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I pushed that anger aside with a few deep breaths and jotted down some notes about the project on a piece of paper. I couldn’t let my emotions get in the way. To get the reaction I wanted, I’d need to play Dad just right.
He’d used me, and now I was going to use him in return. It’d be perfect as long as he didn’t realize that was the point of my call. After the way I’d reacted to the Frankfords’ previous attacks, I didn’t think he’d have trouble seeing me as vengeful.
“I’d better let you go now so I can make this call,” I said to Naomi. “Thanks for keeping me company up here.”
“Any time!” she said cheerfully. “And if you need more than that, you know I’m just a few hours’ plane ride away.”
After I’d hung up with her, I took the phone and my notes, and sat with my back against the wooden chest. My pulse had kicked up a notch. I closed my eyes and willed the surge of adrenaline away. Calm and collected, on the inside at least. That was what I needed to be.
My hand still shook a little as I tapped on Dad’s name in my contacts list. My fingers curled against my palm where I was resting my free hand on the floor. I held my breath as the phone rang, and rang, and—
“Rose?” Dad’s voice on the other end was startled. I couldn’t tell if it was a happy surprise or a wary one.
“Hi, Dad,” I said evenly.
He didn’t seem to know what to say after that. “I— It’s good to hear from you. How are you?”
“I’ve been better.” I rustled the paper purposefully. “This isn’t going to be a long call. I just wanted to give you a chance to make amends, since I know everything that’s happened was more Charles Frankford’s idea than yours. I’ve been doing some digging. I think International Affairs and Unsparked Relations would be very interested to hear about a couple of the projects you two worked on together.”
Any warmth that had been in my father’s voice fell away under a nervous edge. “What are you talking about?”
Good. He wouldn’t be nervous unless he knew there were things I could have uncovered.
“Oh, it seems like some of your choices in Brazil way back when were pretty questionable.” I glanced at my notes. “I’m not sure any amount of land or profits in coffee farming will make up for it. And that San Francisco real estate deal in ’98…” I tsked my tongue. “You didn’t even respect unsparked people who had the savvy to do business with you, did you?”
“I don’t think dragging up all that history is going to help you get what you want,” Dad said.
“Well, I don’t think you understand what I really want, so you can’t really make that decision. But here’s the thing. If you come with me to the Assembly and tell them about all the recent crimes the Frankfords and the rest of their faction have gotten up to, then I’ll leave out your part in the business deals. It was Frankford who took the lead on those early ones anyway. I just wanted to give you the chance to do the right thing.”
I hadn’t even for a second expected him to take that offer. The whole point of this ploy was to send him running to Frankford to warn him. But a pinching sensation jabbed through my heart anyway when Dad said, without hesitation, “I can’t do that. There’s too much at stake.Youdon’t understand, Rose.”
I did. Better than he could probably have imagined, after what I’d heard from Thalia Ainsworth. But he didn’t know I’d even spoken to her.
The witching men didn’t want to give up the power the demons were lending them. Not even when they’d put the whole world at risk by making their deals in the first place, if Dad’s warnings were to be believed. Not even when they were sacrificing the sanity of their wives and daughters to get it.
“Fine,” I said. “If you change your mind, you know how to contact me.”
I’d meant to hang up there, but one thing I still didn’t understand, fresh from my perusal of the attic boxes, stopped me. Before I could stop myself, I was saying, “What really happened to my mother, Dad?”
Dad hesitated a beat longer than was comfortable. “What do you mean? She had an aggressive cancer spread from her liver. We did everything we could, but it moved so quickly…”
“I know that’s the story you’ve always told me,” I said. “I also know that she was writing letters about you, about how she was afraid of you, to her family before she died. I know what tends to happen to people who mess with the Frankfords’ schemes.”
He swallowed audibly. “I don’t want to talk about this with you right now, Rose. But you have to know that I had nothing to do with the sickness or her death. I wouldn’t have made that call.”
Something about his wording made me abruptly sure that even if he hadn’t, someone else had. And he knew that. He knew her death hadn’t been just a random tragedy.
But he’d stayed loyal to those people, more loyal than he was to his own daughter, anyway.
“Sure, Dad,” I said, allowing a sliver of sarcasm to creep into my voice. Then I hung up before I could screw up whatever progress I’d made by letting my tongue fly with my temper.
I sat there for a few minutes longer, my shoulders shivering and stilling, shivering and stilling, until the lingering discomfort of the conversation had faded. Then I headed down into the main body of the house.
At least I’d put that plan into motion. Ky would keep watching the Frankfords, following their movements as well as he could. If they reached out to Charles’s colleagues at the Assembly for any sort of secret meeting, Ky would be watching to catch them.
The front door was just opening as I came down into the second-floor hall. Damon stepped inside. Like my other consorts, he had the code to the gate—a new one after I’d reluctantly changed it after Gabriel’s departure.
He looked around the foyer with his shoulders slightly hunched in a wary stance, as if even after the last few weeks of dropping by regularly, he half expected my father or the staff to show up and chase him off.
