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The Senator stands. “Great work, Roslyn. I have to finish getting ready, but we can discuss your phase two proposals on the way to Florida. Be downstairs in three.” On the way out, he looks over his shoulder and says, “Behave while I’m away, Eduardo. Don’t stay up too late.” His laughter follows him out of the attic.
Roslyn lets out a happy sigh.
“How do you sleep at night, fraud?” I ask.
“A lot better since I started sharing a bed with your father,” she says with a smile.
So they are together now—or at least, hooking up. It seems like there are only a handful of people on the Senator’s team who know about me being alive. I haven’t seen any other bodyguards except Jax and Zenon, and Jax truly should’ve been fired for the way he failed at his job during the break-in this week. But if it’s really just those two, Bishop, and Roslyn, I have to manipulate them. Get into their heads.
“You’re never going to be his First Lady,” I tell her. “I know what it looks like when he talks to a woman he loves. That’s not what’s happening here.”
“My love for him and his work is enough for the both of us,” Roslyn says as she finishes packing up her laptop and files. “That’ll keep me warm in the White House’s master bedroom.”
She leaves the attic.
I want to call her a monster, but that won’t faze her. Roslyn needs time to become unsettled and I have to trust that I’ve planted a seed. I didn’t even have to lie. My mom wasn’t perfect. Her views weren’t always in line with where mine are now, and she didn’t always challenge her husband like she encouraged me with others, but she would’ve never supported all this cheating, let alone help engineer it. She didn’t have to perform her loyalty to the Senator to get him to love her. I saw his private grief when she was killed.
I hope every corrupt person on this team ends up in prison like the criminals they are. Right on cue, Jax arrives—his face fully healed because of Eva—to lock me back in my cage after this torturous session in the attic. I would’ve been happier alone and peeling paint off my walls than having the Senator and Roslyn for company. But Jax doesn’t take me to my bedroom. We go downstairs, where the Senator, Roslyn, and Zenon are waiting by the front door with luggage.
“We said bye already,” I say to the Senator.
“But not to Jax and Zenon. They’ll be joining me on this trip. Fear not, you won’t be left alone,” he says.
Dione steps out of th
e living room and leans against the grandfather clock. “Enough talk. You can go now,” she says to the Senator.
He doesn’t challenge her disrespect. He must understand already that she won’t ever favor him. It’s one of the reasons I trusted her after joining the gang.
I see the Senator and Roslyn in this new light knowing they’re together and I’m thrilled when they leave with Jax and Zenon following them out. That leaves me with Dione. We’re not friends, though I thought we could’ve been. She was always the most human in rooms with bloodthirsty Stanton and ghostly June. But she’s quick to anger, doesn’t show remorse around killing those who try to overpower her, and she’s very loyal to Luna. I have to be smart around her if I’m going to make the most of this time away from the Senator and his team.
“Should we throw a party?” I ask.
“Anything that helps trash this place,” Dione says, eyeing the grandfather clock as if she’s considering tipping it over. “But I have to catch up with Luna.”
“Where is she?”
Dione chuckles. “The Cloaked Phantom is hitting the sky tonight. Where do you think?”
“That’s tonight?!”
The twice-a-year constellation that made me a shifter. How has it already been eight months since I’ve had these powers? I would’ve never thought I’d be back here in the manor, forced to be a weapon once again for the person I happily played dead to never see again.
“For someone who’s credited as being very alert, this important detail flew right over your head.”
“I wasn’t exactly given a calendar with every upcoming prime constellation when forced back here. Take that up with the host you’re working for.”
Dione’s eyes are daggers. “I don’t work for your father. If Luna is successful, you won’t have to work for him either.”
This must be what Luna and the Senator discussed the evening she arrived—my replacement. Maybe she has someone in mind who will be more eager to help them fulfill their vision. “So who’s the young bastard Luna is preying on this time?”
Dione grabs me by the arm and drags me down the steps to the basement. “It’s not your business.”
I struggle, but she’s far stronger than me. “Dione, this is what she does! This is what she did with you too! Luna is an opportunistic predator who buys our loyalty with power, I know you know this!”
We reach the landing and Dione shoves me to the floor. “If you were loyal, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
The panic room is a gigantic black box with one-way windows so those inside can keep track of the intruder’s movements. It’s protected by the gleam-shield, a dome of yellow energy. In a demonstration video provided by the supplier there was a celestial who cast fire at the gleam-shield and it rebounded back at them so quickly they didn’t even have a chance to move. The Senator has mused about improving upon his grandfather’s legacy and upgrading the power-proof vest with similar protections so enforcers will be extra armored against gleam attacks. Dione reads the twenty-digit security code posted on the wall and types it into the keypad; I once had those numbers, or similar ones assuming they’ve been changed, memorized in the event I had to lock myself in the panic room. The shield drops and Dione opens the door.
