Authors: Lynn Barnes
Mrs. Perkins raised her gun. “Thank you for your honesty, Tess.”
A second before she pulled the trigger,
Henry threw himself forward. His body slammed into mine, curved around mine, shielding it, protecting it.
Protecting me.
I heard the gun go off. I felt Henry’s body lurch forward with the impact.
No.
I thought the word, and I screamed it. And all around me, the world exploded into chaos.
I sank to the ground with Henry.
Shot, just like John Thomas. Bleeding, just like John Thomas.
Not Henry.
Traitor—betrayer—friend—
Please, not Henry.
His blood was on my hands. My fingers frantically searched for a bullet hole, combing his back, the weight of his body in my arms.
“Up!” one of the guards yelled at me. “Get up!”
“Or,” a voice said behind him, “
you
could put your weapon down.”
Priya Bharani pressed a gun to the back of his head.
The plan is working
, I thought dully. We’d taken
our chances that the snipers’ attention would be on the FBI and securing the perimeter, not on the “body” killed within ten feet of the Hardwicke door. Priya was a trained operative. She could move
quickly and silently.
The plan is working. This was the plan.
I should have felt a rush of victory. Relief.
I felt numb.
The guard lowered his weapon. Holding Henry, his blood thick on my fingers,
I tried to stop the bleeding and took in the sight beyond us.
Mrs. Perkins was on the ground. There was a tiny, perfect bullet hole in the side of her head.
Priya’s handiwork, thanks to my distraction
. Daniela had taken out one of the guards. She currently held another at gunpoint.
That just left one guard, and Dr. Clark.
The sole remaining guard trained his gun on the dead woman who’d appeared
in front of him. He wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating Priya twice.
“Before you pull the trigger,” Daniela told him lightly, “you might consider the fact that by now, that twenty million dollars has been transferred again—into one of
my
accounts.” She smiled. “Were you hoping to get paid for this job?”
“You—” Dr. Clark couldn’t get out more than a single word. She looked from Daniela
to Priya.
“It was our understanding,” Priya told Dr. Clark, “that what your colleague wanted was a very public show. So we gave you one.”
The knife sliding across Priya’s neck. The way she’d crumpled to the ground.
The blood pooling around her wasn’t hers. The blood on the knife wasn’t hers.
It wasn’t even blood.
I’d been told such sleight of hand wasn’t hard, when the act was to be observed
from a distance. I’d been told that people paid attention to threats, not bodies.
I’d known the plan. I’d
come up with
the plan. And still, it shocked me to see Priya standing there. She’d played her part well.
The blood.
The blood on the pavement hadn’t been Priya’s—but the blood on my hands was Henry’s.
“Can you get us out of here?” the mercenary asked Daniela, his gun still trained on Vivvie’s
aunt.
“I have an exit strategy.” Daniela’s lips curved up slightly. “It will require some . . . sacrifices,” she said. “Are all the men here loyal to you?”
Are you loyal to all the men here?
That was what Daniela was really asking.
The mercenary stared at her for a moment. “No.”
“Well, then,” Daniela said, “perhaps what I’ll need from you won’t be so much of a sacrifice after all.”
There
was a beat of silence and then the mercenary lowered his gun. “I believe I speak for the men on
my
team,” he told her, “when I say that we would like to be paid.”
“Congratulations.” Daniela lowered her own weapon, her eyes alight. “You now officially work for me.”
The United States did not negotiate with terrorists. Now that Daniela had seized Hardwicke, that left her attempting to come to terms with someone else.
“You’re fine?” Ivy asked me, her voice shaking on the other end of the phone line.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re . . .”
“I’m fine.”
I heard Ivy suck in a breath. Even with a phone line between us, I could practically
see
her summoning
up her composure with an uncanny level of emotional control. “You’re grounded until you’re forty.”
“We’re willing to accept those terms,” I retorted, exerting the same control of my emotions that she’d shown over hers. “All you have to do is provide transport.”
Across the table from me, Daniela tilted her head to the side, considering the phone, which I’d set to speaker.
It’s not over, Ivy.
I willed her to see that.
