Page 33 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I say again. “I would have thought that my refusing to answer your calls made that quite clear.”
Abilene just smiles and walks into the office, finding a chair and sitting down on the other side of my desk. “You did make it clear, but this is important. And if you really didn’t want me around, you would have told your Secret Service agents, but they seem to still think I’m an approved visitor.”
“I could call them,” I warn her, sliding my phone close to me. “Right now. I don’t care that you’re pregnant.”
“Yes, but you won’t call.”
I hesitate as I reach for my phone, not sure what game she’s playing. Of course, up until my kidnapping in May, I had no idea that she was playing any games at all. I’d trusted her. My cousin, my best friend. She’d sold me to Melwas, all because I’d had the audacity to marry the man she was obsessed with, and even my abduction hadn’t been enough—she’d blackmailed Embry into an engagement, and she held the threat of going public about Lyr over all our heads.
It’s for Lyr’s sake, and Ash’s, that I relent.
“Okay,” I say. “I won’t. Tell me what you came here for.”
Abilene pulls a creamy stock envelope out from her purse and puts it on the table. “I wanted to make sure your invitation didn’t get lost in the mail.”
Oh fuck you, I want to say to her. Instead I just say, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it.”
“What a shame,” Abilene says mildly. “I really wanted you to be my matron of honor.”
I keep my voice as steady and cool as hers while I say, “Abilene, that will never happen. You must know this.”
She shrugs. “It would make for an excellent story after Embry announces his campaign, you know. If you and Maxen were at the wedding.”
I study her for a moment. I’ve always been good at reading people, and I’ve had more practice with Abilene than almost any other person, but something’s changed inside her that makes her difficult to understand or predict. She’s a satellite with an unstable orbit, destined to swing wide and crash into another moon. “What do you want from all of this?” I ask. “For me to be miserable? For me to know that Embry strayed? For me to get kidnapped again?”
The edges of her mouth curl up in a mocking smile, but when I speak next, the smile disappears.
“You want Ash to love you?” I ask.
She blinks and glances away, and for a split second, I see the girl I used to know. The girl I grew up with. Headstrong and selfish, but not evil. Not this. And it’s in seeing this that I realize I’m right. All of this is about me taking Ash away from her. Embry is a casualty of proximity, just a means to hurt me. All she’s wanted since high school is Ash, and there’s a part of her that realizes she’ll never have him now, not after what she’s done. I hope that knowledge is agony.
I’d been taught in my youth how to identify these weak spots and how to press on them, but I don’t do that now. I don’t want to press on them because I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know her limits anymore, I don’t know the rotten ice edges of her spite, I don’t know what words or looks or gestures might send me plummeting into dark, freezing water. I don’t know that she won’t walk out of here and decide to announce Lyr’s existence in front of the clock tower outside.
So I change tactics, and instead I say, “It was terrible, you know. Being taken by Melwas.”
She looks back to me, the vulnerability fading fast in her face. “Good,” she says. “I wanted it to be.”
“Are you upset that I escaped?”
“I’m upset that you lived,” she says in a bland tone of voice, as though we’re talking about our work schedules or the weather. “That wasn’t supposed to be the case.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I respond, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Sorry for being wanting to be alive.”
She shakes her head. “You still don’t get it, do you? This is just all some fairy tale to you, and it always has been, ever since we were kids. Perfect, sad Greer, all alone in her tower, and she gets rescued and wooed by not one but two men. Don’t you see how stupidly unfair that is? How ridiculous it was when you were already Grandpa’s favorite? When you already had the perfect childhood?”
“My parents died, Abi,” I say, leaning forw
ard in my seat. “I was orphaned. I hardly had the perfect childhood, and if I was Grandpa’s favorite, it was because he had no choice but to take me in.”
“You had everything,” she says angrily. “And Maxen Colchester was the one thing in the world I ever really wanted, and you took him away from me.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t take your teenage crush into consideration when I fell in love.”
“It wasn’t a crush. Maxen was the goal for me, always,” she insists. “Every congressman I fucked, every lobbyist I dated, it was all to get me closer to him. I knew more about him than he knew about himself, that’s how much I loved and wanted him. It was hard, it took me years to discover all his secrets, but I did it.” She lifts her chin, as if expecting some kind of trophy for this.
“Congratulations,” I say. “It’s helped quite a lot with your blackmailing him.”
“I never meant to blackmail him,” she says, as if this distinction matters now. “In fact, I never meant to blackmail anybody. When I found the letter in Grandpa Leo’s desk, all I felt was excited.”
