Page 62 of The Ruling Class (The Fixer #1)

William Keyes lived in Virginia. His residence—and I doubted it was his only one—was nothing short of palatial. The guard out front hadn’t wanted to buzz me through the gate, but I could be very convincing.

Ultimately, William Keyes had a weak spot, and I could tap into it with just four words: It’s about your son .

The others waited outside. Fifteen minutes after I’d been let into the Keyes house and seated in some kind of formal library, the old man joined me.

“You,” he said after a moment, “surprise me.”

It wasn’t clear from his tone whether that was a compliment or a complaint.

“I haven’t surprised you yet,” I replied. “But I’m about to.”

Despite himself, the old man looked slightly intrigued. “Your sister wouldn’t approve,” he said, coming to stand closer to me. I got the feeling that he liked towering over me, that it didn’t matter that physically, I was small.

An enemy could always be made smaller.

“Ivy is being held captive by a rogue Secret Service agent,” I said, not beating around the bush. “President Nolan has received a ransom demand.”

“He won’t negotiate.” The corners of Keyes’s lips twitched. It wasn’t a smile, but it wasn’t a grimace, either.

“She’s got a bomb strapped to her chest.” I kept my voice calm but couldn’t tamp down the intensity in it. “If you can’t get the governor of Arizona to issue a pardon, she’s going to die.”

After exactly three seconds of silence, William Keyes took a seat across from me. “What makes you think I have any sway over the governor of Arizona?”

“If you don’t, you know someone who does.”

This time, he did smile. “You,” he said, lingering on the word, “are very much like your sister.”

I could hear, in those words, that he’d been fond of Ivy once. Keyes stiffened, like he’d heard the same thing and didn’t appreciate the reminder.

“Unfortunately,” he continued, leaning back in his chair, “your sister is no longer my concern. She put Nolan in office. Clearly, she prefers his judgment to mine.”

Whatever bad blood there was between Keyes and the president, the man sitting across from me would never forgive Ivy for helping Peter Nolan make it to the White House.

Luckily, I hadn’t come here to beg forgiveness.

“She’s not my sister.” I let those words sink in, knowing they weren’t what he’d expected—knowing that I wasn’t what he’d expected. “She’s my mother, and I don’t think you want anyone figuring out who my father is.”

Keyes was on his feet again in an instant. “What precisely are you trying to say, young lady?”

“I’m saying that Ivy got pregnant at seventeen.

I’m saying that the man who got her pregnant was young and recently enlisted.

I’m saying she hid the pregnancy and gave me to her parents to raise, and I am saying that from the moment I stepped foot in this town, Ivy has done everything she can to keep you from looking too hard at me. ”

Keyes was staring at me now, as if he could see into my cells and disassemble my DNA, piece by piece.

“How long have Ivy and Adam known each other?” I asked him. I didn’t wait for an answer as I pelted him with question after question. “Did you know he’s teaching me how to drive? Or that the first time he ever saw me, he looked at me like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach?”

The old man came to stand behind the chair he’d been sitting in moments before. His hands closed over the back of it, his grip turning his knuckles white.

“Did you know,” I said slowly, “that I heard Adam tell Ivy that bringing me to DC was a mistake because she’d made an enemy of you? I heard you say that Ivy had gotten under Adam’s skin, that you had no idea how she’d done it. I have a theory.”

Keyes took a step forward. “You think Adam is your father.”

There was a ferocity in his voice when he’d said those words, like it took every ounce of determination and power he had just to choke out that one statement.

“I asked him,” I said. “He didn’t deny it. We’d need a DNA test to know for sure, but a DNA test might raise some questions.” I paused. “You’re still hoping that someday, Adam might retire from the military and go into politics.”

William Keyes had barely interacted with me, but I’d watched him. I’d heard him talking. I knew, instinctively, how to go straight for his heart.

“You have a plan for Adam,” I said, “and I doubt that I am part of that plan.”

“Are you attempting to blackmail me?” Keyes said. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he sounded pleased.

“I prefer to think of it as a negotiation,” I said. “You want to see your son in the Oval Office someday, and I want the governor of Arizona to issue either a pardon or a permanent stay of execution for Damien Kostas’s son.”

Now that the cards were on the table, I saw how easily this could go either way. William Keyes might not give me what I wanted. Adam might not even be my father.

I needed this to work.

Ivy needed for this to work.

“When were you born?” Keyes issued the question like a demand. Those four words—and the laser-sharp focus with which he assessed my features—told me that he wasn’t dismissing my claims outright.

I can do this. I have to do this.

I told him when I was born, and then where. I told him, again, what Ivy had told me: my father was young and recently enlisted.

“Adam joined the military after college.” William’s grip on the back of the chair relaxed slightly. “He met your sister when he was home on leave. She’d just turned twenty.”

