coherent sentence. “Can I borrow your phone?”

Of the people I knew in DC, there was only one whose number I had memorized—Vivvie’s. I called. She answered. Words came out of my mouth—not the right ones, not enough to make sense—but somehow, she was able to tell her aunt where I was.

Her aunt was able to tell Adam.

And Adam came for me. As he ushered me into his car, I told him about Ivy, Kostas—all of it, in stilted sentences and streams of words that came too fast and blurred together.

I told him everything, and when he tried to take me to the hospital, I said no.

He must have decided that it wasn’t worth it to argue with me, because the doctor ended up coming to us.

Adam had a one-bedroom apartment, small and hyper-organized.

After the doctor had checked me over, after I’d told Adam and then Bodie everything I knew—told them again and again until I had no more words left inside me, until there was nothing left to say—Adam steered me gently toward his bathroom.

He turned on the shower, handed me a towel, and laid one of his USAF T-shirts and a pair of sweatpants out for me.

Then he left me alone.

As the shower steamed up behind me, I stood in front of the mirror.

I was still wearing the cotton shift. My face was dirty.

There was the beginning of a bruise on one side.

I woke up in a room with concrete floors and no windows .

Even now that there was no one left to tell, I couldn’t stop going over the facts.

There was some kind of electrical wiring on the wall.

I couldn’t stop hoping, somehow, that I’d remember something, some detail, no matter how tiny, that might tell me where Ivy was.

That might help us get her back.

Kostas is going to use Ivy to try to blackmail the president into pardoning someone. The surface of the mirror began to steam up, obscuring my face. I swiped my hand across it and stared at my reflection, like it might have the answers I was looking for.

Ivy’s eyes are brown , I thought. Mine had flecks of green, like moss amid the mud. Our faces had a similar shape to them. I had her lips, somebody else’s nose.

It doesn’t matter , I told myself. Dragging my eyes from my reflection, I undressed and stepped into the shower, letting the hot water beat against me. Get it together, Tess.

I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.

Not now. Ivy had told the rogue Secret Service agent that she had a program that started releasing her clients’ secrets if she went missing for forty-eight hours.

I wasn’t sure if she’d been telling the truth or not, but either way, if the president didn’t agree to pardon somebody before that time period had elapsed, this situation was going to escalate.

I wanted to believe Kostas wouldn’t kill Ivy.

I wanted to believe that, but I didn’t.

I got out of the shower and slipped on the clothes Adam had left me. They dwarfed my body. I tied the sweatpants and doubled the waistband over, then made my way back out into the world.

Adam and Bodie were still in the living room. I saw a healthy amount of caution in two sets of eyes as they turned to look at me.

“What’s the plan?” I asked. “How are we going to get Ivy back?”

“We’ve got people looking for her,” Adam said. “FBI, Homeland—”

“And some less law-abiding types,” Bodie added. “I’ll head back out once …”

He trailed off.

Once you have me settled , I finished. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself. Go, do whatever you need to do. Find Ivy. He’ll kill her if he doesn’t get what he wants.”

I realized then that they hadn’t pressed me for details—about Kostas, about what he wanted. “You weren’t surprised when I said Kostas wanted the president to pardon someone,” I said slowly. “Or when I told you that Kostas was the one who took me.”

“Ivy suspected from pretty early on that we were looking for someone in the Secret Service or intelligence.” Adam was sitting on the couch, his hands in his lap, his gaze fixed on his hands. “We just didn’t know who.”

“How—” I started to say.

“Ivy went to the Secret Service,” Bodie cut in. “First thing after you and Vivvie told us everything, Ivy went to the Secret Service and asked them to bar Vivvie’s father from the White House.”

I remembered Ivy saying something to that effect.

Ivy talks to the Secret Service about Vivvie’s father. Vivvie’s father is immediately taken out of the picture. I saw the connection with hindsight. Ivy must have seen it from the beginning.

“She suspected it was a Secret Service agent, and she didn’t tell the president?” I asked.

“She didn’t tell the president because she suspected it was a Secret Service agent,” Adam replied.

“The president is a difficult man to get alone, and even if she managed to pass the message along in private, she was fairly certain that the person we were looking for knew that we were digging. If Ivy met with the president and his behavior changed at all …” Adam shook his head.

“That wasn’t a risk Ivy was willing to take. ”

“What about the pardon? You weren’t surprised when I said Kostas was the one who took me, and you weren’t surprised when I said he asked for a pardon.”

Adam and Bodie were silent.

“A pardon for who? For what?” As the questions left my mouth, I became more and more certain that they knew the answers.

“He took me ,” I said slowly. “Ivy is my —she’s my family, and he has her.” I felt like my body might start shaking, but my voice was steady, fierce. Like Ivy’s. “You don’t get to keep me out of this,” I said.

After a moment, Adam stood and left the room.

When he came back, he had a thick file in his hand.

