The Long Game

She.

“You went to see Daniela Nicolae,” I said. I’d known that Ivy had intended to interrogate the terrorist. I’d known she wanted answers. “You went to see a known terrorist and deliberately baited her into hurting you?” My voice went up a notch in volume and pitch.

Ivy tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and then let her hand fall away from my face. “I was trying to bait her into talking,” Ivy clarified. “The physical attack took me by surprise.”

There was enough grit in Ivy’s voice to tell me that Daniela Nicolae wouldn’t be taking her off guard again.

“Did she tell you anything?” I asked. “About Senza Nome?”

About who shot the president?

Ivy’s expression went dangerously neutral, impossible to read.

She told you something, I thought. Something that upset you. Something you think might be dangerous for me to hear.

“Enjoy your party, Tessie.” Ivy shut the door on that topic of conversation. “Go. Be a normal teenager for once.”

I didn’t tell her that given what she did—and what I had every intention of doing tonight myself—normal was probably a relative term.

CHAPTER 37

“You have barely said a word since I picked you up, Kendrick.” Henry pulled off the highway and arched an eyebrow at me in challenge. “Meditating on the wisdom of attending a party that requires both breaking and entering?”

I’d been quiet because I’d been thinking about Ivy. About the bruise on her wrist. About what she’d done to get it.

I was trying to get a rise out of someone, and I succeeded.

“Tess?” Henry used my first name rarely enough that I couldn’t keep my eyes from flickering toward his. In the instant before I looked away, I got the sense that he saw more in mine than I meant for him to.

“What’s a little B-and-E between friends?” I said lightly.

I waited for Henry to make some kind of comment about my fondness for felonies. “As your friend,” he said instead, lingering briefly on the word, “am I allowed to ask where you were a moment ago? What you were thinking?”

A month ago, Henry wouldn’t have asked.

A month ago, I wouldn’t have answered.

“Ivy went to see the terrorist behind the hospital bombing.”

I could see the gears in Henry’s head turning as he processed that information. My heart thudded against my rib cage. I hadn’t planned on telling him—on telling anyone—this.

I had always been better at keeping other people’s secrets than sharing my own.

“Ivy had a bruise on her wrist.” I kept my sentences short. “I saw it. I asked her about it.”

Henry read between the lines. “I am going to go out on a limb and wager that Ivy was not in what one would call a sharing mood about the bruise—or the terrorist.”

I could have snorted. I could have made a wry comment about the fact that the phrases Ivy Kendrick and sharing mood didn’t belong in the same sentence.

Instead, I found myself saying, “Ivy told me that she was trying to get a rise out of the terrorist. I think she was hoping she could bait the woman into saying something about the attack on President Nolan.”

There was a beat of silence.

After the hospital bombing, I hadn’t told Henry that I suspected Walker Nolan was in some way involved. I hadn’t ever told him that Ivy thought there might be a fourth player in his grandfather’s death. In the short time we’d known each other, the things I hadn’t told Henry Marquette were legion.

But he was there, and he was listening, and all I could think about was Henry playing my partner in crime in the front seat of Bancroft’s car, Henry washing the blood from my hands the day John Thomas was killed.

“The group that claimed responsibility for the attack against the president?” I said, letting my eyes linger on his. “The intelligence community calls them Senza Nome. The Nameless. They specialize in government infiltration.”

Henry pulled the car to a stop in a residential area about a mile away from the school. His hand hovered over the key for a moment before he turned it, killing the engine.

“I don’t suppose Ivy volunteered any additional information,” Henry said, his face moonlit through the dash. “About this Senza Nome.”

I looked out the window at the darkness enveloping the neighborhood around us. “Ivy doesn’t volunteer much.”

There was another long silence, and in that silence, Henry’s hand made its way to the very edge of mine.