Stay calm. Think. I had to get out of here. I had to find my sister, or Henry, or both.
The First Lady studied me with eyes every bit as knowing as Adam’s father’s.
Just as she opened her mouth to say something, Ivy reappeared beside us. She said something to Georgia, too low for me to hear, then steered me out of the room.
I tried to turn around and look at my sister, and found myself turned forcibly back to face forward. “Henry—”
“Henry is fine,” Ivy said calmly. “At least, he will be until his mother finishes with him.”
We passed two security teams on our way out of the White House. As we stepped out the East entrance, I tried again. “What happened back there?” I asked, my body dwarfed by massive columns that reminded me that this was the White House. The center of power for the entire country—by some definitions, the world. “Georgia knows about the reporter.”
“She knows,” Ivy said sharply, “that the reporter is dead.”
“Dead?” The word got caught in my throat. The man we’d talked to the day before—the one Henry had tipped off about his grandfather’s death—was dead?
“The police found his body in an alleyway.” Ivy’s words were remarkably unemotional given the content of what she was saying. “Someone slit his throat.”
Bodie pulled the car up. Before I could say anything, my sister had forcibly deposited me in the backseat and climbed into the front.
“What’s she doing here?” Bodie asked Ivy, nodding toward me.
“Tess and Henry Marquette decided a state dinner was a good place to play bait.” Ivy’s answer was laced with barely contained fury.
My brain wouldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop racing. Someone killed the reporter. Is the killer here? Does he know about us? My skin felt clammy all of a sudden. I felt my fingers digging into the seat beneath me.
“Reagan National,” Ivy told Bodie. He turned and shot her a look I couldn’t quite read from the backseat, but she was already on the phone. “Adam,” she said. “I need a favor. Can you go by the house and pack a bag for Tess?”
What?
On the other end of the line, Adam must have asked a similar question, because Ivy responded.
“Yes, I’m sure, Adam.” She paused, listening, and then spoke again. “Indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely?” I overcame my inability to form coherent words. “What do you mean, indefinitely? Why is Adam packing me a bag?”
Ivy didn’t answer. I turned my attention to Bodie.
“What is Reagan National?”
Bodie met my eyes briefly in the mirror. “Airport,” he answered.
Airport. Bag.
“I’m not going,” I said, feeling a ball of panic slowly unfurling inside me. “I’m not going anywhere. Ivy!”
She wasn’t listening to me. As soon as she got off the phone with Adam, she placed another call. “Stetson,” she said, a smile in her voice that I knew, without being able to see her, was not reflected on her face. “Ivy Kendrick. I need a favor.”
It soon became clear that when Ivy said I need a favor, what she really meant was I need a plane.
Less than an hour after she’d removed me from the White House, she was putting me on that plane. Standing on a private airstrip, being ordered onto a private plane, I didn’t have time to wonder when, exactly, I’d become a girl who wore ball gowns and had access to jets.
“Ivy,” I said for probably the fortieth time. “What is going on?”
This time, she answered. “What’s going on,” she said, her voice cutting through the wind around us like a red-hot knife through butter, “is that Carson Dweck was murdered this afternoon.”
Less than twenty-four hours after talking to Henry and me.
“What’s going on,” Ivy continued, “is that I have every reason to believe the person who killed him was there tonight.” Ivy’s gaze was focused entirely on me, with an intensity that scared me. “What’s going on is that I came to the White House to fill the president in on the situation, and I found you. What’s going on, Tess, is that you have drawn an enormous target on your own forehead, and I am getting you out of here.” She glanced back at her driver. “Bodie will go with you.”
Bodie gave a brief nod in response.
“You’re sending me away.” That wasn’t a question. I wasn’t sure why I’d said the words out loud. My chest was tight, each breath hard-won. “Ivy, I didn’t mean to—”
Ivy took a step forward, closing what little space there was between us. “Right now, I don’t care what you meant to do, Tess. I asked you to do one thing. I asked you to keep your mouth shut.” Her lips trembled slightly, then pulled back to reveal her teeth. “I asked you to trust me.” She turned her head, like she couldn’t stand to look at me. “Maybe I should have known that was asking too much.”
I felt like she’d knocked the breath out of me.
“Ivy, I—”
“Give me your phone.” She wasn’t going to listen to me. She’d shut down. She was shutting me out.
I handed it to her. She popped the battery out, dropped the phone onto the tarmac, and crushed it underneath her heel.
“Ivy.”
Ivy stared at the crushed phone for a moment, then looked back up. “You won’t need this,” she said. She turned to Adam. “You have her bag?”
Adam held it out to me. I stood with my hands to my side. If I didn’t take it, this wasn’t real.
“You can go with your things,” Ivy told me calmly, “or you can go with nothing but the clothes on your back, but I swear to you, Tess, you are getting on that plane if I have to order a sedative and knock you unconscious.”
Adam put a hand on Ivy’s shoulder. She took in a ragged breath. I looked over at Bodie, who was standing a few feet away.
“Get on the plane, kid,” he said gently.
“You can’t do this,” I said. I was talking to Bodie and to Ivy and to Adam, who hadn’t said a word since he’d gotten here.
“I can,” Ivy said, “and I am.” For a second, I thought she’d leave it there, but she didn’t. “I’m the adult here. I make the decisions. You’re the kid.” She brought her hand gingerly to my cheek. “You’re my kid.”