THE LONG GAME (21 page)

I forced myself to process, forced my mouth to form words. “Why are you telling me this?”

Why would he tell me a secret he’d kept for decades?

The kingmaker’s gaze went back to the picture. “I lost Tommy,” he said. “Adam thinks me a monster. Walker will never really be mine.” His fingers tightened around the edges of the frame. “I treated Ivy like a daughter, and she chose Peter Nolan over me.” He forced himself to walk back over to the nightstand and set down the frame. “Come what
may, my dear,” he said, turning back to me, “I will
not
lose you.”

CHAPTER 46

True to his word, the kingmaker didn’t allow me out of the house until he personally delivered me to school Monday morning. Headmaster Raleigh called a school-wide assembly for first period. I sat next to Vivvie and tried not to feel anything when Henry walked straight by us both.

I tried not to think about the fact that I hadn’t heard from Ivy in twenty-four hours.

“Did something
happen that I don’t know about?” Vivvie asked. “Because you’re making
this face
”—Vivvie adopted a stormy countenance—“and Henry’s making
that
face, and—”

Headmaster Raleigh saved me from the rest of Vivvie’s inquiry. “Starting today,” he announced, signaling the beginning of the assembly, “our new security measures will be going into full effect.” He began going through the measures: double the
number of security personnel, changes to school policy on search and seizure, strict enforcement of all existing security protocol.

I wondered if I was the only one who noticed how heavily the new security personnel were armed.

The police still hadn’t made an arrest in the murder of John Thomas Wilcox. That left the Hardwicke administration on edge.

John Thomas’s father is in bed with terrorists,
and now John Thomas is dead
, I thought.
Someone at this school killed him. The Hardwicke administration
should
be on edge.

“Tess.” Vivvie nudged me in the side. With a start, I realized the headmaster had stopped speaking. The assembly was over.

As I stood to exit, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I slipped it out, reading the text I’d received. When I looked up, I saw Henry across the room,
staring at me.

“Everything okay?” Vivvie asked.

I stuffed my phone back into my pocket. “Everything is fine.”

According to the text, Ivy had done what Ivy Kendrick did. There was a problem. She’d solved it. Congressman Wilcox had been taken into federal custody. She’d found evidence—concrete evidence—linking him to Senza Nome.

I pushed my way through the crowd, trying to get to Henry. Cold
air hit my face the moment I left the chapel. I called Henry’s name, but he kept walking back to the main building. I caught up with him in the hallway, my face numb from even a brief encounter with the wind outside.

“Ivy can connect Congressman Wilcox to Senza Nome.”

Henry came to a standstill at his locker. For a moment, he twisted the dial this way and that. When the locker door popped open,
he turned his head slightly toward me. I took that as encouragement—however paltry—to continue.

“The congressman is in custody. If John Thomas’s death is connected to this somehow, Ivy won’t let anyone sweep that under the rug.”

Henry shut his locker. He was going to turn his back on me. He was going to walk away.

“Henry,” I said. “Look at me. Please.”

He met my gaze head-on. Almost immediately,
I wished that he hadn’t.

Kendrick, what you don’t know could fill an ocean.

I’d done to him what Ivy had done to his mother. I’d let him believe a lie. I had decided what he did and did not need to know.

“Not to interrupt an incredibly tense and subtext-filled moment”—Vivvie popped up beside us—“but is
anyone
going to catch me up on our status vis-à-vis Project Free Asher?”

Without another
word, Henry walked away. He didn’t even say good-bye. Vivvie turned to me, wide-eyed and bewildered. My stomach twisted sharply.

Henry wasn’t the only one I’d kept things from.

I told Vivvie then, the way I should have told her weeks ago. I told her that there was a chance that the person who’d orchestrated Justice Marquette’s murder—and her own father’s—was still out there. Still alive.

Vivvie
blinked rapidly, her lips pressed together and forced into a smile that told me she was trying not to cry. “You knew it wasn’t over.”

“Vivvie.” I reached out and took her arm, but she jerked out of my grasp.

