"You don't sound hurt by it.”
"I stopped being hurt by my father when I was twelve and realized his campaign slogan got more emotional investment than I did. It’s just how things are.”
Blake's mouth twitches—not quite a smile, but close. "Relatable."
"Your father was a politician, too?”
"Worse. A Delano." He slows as we approach Kingsley Square, the massive Christmas tree lit up like a beacon in the center of town. Even at this hour, the square is alive—couples ice skating, late-night shoppers emerging from Wreath & Whimsy with bags full of things they don't need, and tourists taking photos that’ll linger online until next year this time. Normal people doing normal things in a town that's anything but.
"We're not going to your sister's house, are we?” I ask. It's a rhetorical question.
"No."
"Because it's being watched?”
"Because everything in Wintervale is being watched." He pulls into a side street, parks behind a building I don't recognize. It has a brick facade, minimal signage, the kind of place you'd walk past without noticing unless you knew to look. "Talia's meeting us here. Neutral ground."
"Neutral?" I raise an eyebrow. "In this town?"
"Neutral-adjacent. The owner owes me a favor that predates Silas's current plans. We have thirty minutes before someone notices the gap in surveillance."
“Why do you call him Silas? Isn’t he your uncle?”
“Just because someone is family doesn’t mean they deserve your respect.”
Facts.
He kills the engine. Silence rushes in, broken only by the tick of cooling metal and distant Christmas music bleeding through brick walls.
I should be terrified of what I learned tonight. I should be calling my father's security team, filing police reports, doing any of the rational things a senator's daughter does when strange men with violent resumes extract her from galas and tell her she's worth killing.
Instead, I'm calculating.
Blake said leverage. He said someone wants me alive or signed. He said there's a difference between his family's branches, between orders and protection, between playing the game and changing it.
He also didn’t flinch when I inferred that my mother's death wasn't an accident. In my soul, I’ve known that truth for three years. Known it in the way you know things you can't prove, the timing too convenient, the investigation too brief, the insurance payout too clean. They ruled it a mechanical failure and closed the case before anyone could hire investigators who might ask inconvenient questions.
My father remarried months later. She’s a political strategist with the right connections and no emotional baggage. They honeymoon every anniversary in places that photograph well. My father has always been a complete narcissist, but I will never understand how he can continue to live his life as if my mother’s never mattered.
I kept my mother's journals, her notes, containing some general genealogy research she'd been obsessing over in the months before she died. At first, I thought it was a hobby to keep her mind off of…well, life. But now I’m sure my mother had been searching for something.
And I think she found it.
Then she died.
"You said someone wants me for leverage," I say, turning to face Blake fully, taken aback by the length of this man’s eyelashes, which pop against his angular facial features. Sheesh, he’s hot. "Leverage implies I have value beyond being the senator's daughter. What am I worth, specifically? What did they think I could be used for?"
Blake meets my gaze, and I see the calculation happening behind his eyes on how much to tell, how much to hold back, whether I can handle the truth, or if I'll shatter like the good little political prop I've been raised to be.
I lift my chin. "I'm not fragile, Blake. And I'm not stupid. My mother died researching something she wouldn't tell me about. My father's been receiving threats he thinks I don't know about. And now your family—sorry, one branch of your family—just tried to kidnap me at a Christmas gala. So either tell me what I'm in the middle of, or let me out of this car so I can figure it out myself."
"You'd walk away?” He says it like he's testing the theory.
"I've been planning my exit strategy since I was fifteen. I have three passports, two bank accounts my father doesn't know about, and a go-bag in a locker at Penn Station. So yes, Blake. I'd walk away. The question is whether you'd let me."
Something shifts in his expression like respect, maybe, or recognition. The look of someone who's met a fellow survivor and knows better than to underestimate them.
“You're a Kingsley by blood," he says quietly. "Your mother was not Lila Morrison but Lila Kingsley. Disowned granddaughter of Edmund Kingsley. There's a clause in the family trust which has been sealed, dormant, and forgotten by almost everyone except the people who profit from keeping it buried."
