Authors: Lynn Barnes
Priya was the one who heeded that instruction, stepping forward to take the USB drive from Ivy. “I’ve received an ultimatum of my own,” she
said, her voice steady. “I have to be the one to deliver their demands. I go in.”
“You won’t come out,” Ivy told Priya. The resulting silence indicated Priya’s acceptance of Ivy’s words, both as truth and as inevitable.
Stone-faced, Ivy nodded to the guards. They transferred Daniela Nicolae to Priya’s custody. Seconds later, the guards were gone.
They were never here. Vice President Hayden
was never here. This exchange never happened.
“Come on, Tess,” Adam said, stepping up beside me.
I swallowed. “I can’t.”
Ivy understood before Adam did. She always thought three steps ahead. “No,” she said fiercely. “Tessie.
Theresa
. No—”
There was a blur of movement, and Ivy crumpled. Adam caught her just before she hit the pavement. Priya stood over them. She’d knocked Ivy out, and now she
had a gun in her hand.
“I am sorry,” she told Adam. “Truly. But Tess comes with me.”
Adam lowered Ivy’s prone form to the ground. He stood. Priya fired a warning shot to one side.
“Tess.” Adam addressed me, ignoring Priya, ignoring her gun. “Come to me.”
My throat tightened. “I can’t.”
Adam saw now what Ivy had seen instantly: Priya wasn’t taking me against my will. He saw in my face that
I’d known all along that it would come to this.
“I’m sorry,” I told Adam. “If there was a way . . .” My words came at an uneven pace, my breathing ragged. “I wish there were a way, Adam, but I can’t just step back and let people die. Tell Ivy—”
“Tess—”
I spoke over his objection. “Tell Ivy that I forgive her. For leaving me in Montana, for lying to me—for everything. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell
her that I had to do this, okay? Tell her . . .”
I love her.
He could hear it in my voice. They all could. I stared at Ivy, lying prone on the pavement, her face peaceful.
“Tell her,” I said, “that I am my mother’s daughter.”
I nodded at Priya, and she stepped forward, placing herself between Adam and me, her gun still pointed directly at him. I turned to go. I heard Adam step forward. “You
won’t shoot me,” he told Priya.
A second later, I heard his body hit the ground.
I whipped back around.
There was no gunshot
, I told myself frantically.
Priya didn’t shoot him.
Daniela stood over Adam’s body, her hands still cuffed. “He was right,” she told Priya. “You would not have shot him.”
How did she—
Priya trained her gun on Daniela, and I remembered Vivvie’s aunt telling me that pregnant
or not, Daniela Nicolae could take me.
“He will be fine,” Daniela said, stepping over Adam’s body. “Now, are we doing this, or aren’t we?”
I tried not to think, in that moment, that Priya didn’t know—not really, not fully—what
this
entailed.
The dove. Madrid.
I couldn’t let myself go there. I couldn’t think about the plan—my plan.
Priya lowered her weapon, but never took her eyes off Daniela.
“Let’s go.”
“There’s no way I’m letting a minor put herself back on the chopping block.” The FBI agent who’d greeted me when I was released was the same one we needed to let us back through the gate now.
It had taken us twenty-three minutes to get to Hardwicke and another twelve to arrange this meeting. Feeling suffocated by that tally, I laid my phone on the table in front of us. “You don’t
have a choice.”
I’d received another text on the way here.
Another video
. As I watched, the FBI agent hit
play
. I’d seen the video, but I made myself watch it again.
A girl this time. A senior.
I couldn’t place her name, but I knew she’d applied early to Princeton.
She wouldn’t be going to college now.
“Give them what they want,” I told the agent, “and we can end this.”
She had to avert her
gaze—from me and from my phone.
“Homeland’s cleared it,” one of her colleagues told her.
It
, in this case, was surrendering Daniela to the terrorists’ hands,
not me. “Word is that the order on this one came down from the top.”
The clock was ticking on that order, just like the clock was counting down to the terrorists’ next kill.
Once the president resumes his office, once he figures out what
the vice president has done . . .
We had a window, and we were wasting it.
“This is my choice,” I told the hostage negotiator. “If nothing else, it will buy you time, and they won’t hurt me, not right away.”
