FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

6

Chapter 6

Kane drove me.

I did not ask him to. He simply appeared at my building fifteen minutes after I left the athletic office, car already running, and when I stopped on the steps and looked at him through the windshield he said nothing. He just waited.

I got in.

We did not speak on the drive across campus. The silence between us was different now, weighted with everything that had happened in that office, his hand on my jaw and his mouth on mine and the fact that I had let it happen and was not sorry. I kept my eyes on the road ahead and tried to organise my face into something that would survive the next hour.

I had not seen my father in thirteen years.

I did not know what version of myself was going to walk into that room.

Kane parked and came around to my side before I had the door open. He did not offer his hand. He stood beside me on the path and looked down at me with those steady grey eyes and said: You do not have to agree to anything. You do not have to explain yourself. You do not have to be polite.

I looked at him. Are you coming in.

He said: That depends on whether you want me there.

I thought about walking into that Dean's office alone. My father on one side of a table, the Dean on the other, and me standing in the middle of a conversation that had clearly been arranged without my consent.

I want you there, I said.

Something shifted in his expression. Brief and gone quickly. He nodded and we walked in together.

My father was already seated when we entered.

He looked like time had been reasonable to him, which felt unfair. Silver at his temples, good suit, the particular ease of a man who had spent decades being the most important person in every room he entered. He looked up when the door opened and his eyes found me immediately and something crossed his face that might have been relief if I had been willing to give him that.

I was not.

His eyes moved to Kane beside me and the relief curdled into something careful.

Sienna, he said. You look like your mother.

I sat down across from him and said: I look like myself. What do you want.

The Dean, a precise woman in her fifties who clearly had not anticipated the temperature of this reunion, cleared her throat. Perhaps we should begin with introductions.

We know each other, my father said. He looked at me. I know this is a shock.

You have been watching me for two years, I said. That is not a shock. That is a violation.

His jaw tightened. I was making sure you were safe.

From what.

He glanced at Kane. From the people around you who have their own agendas.

Kane said nothing. He was leaning back in the chair beside me with his arms crossed and his face completely neutral and he looked like a man who had been in rooms like this before and found them mildly boring.

My father looked back at me. I need you to come home, Sienna. Take a leave of absence. There are things happening around you that you do not fully understand and I cannot protect you here.

You cannot protect me anywhere, I said. You have not been present for thirteen years.

I was present, he said quietly. You just did not know it.

The words hit somewhere I had not expected. I kept my face still.

You sent those notes, I said.

He did not deny it.

I was trying to get you to leave before it escalated, he said. Before you became a target.

I am already a target, I said. Because of you. Because someone wants to use me to get to you or to get to Kane or to get to all of them and instead of telling me the truth you left threatening notes in my private belongings like I was a problem to be managed.

Sienna.

No, I said. Whatever you are about to say, no. You do not get to walk back into my life with a request. You get to answer my questions. Then I decide what happens next. Not you.

The room was very still.

My father looked at me for a long moment. Then something in him settled, some old resistance dropping away, and he said: What do you want to know.

Everything, I said. Start with why you left.

He told me.

I will not give him the grace of saying it justified thirteen years. It did not. But it was more complicated than I had let myself imagine in the decade plus of not letting myself imagine it. There were people he had been running from, debts of a kind that were not financial, and my mother had known and chosen the clean break to protect us both.

My mother had known.

I sat with that while the Dean looked uncomfortable and Kane stayed perfectly still beside me.

When my father finished I said: Does she know you are here.

Yes, he said. She asked me to come.

Something cracked open in my chest. I pressed my hand flat against the table and breathed.

Kane's hand closed over mine under the table. Quiet and warm and out of sight. He did not squeeze. He just held on and I held back and nobody in that room knew it was happening but me.

It was the thing that kept me in the chair.

I told my father I needed time. I told the Dean the meeting was over. I stood up and Kane stood with me and we walked out together and neither of us spoke until we were outside in the cold air of the campus path.

Then I stopped walking and put my face in my hands.

Kane stood in front of me. Not touching. Just there, solid and present, blocking the wind.

My mother knew, I said into my palms.

I know, he said.

How long have you known that.

Two weeks, he said.

I looked up at him. His expression was braced for the anger he knew was coming.

I am so tired, I said instead.

Something shifted in his face. He reached out and pulled me in and I let him, my forehead against his chest and his arms around me and the solid steadiness of him the only thing that felt real. He did not say it would be fine. He did not say anything. He just held on.

We stood like that for a long time.

When I finally pulled back I wiped my face with the back of my hand and he watched me do it with an expression I did not have a category for yet.

What happens now, I said.

Now we figure out who is actually behind this, he said. Because it is not your father.

I stared at him. He sent the notes.

He sent the notes to scare you off, Kane said. But the file in that room, the surveillance, the level of access to your private information. That is not one man working alone. Someone else is running this and they used your father to get close to you.

My stomach dropped.

Then who, I said.

He looked at me with something that might have been reluctance on any other face but on his looked more like the careful delivery of something sharp.

That is what I need to show you, he said. But I need you to understand that when I do, one of the other people in your life right now is going to look very different.

My blood went cold.

He said the name.

And the bottom fell out of everything I thought I knew.