“You listened to me talk about my dad,” Vivvie said. “And you knew. You knew it wasn’t over. You’re supposed to be my friend. My
best
friend.” She shook her head. “And I know that I might
not be yours. I know that you have Asher and Henry, and you probably have tons of friends back in Montana, but you’re
my
best friend. Sometimes I think you’re my
only
friend. I trusted you when I didn’t trust anyone, and—”

The flow of words cut off abruptly.

“I’m sorry,” I told Vivvie. “I thought I was protecting you. And it was just a theory.”

A theory I’d believed from the moment I’d heard
it.

“It’s fine,” Vivvie said, her voice dull. She forced herself to smile, even as a tear broke free and started carving a path down her face. “I’m not mad.”

Henry was angry with me. Vivvie was heartbroken.

“I’m not mad,” she repeated. “I just—I need to go.”

“Viv—”

I didn’t even get her whole name out before she was gone, bolting down the hall before anyone—myself included—could see her cry.
As she disappeared around the corner, a member of the security staff walked by and told me to get to class. I waited until he’d passed, then turned and walked away.

I wanted to go after Vivvie, but I wasn’t sure I had the right to, so I did what I always did when my brain was too loud and there were no right answers to be found: I walked. I walked down the hall. I looped around and found myself
standing in front of the library.

And that was when I heard the first shot.

CHAPTER 47

I thought that I’d imagined it. And then there was a second shot. And a third.
Gunfire.
My brain searched for another explanation, even as my body told me to
run
.
Run-run-run-run—

I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, my entire body jarring with each beat. Blood rushed in my ears. I forced myself to move, forced myself to turn, to take a step forward—away.

Away. Away. Run away.
Run-run-run—

I caught sight of the library door. I remembered the door opening, John Thomas’s bloody body spilling into the hall. I shook. My vision blurred. Shallow breaths burned my lungs.

Blood. Everywhere I look, I see red. John Thomas. His body is on the ground. The walls close in around me.

Shot. Shot. Shot.

He’s bleeding. Can’t run. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. The blood—

Hands gripped
my shoulders. I lashed out, like a horse with a broken leg.

The person holding me stumbles backward. All I can see is blood. I hear her, calling my name.

I felt like I was watching myself from outside my body. I felt as if something else had control.

“Tess.
Tess.
”

Through the blood, her features come into focus—

“Emilia.” I said the name and came back to myself. There was no blood. There
was no body. But the gunshots were real. It took hearing another one before I was sure, and by that time, Emilia had locked a hand around my forearm.

“We have to go,” she said. “We have to hide.”

I let her pull me toward the library door, and then my survival instincts clicked back on. I pushed the door inward. Emilia followed. I considered barricading the door but decided that might just draw
attention. If we barricaded ourselves in, the shooter would know we were here.

I pulled Emilia through the stacks. Toward the back of the library, the lights in the stacks were motion activated on an aisle-by-aisle basis. I hunkered down between two shelves, pressing my body as flat to them as I could. Beside me, Emilia did the same. It took a minute for the lights to go off.

Those sixty seconds
were the longest in my life.

I could hear Emilia breathing beside me, could feel her breath on my neck.

“What’s going on?” I asked her, my voice so quiet I could barely hear the words myself.

“We were supposed to be in class,” Emilia said, her voice nearly as low as mine, neither of them anywhere near as deafening as the sound of my own heartbeat. “I forgot something in my
locker. I went back,
and I saw one of the new security guards pull his gun.”

Hardwicke had doubled the number of security personnel on campus.
Heavily armed.
The memory washed back over me. I’d thought—we’d all thought—that the guards were armed for our protection.

“How many?” I said, my voice hushed, my throat tightening around the words. “Just the one guard?”

Emilia shook her head, the motion stilted. We couldn’t
afford to set off the motion sensors. We couldn’t afford the light. We couldn’t afford to draw attention to the library.

What do they want?

I didn’t waste my breath to risk asking that question out loud. Emilia had no way of knowing the answer—not if she’d seen what she’d seen and then run.

