“Get your hands off of me or this won’t go well for you,” Derek warned.
“Fuck you,” Marcus spat.
The punch was an uppercut, and Marcus didn’t even see it coming. It didn’t have much power because they were already on top of one another, but it was enough to propel Marcus back into the corner of the desk behind him. He struggled to catch himself before he fell, and in the process knocked over trophies, papers, a laptop, and assorted other items on Derek’s crowded desktop. The noise of things hitting the floor was nearly as loud as Marcus’s oaths as he stumbled.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” he shouted as he regained his balance. He stepped forward, fists balled and ready to strike, but Derek was already looking beyond him to where Renee stood, her face white with shock and horror.
Derek’s anger dissolved as quickly as it had risen. “Oh shit…” he whispered.
Marcus whirled in time to see Renee before she turned and ran from the office.
“Dammit!” he croaked as the front doors to the office slammed. He looked back at Derek.
“Go,” Derek said, as his head throbbed and regret coated his tongue. “Go stop her.”
After Marcus left, Derek collapsed into his office chair and buried his head in his hands. What the hell was happening to him? He’d just punched his brother, and not for fun at Spar, but seriously. He’d hit him. He’d never hit Marcus—he was eight years older, and had known from day one that his job was not to bully or compete, but to protect and mold. He’d spent the better part of twenty years watching over Marcus, keeping him safe, guiding him toward a brilliant future. He’d celebrated Marcus’s successes, bragged about him to anyone who would listen, and felt his own heart swell with pride whenever the kid reached a new milestone.
And now he’d yelled at him, berated him, and fucking punched him in the face. This simply wasn’t the way Derek’s life worked. Ever since he’d reached adulthood his life had been about gaining—power, influence, prestige. Now it seemed that all he was doing was losing—his friends, his clients, his family.
But then he reminded himself that he’d gained the greatest prize of all, London. The rest would be fine. He’d get it all back on track. Kamal, his career, Marcus. They were his, and while he might have hit a rough patch in the road, he’d never lose what was his. He was Derek Ambrose. He’d have it all, he wasn’t about to give it up.
Chapter 14
It was after ten p.m. when Jeff, Scott, and Teague arrived at the Powerplay condo.
“You do know I was on a date?” Teague bitched as he threw himself down on the sofa.
“You’re always on a date,” Derek answered, handing him a beer hoping it would mellow him some.
Jeff took up his usual position by the pool table, and Scott appropriated the most comfortable armchair. Derek remained leaning against the bar where he could watch the group of them easily.
“Kamal coming?” Jeff asked, his gaze sharp on Derek.
“No,” Derek answered succinctly.
“So he was telling the truth when he said you two are on the outs?” Jeff asked.
“What? How the hell did I not know this?” Scott asked.
“I only found out because I gave Jeff a ride over here,” Teague interjected.
Derek sighed. As much as he liked his friends, they gossiped like a pack of old women. “Look, we’re not seeing eye to eye on some things right now, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve got more important things to deal with.”
Jeff scowled. “You two need to fix this. The rest of us aren’t going to choose sides you know.”
Derek shrugged. “You don’t have to choose. I’ll stay out of his way and he can stay out of mine.”
Teague snorted and Scott muttered, “Yeah right.” Derek glared at each of them in turn.
“Can we just move on?” he demanded.
“Fine. For now,” Jeff answered as Teague and Scott both nodded reluctantly.
“I got some very interesting news from Nick Patterson earlier.” Derek relayed the story of Nick’s wife and Ryan Williams. When he was done with the story all three of the other men in the room were tense with displeasure.
“What kind of a sick bastard comes up with a plan like that?” Teague shook his head, incredulous.
Outside a siren’s wail broke through the relative quiet inside the high-rise condo unit. Derek watched the lights of the neighboring buildings for a moment before he turned back to his friends.
“I won’t pretend to know what motivates a guy like Williams, but if he’s sick enough to do this to Nick, he’s not above much, including trying to assassinate Melville, and discrediting him in the press.”
Scott stepped to the bar and grabbed a beer from the fridge unit. “But Nick said the reason Williams wanted the income from the firm was that he’s tired of life on the Hill. Why would he get mixed up in the presidential race if he’s not going to be there to benefit from the results?”
“He raises a good point,” Teague said. “Wanting to have an interest in a private sector consulting business seems to be the exact opposite direction of a grab for a White House position.”
Derek scratched his head. Yes, it had occurred to him, but he’d been so focused on finding out who had messed with Melville’s campaign and his own reputation that he’d dismissed it from the equation.
“I don’t know. But I don’t feel like we can ignore this since we know he’s been sniffing around Melville. I also promised Nick that we’d find a solution to his problems with Williams. He’s a good guy, and one that I can’t stand by and watch be exploited like this.”
Scott nodded. “Agreed. And I can make sure that Williams never works on the Hill or anywhere in politics again. But what do we do about the fact that Nick’s signed a partnership contract with the bastard?”
Teague scoffed. “You’re joking, right?”
Derek smirked. He knew what was coming next and he loved to watch it.
“I’ve never met a contract I couldn’t break,” Teague boasted. “I’ll have Nick send me a copy first thing in the morning and I’ll have him out of it by the afternoon.”
“And the videos he’s got of Nick’s wife?” Derek asked.