“Ivy flew down to Arizona to look for a connection between Judge Pierce and someone in the Secret Service—or the intelligence community. She came back with detailed information about Pierce’s docket.

Cases he’d heard. Cases he was scheduled to hear. Appeals.”

“She found a connection?” I knew, even as I asked the question, that the answer was yes . She was Ivy Kendrick. Of course she found the connection.

Adam handed me the file. “It’s a death penalty case. Defendant was nineteen when the crime was committed, with a history of traumatic brain injury. There’s a question about whether he was mentally competent to stand trial at all.”

I opened the file. The defendant’s name didn’t ring any bells, but when I saw his picture, my breath caught in my throat. The eyes. The set of his features.

“Kostas?” I asked.

“His son,” Bodie confirmed. “From what we can tell, Kostas didn’t even know the kid existed until the mother came to him for help with legal fees.”

I thought of Kostas saying that Vivvie’s father had no honor. I thought of the way he’d spoken of people who killed for money, or for power. I’d wondered what he had killed for, and now I knew.

“He let me go,” I said, my throat tightening. “He wasn’t going to, but when Ivy told him I was her daughter —”

She’d asked him, one parent to another. And he’d let me go.

“Pierce was supposed to hear the son’s case?” I tried to focus on the file.

“Best as we can figure,” Bodie told me, “Pierce offered to set aside the son’s sentence if Kostas helped assassinate the chief justice. Once the deed was done, the judge failed to fulfill his end of the bargain.”

Pierce reneged, and Kostas killed him. I felt sick.

“Ivy said she had a program.” I thought of the promises she had made. “She said that if Kostas held her captive, the president might bargain.”

“He might,” Adam said after several seconds. What he didn’t say was: He also might not .

He has to , I thought. He has to. But we were talking about the president of the United States. He didn’t have to do anything.

“We need to find her.” I was back to that, back to the ticking clock and the certainty that if we didn’t find Ivy, she might not make it out of this alive.

“You need to get some sleep,” Adam corrected. He stood and walked over to me, setting a hand on my shoulder. “The president has been filled in on the situation. He wants to find Ivy as badly as we do. Everyone who could be looking for her is looking for her.”

At that, Bodie nodded at Adam and took his leave.

“Aren’t you going, too?” I asked Adam. I could accept that there might not be anything I could do. I didn’t like it. I certainly wouldn’t be able to sleep. But I could accept that a sixteen-year-old girl probably wasn’t as qualified to look for Ivy as the people who were actually looking for her.

But Adam worked for the Pentagon. He could do something.

“You’re not the only one who loves her,” Adam said softly. “But I know where your sister would want me, and that’s here. With you.”

I swallowed. “You called her my sister.”

“Force of habit.” He looked like he might stop there. “She wanted to tell you, Tess. Years ago, as soon as she was set up here, as soon as she was in a position to take care of you, she wanted to tell you the truth. She wanted you here.”

“And then she changed her mind.” The words escaped my mouth before I could bite them back. Ivy was missing. She was gone , and I was so angry at her—for doing this, for leaving me.

Again.

“She stopped visiting. She barely even called.” I closed my eyes. “She never told me why. I don’t know what I did, why she left—”

“Hey,” Adam said, capturing my chin in his hand. “You didn’t do anything, Tess.”

I believed that. But the thirteen-year-old inside me couldn’t. Ivy had left me. She was my mother , and she’d chosen to leave.

She chose to stay with Kostas. I should have been grateful for that. She’d traded herself for me, she’d saved me, she loved me. But there was nothing I could do to keep from feeling like she’d thrown me away, all over again.

“Your grandfather asked her to go.” Adam’s voice broke into my thoughts.

His words knocked the breath out of me. “He said she was being selfish. That being a parent wasn’t about what she wanted.

That she had to think about what was best for you .

” Adam cupped my face in his hand. “He sent her away, Tess, and she came back here, and something happened that convinced her he was right.”

What happened? I didn’t ask the question out loud. It didn’t matter. Gramps might have sent Ivy away, but she’d gone. She was the one who hadn’t said good-bye. She was the one who’d stopped calling.

“There was never a day, not one,” Adam said softly, “that she didn’t think about you.”

She should have been there. I closed my eyes, more to keep them from tearing up than because I was tired. She should be here now.

“Come on,” Adam said. “You need to rest.” He steered me toward his bedroom, toward the bed. Adam waited until I’d actually sat down on the edge of the mattress before retreating.

Sleep never came.

Every second, every minute, every hour that passed was time I wouldn’t get back. Time Ivy wouldn’t get back.

In the dead of the night, I started pacing: the bedroom, the hallway right outside, the bathroom. As I came to the living room, I paused in the doorway.

Adam was awake. He was bent over his desk, looking at something. A note? A photograph? Whatever it was, he tucked it back into a drawer. He looked up but didn’t see me. From the expression on his face, I was willing to bet he didn’t see anything at all.