Falling For Danger Page 16

Whatever.

  We sat for dinner, the catering staff my mother had hired for this evening setting out the various courses. Conversation was stilted and polite, and then I heard Matt’s father’s name come up, and I saw my opportunity.

  We’d gone back and forth on what excuse I could use to get away from the table without arousing their suspicion, but still giving me enough time to search my father’s office. Matt had suggested saying I was ill, and up until now I’d thought that would be the best play; but now, listening to them discuss Mr. Ryan’s murder in graphic detail, I knew the perfect getaway would be to leave the table in tears—or as close to tears as I could manage. My father wasn’t prone to emotional displays so he certainly wouldn’t come after me, and emotions made my mother uncomfortable so I didn’t have any worries in that quarter, either. It was the perfect excuse.

  I ducked my head, mustering up some sniffling noises, covering my face with my napkin as I pretend-dabbed at my eyes, willing some tears to well up.

  I could feel the stares drifting my way. Good. Let them think I was making a scene at the table, let their embarrassment and discomfort give me the opportunity to flee.

  “Excuse me,” I mumbled, still using the napkin to shield my face from the rest of the group.

  I was possibly overacting a bit, but I figured I had years of painful history on my side. Everyone knew I’d gone off the rails when Matt had “died.” It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that I wasn’t over it, that bringing up what had happened to his father would only dredge up old wounds and memories.

  I walked out of the dining room, my heels clicking against the hardwood floors as I lengthened my stride, ignoring the low murmurs behind me, relief filling me at the absence of footsteps trailing after me. Then I was bounding up the double staircase, heading for my father’s office on the second floor.

  My breath hitched, my legs shaking as I neared my destination.

  Focus. Keep it together. You can do this.

  I strode past my bedroom door, then Blair’s, wave after wave of nostalgia crashing over me as I remembered the nights we’d stayed up in each other’s rooms talking and laughing while our parents were out at some gala. Or the times when I was older and they’d been out of town or simply absent, and I’d snuck Matt into my bedroom.

  My father’s office sat at the end of the hall. My heart raced as I neared the door, each step taking me closer and closer to the point of no return. Was I really going to get away with this? I checked my watch, making note of the time, figuring I only had a fifteen-minute window before I’d have to explain my absence and someone might come after me. They’d been starting the main course when I’d fled, so hopefully they’d be distracted by the food and not pay much attention to how long I’d been gone.

  So far luck hadn’t exactly been on my side, but a girl could hope.

  My gaze darted back and forth, my fingers gripped tightly around the panic button, as I checked to see if anyone was upstairs. I didn’t know if their habits had changed, but as far as I knew my parents still employed Mrs. Tremaine, a live-in housekeeper who had been with us since Blair and I were kids, and that was it. She’d been responsible for cooking on nights that my parents weren’t entertaining, taking care of the house, and occasionally, child-rearing. We’d had a nanny when we were younger, but Mrs. Tremaine had been our favorite.

  The hallway clear, my hand closed over the doorknob, and I was relieved when it gave way beneath my palm.

  I stepped over the threshold, closing the door gently behind me, a chill sliding down my spine as I entered his inner sanctum. I remembered the day my life had changed, when I’d been on the other side of the door listening to my father and Matt’s discuss his unit’s ambush. This room contained my ugliest ghosts.

  I fought back against the panic beating in my chest. I’d do a quick search of his desk and computer. I just had to focus, had to somehow ignore how my surroundings made my skin crawl. I took a deep breath, grabbing the tiny flashlight out of the other pocket of my dress, shining the beam in the direction of my father’s massive desk.

  I began sifting through the papers stacked in piles, most of it correspondence that he needed to reply to. Another wave of nostalgia hit me as I remembered sitting at his desk when I was a little girl, “helping” him reply to letters. That was the hardest part of all of this—not all of my memories of my father were bad. But after everything that had happened, every memory I had seemed tainted, and I couldn’t decipher what was the truth and what was a lie.

  I scanned each letter quickly, shoving the memories from my head. Everything looked to be perfectly normal, letters from constituents, nothing out of the ordinary or incriminating. I put the papers back in their stacks, not sure it even mattered since I feared he’d figure out that I’d broken in eventually, but trying my best to cover my tracks. James Bond, I was not.

  Maybe Matt should have snuck in. I could have tried to figure out some way to get him into the house. He was likely way better at this than I was.

  Fuck. I was running out of time.

  Heart pounding, I went for the drawers next, rifling through the contents, the detritus of my father’s life. The computer taunted me, its presence a blinking light that said, “Try me.”

  I abandoned my search of the drawers, checking my watch again.

  Seven more minutes and then I needed to start heading downstairs. I couldn’t afford to arouse my father’s suspicion, especially if I came up empty. We hadn’t worked out a “plan B” yet, but I figured we were heading into the territory of needing one.