We can’t stand around debating this. We need to move.
“We’ve got the girl’s guardian on the line.” Someone held out a phone to the FBI woman. At the mere mention of Ivy, I snapped into
motion. The FBI hadn’t patted me down for weapons this time.
That was a mistake.
Priya had refused to give me a gun, but she hadn’t left me defenseless. We’d had time to talk about how this would go down on the drive here. Before we’d left the car, she’d given me a knife.
“Put the phone down,” I said. It took a single beat for the agents to process the fact that I was holding a blade. That
was all the time it took for me to angle it at my own throat.
“
Put the phone down
,” I repeated.
“Tess.” Hostage negotiators specialized in sounding reasonable.
I dug the tip of the blade into my own neck. I felt a sharp pain. Blood tricked down and over my collarbone.
They put the phone down.
“You have two choices,” I said, stepping back. “You either send me in with Priya and Daniela and
you risk that something
might
happen to me in there, or I swear to all that is holy that something
will
happen to me, right here.”
They might be able to take the knife from me, but not before I did some serious damage to myself.
“Am I bluffing?” I asked the female agent.
She took in my posture, the expression on my face. “No.”
My gut said that they
wanted
to send me in. They
wanted
to buy
themselves time.
I just had to give them an excuse.
When Priya, Daniela Nicolae, and I walked through the gates of Hardwicke, I could just barely make out the silhouettes of the snipers on the roof. Behind us, the SWAT team and the FBI stood in a formidable line.
One wrong move, and it was all over.
Step after step after step, we walked away from the safety of the outside world and toward
the main campus—toward the armed men and Mrs. Perkins and the bodies already littering the Hardwicke halls.
We’d made it two-thirds of the way there when Daniela spoke. “You can lower the knife.”
My arm had held the blade in position long enough that for a second, it didn’t want to move.
Closer to the front doors of Hardwicke. Closer.
My hand shaking, I managed to lower the blade to my side.
“Drop it,” Priya told me, her voice guttural and low, as we approached the main building. I followed her gaze and saw the red dot on my chest.
The snipers.
I dropped the knife. It clattered to the pavement. For an elongated moment, the sound echoed all around us. The world was still. Calm.
And then Daniela Nicolae bent to pick up the knife.
Dove. Madrid—
Within a heartbeat, Daniela was holding
Priya from behind, the knife at her throat. Daniela turned to face the SWAT team, to face the
world
.
“My name is Daniela Nicolae,” she shouted, her voice high and clear. “And the time for waiting is
over
.”
The blade slid over Priya’s throat. One second, Vivvie’s aunt was standing beside me, and the next, Daniela pushed her body aside and made a grab for me. She held the blade to
my
throat.
“Breathe,” Daniela murmured into the back of my head, using my body as a shield as she backed away from the SWAT team’s raised weapons, away from Priya, sprawled out on the ground.
The dove has always wanted to fly to Madrid.
I did as Daniela Nicolae instructed. I forced air into my lungs and I forced it out. But all I could see, in the world in front of me and in my mind, was blood.
I’d known the plan. That was what I told myself as Daniela jerked me through the front doors of Hardwicke. I’d known that for us to do what needed to be done, the terrorists had to watch Daniela do as she’d been told.
They had to watch her kill Vivvie’s aunt.
“Ms. Kendrick,” Mrs. Perkins greeted me as we stepped inside the building. “So nice to see you again.”
An armed man slammed
me against the wall. My face pressed flat, my heart thudding in my chest, I tried to ignore the hands on my body, checking me for weapons, lingering a second too long.
“She’s clear,” the man said, stepping back. I turned slowly to face them. Opposite me, Mrs. Perkins plucked the knife from Daniela’s hand. “I’ll take this,” she said.
The blade was still smeared with red, still dripping.
Mrs.
Perkins let the knife dangle from her fingertips as she led us down the hallway and up the stairs. One of the guards pressed the tip of his automatic weapon against the small of my back.
When we stepped out into the third-floor hallway, I saw a trio of bodies lined up against the wall.
The headmaster, two students.
“This isn’t who we are,” Daniela said, her voice low, her eyes on the bodies.