I felt like a balloon that had been scratched with a knife. There was one moment of tightness in my chest, like I might explode, and then I felt the fight drain out of me. This was supposed to be my Hail Mary pass.

This was supposed to be me saving Ivy.

Adam met Ivy after I was born. As I forced myself to process that fact, I realized that I hadn’t just thought Adam was my father, I hadn’t just believed it—I’d wanted it to be true.

If Keyes was telling me the truth, Adam couldn’t be my father. I wasn’t anything to him but Ivy’s daughter.

I stood up and turned sharply to the door.

“I suggest you sit back down.”

I stopped in my tracks but didn’t sit.

“Tess, isn’t it?” the older man said, coming around to stand in front of me. “Is that short for Tessa?”

I wondered what game he was playing.

“Theresa,” I said finally.

Keyes studied me, eyes sharp. “My late wife’s name was Theresa.”

The game had changed—but I wasn’t sure how.

“I never quite figured out how Adam and Ivy met,” William Keyes continued. “She was at Georgetown. He went to see her. I’ve wondered, over the years, if there was something romantic between them.” He paused. “I see now that there’s not. That there couldn’t be.”

He walked over to a shelf on the opposite side of the room and returned with a picture. In it were two young boys. The older one had a serious expression on his face. Adam . The younger boy—he had dark hair, a shade too light to be black. He was laughing, smiling.

His eyes were hazel, a familiar mix of brown and green.

“You look like him,” William Keyes said. I had no idea what he was feeling. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the picture—away from the boy.

“Adam said he had a brother,” I said slowly. The memory washed over me. “The first time we met, Adam said he had a brother.”

He’d said that his brother had never cared for school, that he had preferred to spend his time outside.

Like me.

“You know what I think, Tess?” Keyes said, putting the picture down. “I think that my youngest met Ivy during basic training. I think they were young and stupid and, if we want to be generous, maybe even in love. Tommy was like that. If he fell, he fell hard.”

Was , I thought dully. Tommy was like that. The past tense hit me with an almost physical force.

“I told him not to enlist. I told him to go to college. He could have been an officer—but he didn’t listen.

” Keyes ran a hand roughly through his hair.

“Adam thinks I pushed Tommy away, pushed him into joining up by forbidding him to go. Tommy died. I lost both sons.” The kingmaker’s sentences got shorter and curter. “And then there was Ivy.”

Adam’s father— Tommy’s father—began to pace. I watched him, hyperaware in that moment that it was almost like watching myself. I’d looked at Adam, wondering if there was any of him in me, and now I knew.

It wasn’t Adam.

It was never Adam.

“Adam must have known Tommy was seeing someone,” Keyes continued, his voice raising a decibel or two as he paced. “And somehow, he found out about you.”

Me. The pieces fell into place in my mind. All of those times I’d felt like Adam was looking at me like I reminded him of someone—I’d assumed I reminded him of Ivy.

But what if I was wrong?

What if, when he yelled at me, when he told me that family didn’t bolt just because things were hard—what if those had been the times when I’d reminded him of his brother?

His dead brother. I’d lost so much in the past few weeks: Gramps, my home, my identity, who I thought my parents were, Ivy . I’d read a poem once in English class, about what it meant to master the art of losing.

I was an artist.

And now—now I would never know my father. I would never get to meet him, never know if he would have looked at me and seen pieces of himself, if he would have wanted me.

If I could have been a daughter he would have loved.

I couldn’t stay here. I started for the door with no plans of what I would do when I walked out. I’d gambled and I’d failed, and now I really was going to be an orphan. Tommy was dead, and Ivy—

Kostas is going to kill her.

I tried.

“Hold it right there, young lady.” Keyes barked out as my hand closed around the doorknob.

“Why?” I asked, whirling around, caught between sorrow and a smoldering anger I wasn’t sure would ever go away. “If it was Adam, I had something to offer. But my father is dead. Dead men don’t win elections.”

Dead men fathering illegitimate children was barely even news.

My father is dead. It hurt. All I’d ever seen of him was a picture, and it hurt. Ivy might die. I hadn’t saved her.

Just this once, I wanted to save someone.

“No matter what Ivy and my son might have told you”—Keyes crossed the room to stand in front of me—“I’m not so heartless as to send my only grandchild away.”

His grandchild . There was something in the way he said that word that was almost manic, as if my importance were larger than life.

My heart clenched.

“You’ll do it?” I asked, terrified to hope for even a second that the answer might be yes. “You’ll get the pardon?”

You’ll save Ivy?

William Keyes—my paternal grandfather—put a hand under my chin. He tilted my face toward his. “That depends,” he said, “on whether or not you’ll do something for me.”