Solstice (Midsummer #3)

24. Ivy

24

Ivy

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING

T he days went by with no sign of Siobhan, Finn, or Donnelly.

I didn’t hear from Miri. She was an adult; she could make her own choices.

And she hadn’t chosen me.

My heart throbbed, and I glanced down at the scars on my hand, the remnants of vows we made when we were younger and more naive.

Enough now.

I wanted to move past it. I wanted it to not hurt anymore. Hell, even I had started to pity myself. But…it just wasn’t right without her here. A few nights ago, I had gotten the courage to call her, knowing it would only bring me more heartache.

The phone had rang and rang while my skin crawled. It must have been 7 or 8 a.m. in London, certainly she was awake. A click had brought me back to the present.

“Hello?” My knees had crumpled under me, and I’d slumped to a couch. “Miri? Is that you?”

Nothing had come from the other end.

“Miri, please. I miss you. Say something.” Tears had burned my eyes and sobs had threatened to spill out of my throat. I’d shoved them back down into my chest. “Yeah, I get it. You’ll be okay…okay? Just hang in there.”

Still, no words had come from the other side, just the soft whisper of someone breathing. Was it her? Had it been some royal creep listening in?

“Miri, I love you. I haven’t forgotten my promise.” My murmurs had turned to whispers and, finally, to pleas. Hot tears had slid down my cheeks as I gave in to the angst building in my chest. “Please let me back in. We all miss you. We can’t do this without you, Miri, my darling. My love. Please.”

Then the line had gone dead.

I’d gasped and stared at my phone. That had to have been her. She must have heard me; her desperate breathing gave her away. I’d tried to call the number again, but it had gone straight to voicemail, as if the phone had been turned off or gone dead.

For any other person, this would have softened their resolve and maybe they would have gotten a clue by now. But it only poked the wild beast stirring inside me.

Once upon a time, I’d made a promise to her I wouldn’t let her get away from me again. Something so fucking trivial, like the paparazzi making up rumors about us, shouldn’t have been enough to tear us apart. We were stronger than this. We’d made vows. We’d been through worse.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t Miri, and I was willing to bet everything on that. It was that secret I sensed the last time I’d seen her, the one that had been hidden from even her. It was whatever lived inside of her that she didn’t know about. Carter called every night from his tour, and when he met with Miri tomorrow, we’d have our answers.

In the weeks since the scandal broke, I’d reached out to Miri’s grandmother, thinking if I could talk some sense into that woman, maybe she’d let my wife off the hook. Now, at my rehearsal dinner, I finally had an answer. I looked down at my phone and pulled up the formal response from the royal family.

“Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of England, regrets to formally decline your request for an audience. The queen’s intensive schedule does not allow for diplomatic affairs outside of what has been previously arranged with the United States embassy. The queen has supplied this comment: ‘If my granddaughter has ended your friendship, best leave it be. All my love to my dear friends, your mother and future father-in-law. Best wishes on your upcoming nuptials.’ The queen has donated a generous sum to the charity listed on your registry as a gesture of solidarity and goodwill.”

I closed my phone and took a sip of wine, feeling more helpless than an abandoned kitten. I didn’t know how I would pull this off. I mean, how in the hell could I defeat a king of fairies when I couldn’t even keep my own family together?

Looking around at this menagerie of collected power figures made me even more disheartened. Dmitri and most of Lex’s family had flown in for the festivities. Since this was the biggest occasion since the last royal wedding, everyone who was anyone in the world’s aristocracy was here. Mount Vernon overflowed with old money, and every room at my family’s ancestral mansion had been filled by relatives. Most of them, I’d never met before, or if I had, it had been a long time since I’d seen them—cousins, aunts, uncles, people with the Washington last name or ties to it but had the good fortune of not being the Washington family, the firstborn of the firstborn going all the way back.

I stood in the parlor, watching my mother flit from guest to guest—politician smile wide, arms out in greeting. Like this was the most joyous thing to ever happen: her eldest daughter, finally sold off to the neighbor. I finished my pinot in one gulp.

“Slow down,” Lex murmured, coming to stand next to me. My attention caught on Kit talking to a Kennedy in the corner. I wasn’t sure which one—Hugh, Lexington, another John. It didn’t matter. She’d be next on the chopping block, no matter what I tried to do to stop it. I grabbed a glass off the tray of a passing server, handing him my empty one in exchange.

“Only two days before the end, Lucifer.” I smirked. “You can still run.”

He chuckled. “I’d never run from you, X.”

I stared at him, echoes of our game in his gaze. What would this crowd of rich old farts think if they knew that only a few days ago, he and our husband had held me down and spit roasted me like a kabob? I snorted at the image.

They thought what I did with Miri was bad? Good fucking Lord.