Mrs. Perkins opened the door to the third-floor computer lab. “It’s who you are,” she told Daniela lightly. “It’s all you’ll ever be in the eyes of the world, thanks to your wonderful little performance out front.”
That was the point
, I thought. Like the kingmaker, Mrs. Perkins played the long game. This was strategy. A carefully laid plan.
She’s not treating Daniela like a traitor. She’s treating
her like competition.
“Now,” Mrs. Perkins said, turning her attention back to me. “Let us see how our little fixer did, shall we?”
Anxiety and adrenaline shot through my body. Ignoring it as best I could, I scanned the occupants of the room. Dr. Clark was sitting in front of a computer. Including the guards who’d escorted us up here, there were a total of four. And standing in between two of
them was Henry.
Don’t look at him. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t feel his stare on your skin.
I focused on Mrs. Perkins and Dr. Clark instead.
“Money transfer came through,” Dr. Clark told Mrs. Perkins. “Twenty million, untraceable.”
I let out a shallow breath. William Keyes was a man of his word.
“Congratulations, gentlemen,” Mrs. Perkins said to the guards. “You’ll be getting paid.”
Mercenaries.
My chest tightened.
Guns for hire.
That had been my hope. I couldn’t afford to show any visible reaction to the confirmation I’d just received.
“And what of Ivy Kendrick?” Mrs. Perkins asked me. “Did DC’s most notorious fixer step up to the plate?”
“She got your prisoner released,” I replied, glancing toward Daniela. “Didn’t she?”
Mrs. Perkins made a
tsk
sound under her breath. “There’s no
need to take a confrontational tone, Tess. We’re all friends here.” She stepped forward and trailed the flat of the knife blade along my neck. “Now tell me, did Ivy happen to send us anything else?”
I nodded, as much as I could with a knife at my throat.
“Delightful,” Mrs. Perkins declared, stepping back. On the other side of the room, Henry stared at her, his jaw clamped closed.
I won’t let
anything happen to you
, he’d said roughly, his body less than a millimeter from mine.
“I believe you’re looking for this,” Daniela said, holding up the USB drive she’d taken from Priya. There wasn’t an ounce of tension in her voice—nothing but the barest hint of challenge.
She’s not afraid of them
, I realized.
They haven’t lifted a hand against her.
There was a plan. Daniela and I had a plan—but
the reason I’d put my life in her hands,
Priya’s
life in her hands, was that I’d thought that our goals were aligned.
I’d thought she—and her child—were in danger.
Mrs. Perkins took the drive from Daniela and handed it to Dr. Clark. My former teacher plugged it in. A sequence of numbers and programming code appeared on the screen.
All eyes went to me.
“It has to be decrypted,” Daniela spoke
up on my behalf, leaning back against a nearby table as she did. “Would you expect anything less?”
She’s on my side. She is. She knows the plan. She’ll stick to it.
“For your sake, Tess,” Mrs. Perkins said, her gaze lingering on my face, “let us hope it’s decrypted quickly.”
The sound of my own breathing was deafening in my ears, but somehow, I heard it—
a light, high-pitched whistle.
Daniela
eased herself off the table. The moment Mrs. Perkins attention was drawn to Daniela, I bolted.
Out the door, into the hall.
I made it two feet, maybe three, and then I was slammed into a wall. I heard a crack.
My jaw.
My teeth bit into my tongue.
One of the guards grabbed me roughly, my arms held so tightly behind my back that my shoulder threatened to dislocate. My eyes teared up. My vision
blurred. I blinked.
Mrs. Perkins stepped out into the hall. She took her time and traded her knife for a gun.
My eyes found their way to Henry’s. For a second, I let myself pretend that none of this had happened. That it was just Henry and me. That he was the boy I’d known, the person I’d thought he could be.
“Stop, Kendrick. Please.”
I saw him say the words as much as I heard them.
Stop
fighting. Stop taking chances. Stop.
I couldn’t. I had to keep Mrs. Perkins looking at me. I had to keep her attention on me for just a few more seconds.
“The program won’t work,” I said. “Ivy would
never
give you what you wanted. If she gave you anything, it’s a
fraction
of what she has.”