Run. Run-run-run—

Every instinct I had told me to get out of here. I was trapped. And if they looked
for us—if they wanted to find us, there was nowhere to hide. And if they weren’t looking for us, if this was an attack and they decided to concentrate on the classrooms, then our classmates, the ones who’d made it back to class after the assembly—

Without even realizing I was doing it, I shifted. I was going to get up. I was going to do something. But Emilia’s fingernails dug into my arm.

Don’t
. Like my last question, her plea was silent.
Don’t be stupid.

Don’t leave her there alone.

“Henry’s out there,” I told Emilia, my voice nearly refusing to form the words. “And Vivvie—”

I had no idea where Vivvie was. She’d bolted, minutes before the first shot.

There was a moment of silence out in the hallway, and then a rapid-fire burst of shots, louder than the others.
Closer.

Emilia squeezed
her eyes shut. I eased the phone out of my pocket.
Call. Call for help. Dial—

No service.
I heard footsteps outside the door, heard someone shouting out orders. Why wasn’t my phone working?

Had they knocked out the service?
They.

For the first time, I let myself process the fact that there was a word for the kind of people who infiltrated the security force of an elite private school and then
began shooting.

Terrorists.

“Somebody roofied me.” Beside me, Emilia’s eyes were open now. She was pale and staring straight ahead. “At that party, someone roofied me.”

This was the first time she’d ever said the words. I knew that, just like I knew that she didn’t want to die without saying them.

We’re not going to die. We’re not.

“I don’t know if John Thomas was the one who slipped it into
my drink,” she said hoarsely, her lips barely moving, the words barely audible. “I never knew for sure what happened that night, or who was involved. I didn’t
want
to know.”

Another set of footsteps. Heavy. Running.

A tremor ran down my spine. I forced myself to stop shaking but couldn’t stop the horrible questions wending their way through my mind.

How many gunmen were there?

How many people
are already dead?

Emilia closed her eyes again, then slipped her hand into the messenger bag she wore over her shoulder.

My breath caught in my throat.
What are you doing, Emilia?

The lights stayed off as she eased an electronic tablet out of her bag. Her movements tortuously slow, her own breaths shallow, she hit several buttons on the screen.

A second later, the screen was split six ways.
Six video feeds
, I realized.

“I said I’d find out what it would take to hack Hardwicke’s security,” Emilia whispered. “So I hacked it.”

My gaze was locked on the screen. I could see armed guards passing by one camera after another.

There were bodies on the floor.

Grown men.
I processed what I was seeing.
Hardwicke security. The first thing they did was shoot the other guards.

I didn’t see
any students—not on the ground and not in the halls.

There was a blur of motion in front of one of the cameras, and a second later, the door to the library flew inward. Peering through the shelves, I saw the gun before I saw the man holding it.

I heard the girl with him cry out before I recognized her.

Anna Hayden.

The man with her was Secret Service. His gun drawn, he herded Anna toward the
far side of the library. I was on the verge of yelling out to let them know we were here when the door opened again. The agent shoved Anna behind him and started shooting.

Emilia and I sat there, huddled in the dark, unable to move, not even to crawl away from the gunfire, without setting off the
light overhead. Anna was screaming. The armed guard shooting at the Secret Service agent was yelling
for backup.

Emilia’s body pressed itself up against mine. I could feel her shaking beside me. She bit down on her hand to stifle a whimper that tried to make its way out of her mouth.

Don’t move. If we move, the lights come on. If we move, we die.

One of the terrorists went down, but another rounded the corner after the Secret Service agent, who switched out guns and kept shooting.

“Anna.”

I heard someone say Anna’s name—a female someone. At first I thought it was Emilia, or maybe even me, but it wasn’t. The stilted, desperate whisper came from the far entrance.

Dr. Clark.

My World Issues teacher looked how I felt—somewhere between gutted and numb. I remembered her lecture on flashbulb memories. I wouldn’t forget a single thing about this day.