It won’t be over until we come to terms.
Daniela had taken control of Hardwicke. She was amenable to finding a peaceful solution—but that peaceful solution could not entail her going back into federal custody. The woman sitting across from me hadn’t engineered this situation. She hadn’t escalated it. But she held the reins now, and she wouldn’t hand them over until she
was sure that it was in her best interest to do so.
Our prior alliance could only carry this so far.
“Transport?” Ivy repeated, after an elongated silence. “The whole world is watching. This doesn’t end with a cease-fire. This ends with a surrender. It has to.”
“A student was shot,” I said, feeling a bit like I was standing outside my body, watching myself dispassionately say those words. “He
needs medical attention, Ivy.”
There was silence on Ivy’s end of the line.
“
Henry
needs medical attention,” I repeated, my grip on my emotions slipping finger by finger when I said Henry’s name.
Please, Ivy. You’re supposed to be a miracle worker. Give me my miracle, just this once.
“Daniela,” I continued, my voice remarkably steady, “needs safe transport out of the country for herself and a
handful of men.”
“And if I’m going to make
anything
happen,” Ivy countered, “I need a surrender. I need terrorists in cuffs.”
Daniela leaned forward, folding her hands on the table. “Perhaps,” she said, “there is a way for all of us to get what we need.”
• • •
I ended up sitting on the floor of an empty classroom. Dr. Clark sat beside me, tending Henry’s wound.
“Don’t worry,” she told me,
her voice oddly calm, given the circumstances. “Shoulder wounds are rarely lethal.”
He’s lost a lot of blood.
I didn’t say that, couldn’t let myself say that. So instead, I said, “Why?”
“Unless the bullet hits a major artery—”
“No,” I said forcefully. “Why agree to turn yourself in?”
“Because,” Dr. Clark said softly, “it’s for the greater good.”
The United States government needed terrorists
in cuffs. They needed a face for this horror. They needed to win.
Mrs. Perkins was dead. And the moment Daniela had asked, Dr. Clark had offered herself up.
In penance?
No
, I thought, watching her tend Henry with an unnatural calm.
With purpose.
Even now, even after everything, Dr. Clark did everything in the name of Senza Nome.
Ivy would get her surrender. She’d get Mrs. Perkins in a body
bag and Dr. Clark in handcuffs. She’d get two-thirds of the mercenaries.
The remaining men—the ones Daniela had struck a deal with—would get out of this alive and much richer, so long as they helped take down the rest. It was amazing how easy it was to find men willing to turn on their cohorts when there were $20 million and charges of treason at stake.
I heard the first gunshot.
The subset
of the mercenaries Daniela had offered to Ivy on a platter wouldn’t go willingly. That was why Daniela had stationed
two of her men at my door—and more at the doors of the other classrooms.
More shots. Coordinated movement.
Daniela had brought the snipers down. She’d allowed the SWAT team in, and now they were doing what SWAT teams did.
“She’ll make it out of this?” Dr. Clark spoke suddenly.
“Daniela?”
That was the plan—and based on the tone in Dr. Clark’s voice, that was what she wanted. That was
all
she wanted.
“Are you really doing this for the greater good?” I asked. “Or for her?”
“We’re clear!” I heard someone shout from the hallway.
That would be the sign for the remaining mercenaries—Daniela’s men, the ones she’d struck a deal with—to leave.
Daniela gets away. A small subset
of the men get away. The government gets their body bags and their arrests.
And no one would ever know the difference.
“Not just for her.” Dr. Clark’s answer came on enough of a delay that I’d stopped expecting her to reply to my question at all. “I’m doing this for the man who recruited me. The one who recruited all of us, trained all of us.”
This was the first I’d heard a mention of a man,
the first clue I’d been given that someone
was
in charge of Senza Nome.
“Daniela proved herself tonight,” Dr. Clark said. “She’s worthy.”
“Worthy?” My stomach twisted sharply. Daniela had been the devil I knew. She’d been the lesser of two evils.
But she was still a terrorist.
My people, the organization I work for—they have been my family.
