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.”
CHAPTER 61
“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.”