  I turned on his computer, sucking in a deep breath at the sound of it whirring to life. The house was huge and there was no way they could hear the noise from the dining room downstairs, and yet each sound felt like a scream breaking through the air. My heart beat so rapidly I swore they could hear it downstairs, as though I was something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, my organ somewhere under the floorboards of the house of my childhood that had never felt like a home.

  The monitor lit up, the computer prompting me for a password.

  My fingers hovered over the keys, wondering what someone like my father would have used for a password. I’d considered this possibility in the days leading up to tonight, and still didn’t have a clue. A random series of numbers? A birthday or anniversary? The year he was first elected to the Senate?

  Fuck.

  I searched around his keyboard, the monitor, looking to see if he was one of those people who kept his password written down somewhere close by so he could reference it in case he forgot.

  Nothing.

  Frustration filled me, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, ready to start trying likely combinations, figuring I had a few attempts before the computer would lock me out.

  I froze. The sound of footsteps against the hardwood floors broke through the quiet night, sending ice through my veins. I held my breath, listening to them get closer, closer, praying that it wasn’t my father, that he wouldn’t come into his office. I was afraid to move, afraid to make a sound, wondering if I should dive down behind the desk, when all of a sudden the sound became quieter, and quieter, and then finally, disappeared.

  I stood there for a moment, my body hunched over the keyboard, waiting …

  Silence filled the night around me.

  I breathed out, relief coursing through my veins.

  Close fucking call.

  My fingers hit the keys again, trying the year my father had first been elected for the Senate.

  Incorrect password.

  Fuck.

  Okay, a birthday, maybe? But whose? My parents’ anniversary? He didn’t really strike me as the sentimental type.

  I began typing again, trying my father’s birthday—

  The door swung open with an ominous creak and then the whole room was flooded with light.

  Fear slammed into me, the hairs on my body standing up, goose bumps pebbling my skin. I turned slowly—dreading what I’d find there—and my gaze connected with an
open doorway and the sight of my father standing in the entryway, staring at me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  We have it from a very reliable source that Kate Reynolds is no longer on speaking terms with her family. We wonder what—or who—reopened this rift …

  —Capital Confessions blog

  Kate

  We stared at each other, and then my father shut the door behind him.

  I gripped the panic button so hard the edges dug into my skin, my finger itching to press down.

  I didn’t.

  Now that the moment I’d feared was upon me, I couldn’t imagine involving Matt in this. He’d paid enough at the hands of my family.

  My father stopped on the other side of his desk, facing off with me.

  I pulled my hands out of my pockets, jerking my head up to meet his gaze.

  “Did you think I believed your little homecoming?”

  I shrugged, adopting the same veiled nonchalance he flaunted before me, even as I mentally weighed the odds of him having me killed in the middle of a dinner party.

  “Did Ryan put you up to this?”

  My breath hitched.

  “I know he’s alive.”

  Fear slammed into me, my heart racing as my worst nightmare came true. For a moment I felt like I was splintering apart, as though my body couldn’t contain the panic seeping through my bones.

  It took everything I had to shut it down.

  I swallowed, some of the tension easing from my body, and then I met his gaze.

  “Did you figure that out when you tortured James Ryan?”

  I was the daughter of a killer, made even more dangerous by the fact that he wasn’t evil or crazy. He was smart and ambitious. This wasn’t emotional for him; it was business. That made him very hard to destroy. There were no chinks in his armor, my only play to beat him at his own game.

  “Do you honestly think I’m stupid enough to answer that question? Let me guess, Ryan made sure you came here with a wire.”

  Actually, we had figured my father was too cunning to implicate himself and had thought the wire too risky. I didn’t speak, though. There was no point to answering his question. I’d already learned a long time ago that sometimes the best offense was to say nothing at all, letting your adversary fill the silence with the secrets you needed. Human nature being what it was, people loved to talk about themselves. People like my father with egos the size of Texas were their own special breed of narcissist. I played to his weakness now.

  My father jerked his head toward his computer. “What did you think you would find there? A note saying, ‘I did it’? Proof that you could use to bring me down?”

  I ignored that, too. If I was going down, then at least I’d get some answers.

  “You had me stabbed.”

  I wasn’t going to let him control the conversation, wasn’t going to allow him to take the upper hand from me. I wasn’t a young girl anymore, and I wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty if I needed to.

  Anger flashed into his eyes—the color so disconcertingly similar to Jackie’s. “That never should have happened.”

  So despite all of his atrocities, there was a part of him that was protecting me. Sort of.

  “But it did. I was in the hospital. I had stitches. I collapsed on the fucking street. Did you lose control of your employee? Did he fail to follow orders and strike out on his own? How about when he broke into my apartment on my birthday?”

  “You should never have been involved in this,” he snapped. “None of this would have happened if you didn’t start giving information to that blog.”

  So he did know about my involvement with Capital Confessions.

  “Do you really think there’s anything that happens in this town that I don’t know about? I knew the minute you started leaking information about this family.” His gaze narrowed, his expression shrewd. “How did your sister feel about you airing her personal business for everyone to see?”