Daniela’s words washed back over
me as the door burst
inward and SWAT officers poured in.
I was taught, from the cradle, to protect that family.
“Worthy,” Dr. Clark repeated as the men threw her facedown on the floor. “She’s his daughter.”
“We’ve got one wounded!” a woman shouted, kneeling over Henry.
“Secure!”
Amid the shouts, my concentration was wholly absorbed in Dr. Clark.
“His daughter?” I asked.
To the people you have been dealing with
, Daniela had told me,
let us say that I am a
concern.
Dr. Clark’s face pressed into the floor, her hands cuffed behind her back, she smiled. “His daughter. And now that she’s proved herself,” she said, every inch the true believer, “his heir.”
The occupation of Hardwicke made international news. So, too, did the takedown. All the terrorists had been either apprehended or killed.
Or at least, that was how the story went.
As far as the world was concerned, Daniela Nicolae had served as a double agent, helping the SWAT team infiltrate the building and take down her cohorts inside. Both she and her unborn child had been killed
in the process.
The United States government had their victory. The Hardwicke parents had their children back. And I had another truth—another secret—I didn’t want to know.
I wondered if it was the weight of secrets like this, as much as the fact that they served as a protective measure, that had made Ivy start keeping her files. She uploaded her secrets to the program. Maybe that meant she
didn’t have to carry them inside.
“Raise your arm over your head. Now rotate it away from me.”
Grinding my teeth, I did as the doctor asked. I had a hairline fracture in my jaw, one hell of a headache, and a shoulder that the doctor subsequently informed me had not been dislocated, but that wasn’t very happy either.
I felt it. I felt all of it—all the pain, all the terror, all the ways this
could have gone differently—now that the ordeal was over.
“What’s the verdict, doctor? Will our patient live?”
At some point, when I’d been caught up in the treacherous tangle of my own mind, Adam had entered the exam room. The doctor narrowed her eyes at him.
“Are you her father?” she asked.
Ivy was off running interference with the media, keeping them away from the hospital—away from Henry,
away from Anna Hayden, away from me. If she’d had her way, Ivy never would have left my side.
“Uncle.” Adam answered the doctor’s question about being my father. I could see the woman on the verge of telling him she could only speak to my parent or legal guardian.
I spoke up. “Close enough.”
Adam kept his face carefully blank as the doctor rattled off the details of my condition, but I knew
him well enough to see the emotions underneath. He was the closest thing I had to a father, the closest thing I would ever have, with Tommy dead.
Soon enough, the doctor left the two of us alone. Adam came to stand in front of me. After a long moment, he sat beside me on the exam table. He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t ask me how I was doing. He just sat there, and I leaned into him.
His arm
wrapped around me, and I cried—deep, bone- shuddering sobs that racked my body and his. He held on, held
me, and when I stopped crying and straightened, wiping the back of my hand roughly over my tear-drenched face, he didn’t say a word.
“I’m sorry Daniela knocked you out,” I said, beaten at my own game by his steady silence.
In reply, Adam raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you?”
“Not really,”
I admitted, managing a small smile. “But I’m sorry it was necessary.”
Adam snorted. “I hear you’re grounded until you’re forty,” he said, pushing back any urge he might have felt to tear into me himself.
“I’m pretty sure Ivy was exaggerating,” I said.
Adam’s other eyebrow joined the first. “Are you?”
The door to the hospital room opened. I expected it to be Ivy or Bodie, who’d promised to
bring me a snack, but instead, William Keyes stood there. He hadn’t changed clothes since the last time I’d seen him. His thick white hair was disheveled. He’d aged a decade in a day.
“You are unharmed?”
Those were the exact same words he’d said to me before, but this time, there was more raw emotion woven through them than I’d ever heard in his voice. I wondered if he believed, as the rest
of the world did, that Daniela and the baby had been killed. Given everything I knew about the man, if he hadn’t uncovered the truth yet, he would soon.
“I’m going to be okay,” I said. I meant it. I
almost
meant it.
“If I thought I would not be murdered on the spot,” the kingmaker said, coming toward me, “I would turn you over my knee for going back into that building.”