“Ma’am.” Reagan cut across the room and headed right toward me, standing close so they could whisper in my ear. “We’ve been given the heads-up that your bill is unlikely to pass through the Senate.”

I sighed, my lungs turning to lead as they sank into my stomach. Just another goddamned thing. When it rains, it’s a hurricane.

“I forwarded the email to you. But…it’s not good news.”

“Okay.” I pulled back to nod. “Thank you, Reagan.”

Their brown eyes met mine with sympathy as they squeezed my hand.

“You’ll get through this,” they said. “Just focus on the wedding for now. Giana’s got everything else covered.”

I had no doubt she did. Reagan kissed me on the cheek and turned to walk away. I’d failed in every way. I couldn’t figure out a way to destroy the fairy king or find the fairy queen. I hadn’t heard from Siobhan since she left, and we were supposed to capture the king in two days. I couldn’t stop this marriage from happening or get my wife back. I couldn’t even do my one fucking job in Congress.

My evening gown tightened, suddenly suffocating me. I couldn’t breathe. “I’ll be right back, Lucifer.”

“You okay, X?”

I nodded, pursed my lips, and casually walked to the balcony, looking out over the gardens and the Potomac River in the distance. I’d stood in this exact spot thousands of times, contemplating my life and what to do with it. I couldn’t decide which failure hurt worse, for there had been plenty since then.

“Hey,” came the deep voice from behind me. My father walked closer, one hand in his pocket, a glass of whiskey in his other, the typical accessory for him these days.

I straightened and turned to face him, plastering on a fake smile as I tried to bottle up my emotions. “Hello.”

“How are you doing?”

I shrugged. “Living the dream.”

He laughed and held up his glass for me to cheers.

“My bill failed in the Senate. So, there’s that.”

Father sighed, staring out at the river with an expression so like my own. Hell, it was like looking in a mirror sometimes. “Ah.”

“Ah?” I shook my head. Not that he’d ever been a beacon of fatherly wisdom, nor had we ever been very close, but that noise sounded loaded.

He gave me an encouraging nod. “You’re young. You’ve got a lot of time to try again.”

“What if I don’t want to?” The words flew out before I could stop them. Hell, I didn’t even know I felt that way until I said it.

He narrowed his eyes as he considered me, taking a drink of his liquor. “That’s the great game, Ivy.” He shook his head. “You put yourself out there. You do the best you can. They chew you up and spit you back out. The ones who keep going, they’re the ones left standing at the end.”

Far be it from me to take advice from a man who had forced me into this situation, a man who had once chided me for protesting it at all.

“You’re either in this family or you’re not. Exitus acta probat.”

In the days since, time had beaten him down. How long had it been defeating him before that? How many times had this town chewed him up and spit him back out? How many times would it do it to me? Was I so like him that I wouldn’t stop, no matter what? The next time I got caught, the next time someone broke into my house, my cell phone, my laptop, and leaked my secrets to the media? Would I keep going once they knew about Poppy and Carter, once they destroyed my image and my brand and everything to do with my personal life?

I drifted my focus across the crowd to where my mother laughed at something Senator Jacobs said, clutching both him and his wife. I wondered how much of my current situation she was responsible for. She might have forced the breakup with Carter and Miri four years ago and leaked the pictures to the public so I wouldn’t be tempted to call this off in favor of Miri. Had she manipulated my whole life?

More importantly…if I did become her, if I took up the mantle of the Washington matriarch, what would I do to my children? Would I be capable of doing what was done to me for the sake of national policy?

“Are you happy, Father?”

It had been a long time since I’d addressed him as anything other than “Sir,” and he turned to face me with his eyebrows furrowed. “Why would you ask me that?”

I shrugged and gazed up at him, hoping for the cold, honest truth. “Just wondering if you’d do anything differently, if you could do it again.”

“Oh, well.” He sighed and looked down to the ground, swirling his whiskey in his glass. “Of course. Everyone feels that way.”

“Would you marry Mother again?”

He snapped his gaze to meet mine, his features dropping. “Of course, Ivy. It wasn’t just an arrangement. She used to make me laugh.” One side of his mouth pulled into a smile as memories flipped behind his eyes. I’d give anything to put my hands on him and see what he was seeing. But no, those were just for him. Just for them. “She’s tired.” He shook his head and took another sip. “She thinks the weight of the world is on her shoulders, like she has to fix everything. She doesn’t, and she can’t.”

Anything else he could have said wouldn’t have impacted me nearly as much. I’d been compared to Evelyn my entire life, as she had been compared to her mother and so on before that. Washington women were the backbone of this family, and without us, not even the first George would have done what he did.

It nearly broke my heart. If I didn’t want to be like her, I didn’t have to be. That started with taking a stand—for myself, for my siblings, for my father. And most importantly, for her.

If I was going to sabotage this wedding anyway by inviting a dark fairy king to crash it, then why not go all in?