  Of all of my regrets, selling out Blair was my biggest one. Trust him to land his barb precisely where it hurt.

  “At least Blair talks to me. It must be really difficult for you to keep up the facade of family values when you don’t have any family to speak of.”

  “Your sister will come back. She’s having a moment with that boy, but she’ll eventually realize that she has a duty to her family, to our name.”

  “You’ve lost Blair. You’re crazy if you think she’ll ever have a relationship with you again. Maybe the rest of the world doesn’t see it, but we do. You can’t pretend you’re anything other than a monster.”

  “That’s rich coming from you. It’s like looking in the mirror, isn’t it?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Do you think Blair would break into my office? That she would sell out her family to a trashy blog? Do you think she would put everyone else’s needs after her own? You want to take me down and you’ve had no moral qualms about how you do it.”

  He almost sounded proud.

  “I haven’t killed.” I held his gaze, clinging to that essential difference between us. “And you’re wrong. We aren’t the same. Maybe you taught me to be ruthless, how to play the game, but everything I’ve done, I’ve done for Matt. Everything you do is for your own fucking greed.”

  “Does that boy have any self-respect or does he just hide behind your skirts?”

  “What is this, 1920? Good luck with the female vote with that attitude. He’s more of a man than you’ll ever be. He’s not afraid to ask for help when he needs it, knows I’m not some weak, helpless creature who needs protecting.”

  “You’ve betrayed your family for him.”

  “He is my family. He always was. Matt and my sisters are my only family.” My gaze narrowed speculatively. “It must really piss you off to see us so close, to see Jackie treated as our sister. You can’t bury that shit anymore. Can’t hide behind all of your lies.”

  “Do you really think I’m scared of a blog like Capital Confessions? I’ve been in the Senate longer than you’ve been alive. Blogs like Capital Confessions come and go. I’m not afraid of the nonsense they print about me.”

  Even he couldn’t be so arrogant as to think he was above public opinion. For all of his money and power, he still held an elected office. Upsets happened all the time, so unless he wanted to lose his seat, he needed to start caring.

  “I think you’re going to have to be extra careful if you’re running for president. I think you’ll be under a level of scrutiny you avoided when you ruled over Virginia as an incumbent with a wealth of connections and support. I think your opponents will have deeper pockets behind them and will be able to dig for dirt more than anyone you’ve ever run against. You just better hope that they don’t find the bodies you’ve buried.”

  I took aim and fired.

  “You killed James Ryan—one of your oldest friends—to cover up the fact that he was diverting arms that should have been going to American troops and instead sending them to Afghani warlords with interests contrary to the United States—with your assistance. For what? Money? Campaign contributions?

  “You killed Matt’s Army unit because they got too close and realized you were a traitor to your own country, sending weapons to the other side, because they saw payments go down that would have implicated you. All those bodies so that you could cover up your treason.”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw, but otherwise his expression remained calm.

  “Did you get that information from those papers James Ryan sent you?” he asked.

  I froze. What?

  “You didn’t know, did you? Of course he sent them. Who else do you think had access to that information?”

  My gaze narrowed, not sure I believed anything he said, feeling like I no longer knew which way was up.

  “Why? Why would he do that? Why would he risk implicating himself?”

  “Because he didn’t know it was his son’s unit. Because when he found out his son was alive, he wanted to
do right by him. Because he was a fool who didn’t have what it takes to follow through. To reign.”

  My eyes closed. So it hadn’t been intentional; Matt had just been a casualty in his father’s greed.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the man whose lap I’d once sat on, who’d bought me a bike when my mother refused to get me one, and wondered where the hell it had all gone wrong.

  “Did you? Did you know Matt was in that unit?”

  I didn’t know why the question mattered so much, but it did. Maybe for the same reason that Matt had asked me what his parents’ reaction had been to his funeral. Because even though we knew better, and even though we told ourselves we really shouldn’t care, we did care. They were still our parents and their indifference still hurt.

  “It didn’t matter.”

  It was the final confirmation of what I’d always known to be true, the ultimate shattering of any ties we’d ever had between us. Killing his daughter’s fiancé was less important than protecting his business relationship. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and at the same time, it still stung. He truly valued nothing above himself.

  “Is nothing sacred to you? Nothing off-limits? You abused the trust of the people who got you elected. Did you forget about them? That you serve your constituents? Did you ever care or did you just get into politics to hoard power?”

  “Please,” he scoffed. “You know nothing of what it takes to run this country. Nothing about the behind-the-scenes machinations that are required to make this country work. You’re so fucking naive to think that you have any right to judge me. That you should have a seat at the table.”

  “Is this how you sleep at night—you’ve somehow convinced yourself that you’re a special snowflake who’s immune to the law and common human decency?”

  “One day you will grow up and you will realize that sometimes people have to be expendable. That sacrifices have to be made.”

  He wasn’t even the littlest bit sorry. He genuinely thought his behavior was excusable, that somehow allowances could be made for all of the destruction he’d wrought.