“Let me handle that,” Jeff answered. “I’ve got some guys on retainer who can find those videos, and also…” he paused, “provide a large disincentive to Williams ever setting foot near Nick or his wife again.”
Derek saw Teague and Scott’s eyebrows rise just as his own did. They were all smart enough to know that they shouldn’t and wouldn’t want to hear the details of whatever Jeff was going to set in motion. However, they also needed to find out once and for all if Williams was involved in taking down Melville.
Derek framed his remarks carefully. “And when this disincentive is being explained, would there be room to ask some questions about what’s happened with Melville?”
“That can be arranged.”
Derek saw Teague struggling not to grin.
“You handle things more directly than Kamal generally does,” Derek remarked.
Jeff shrugged. “He likes to play spy games. Use his secret informants, see if he can manipulate people to give up information. I just need to know what the bottom line is and then I’ll fix it. I’m a problem solver, he’s a chess player.”
“Yet normally you let him play chess, and now we’re all wondering if things could be done much faster if you just handled them,” Teague opined.
Derek and Scott nodded in agreement.
Jeff cracked a small smile, something rare and fleeting. “It gives him purpose and allows me to save my influence for when it’s crucial. I could have simply had Williams approached when we first suspected him, but he hadn’t done anything wrong that we knew of at that point. It would have been overkill, used up my resources unnecessarily, and run the risk of complications that you all don’t want to know about. By letting Kamal continue to dig and hypothesize, I saved the big guns for when we actually found something significant.
It all worked out like it was meant to.”
Derek grinned at the quietest and most self-effacing of the Powerplay members. Jeff was a soldier through and through. He never sought to do things for himself, always worked as part of the team, filling in wherever he was needed. But now Derek could see that it paid not to underestimate the man. He was perhaps smarter and savvier than the rest of the members gave him credit for.
Teague stood and walked to Jeff, slapping him once on the back before picking up his drink and downing it in one gulp. “My man, you scare the shit out of me, so I’m glad you’re on our side.”
Jeff rolled his eyes and Scott chuckled.
“We’ll have this settled in twenty-four hours,” he told the group. “We’ll know once and for all if Williams did this.”
“Once and for all,” Derek echoed. “We’ll finally know.”
London had just stepped out of the shower when she heard her phone ringing. She was hoping it was Derek. He had worked late the night before and had an early morning meeting, so he’d elected to sleep at his office. When she looked at the caller ID, however, she saw it wasn’t him, but even without a name she knew exactly who that number belonged to.
She hesitated before answering. “Hello, Mom,” she said quietly, her heart beating at double speed.
“Habibi,” Farrah said. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to hear your voice.”
London nodded silently.
“How are you feeling today? Are you somewhere safe where those horrible reporters can’t bother you?”
London sat at the dressing table and set the phone on speaker on the tabletop as she towel dried her hair. Somehow by not touching the phone she felt a little distance between herself and Farrah. Distance that helped her maintain emotional equilibrium.
“I’m fine, Mom. Derek Ambrose has hired security to keep the press away from me. They stay at my house and take me where I need to go. Who’d have imagined me with bodyguards?”
She regretted saying it almost immediately. It was too easy to slide back into informality with her mother, as if all the years hadn’t passed, as if she should be bringing up things that reminded them both of what they might have imagined she’d become.
But Farrah didn’t catch the implications, or was far too smooth at passing over them. “I’m very glad. Mr. Ambrose is good to you then. You said it was complicated with him?”
London watched her own dark eyes in the mirror as she ran a comb through her long, thick locks. “Maybe not as complicated as I thought. He’s…we’re involved.”
This time there was a hesitation. And London knew exactly what that hesitation was. Humiliation washed over her, and she dropped her gaze from the mirror, unable to see the shame in her own eyes.
“He’s never…” She cleared her throat, and pinched the bridge of her nose so she wouldn’t break down. “He’s never paid. It’s not like that, and I’m not working now. I’m taking some time off. Maybe thinking about what I should do…differently.”
Farrah cleared her throat as well, and when she spoke again, her voice trembled.
“This is good, habibi. You are still my beautiful girl and you deserve to have someone who cares about you and is good to you. You deserve to be whomever you choose to be.”
London couldn’t possibly have missed the subtext of the words—after having discovered that Farrah had hidden the truth of who London was for her whole childhood, who she chose to be mattered—deeply. At seventeen she’d been so determined to have the choice that she’d given very little thought to what the choice was. Now, confronted for the first time in a decade by people who cared about her—Joanna, Derek, her estranged mother—she was starting to think that the quality of the choice mattered just as much or more than the having of it. As much as she had painted her mother as the demon in the history of her life, London couldn’t ignore Farrah’s words and the understanding they imparted—you deserve to be whomever you choose to be. Was it possible, she wondered, that her mother understood her so much better than she’d ever given her credit for?
Farrah continued, “I want to ask you something. I have tried to think of how it would be best to ask, but I cannot pretend to know what you are thinking or feeling now. And I’m afraid that if I push too hard you will leave me when we have just found one another again. But I also can’t bear not to at least ask.”
Farrah paused, obviously waiting for London to respond. “Okay,” she said, her voice weak.
“Would you be willing to see me?”
That was all. Not a question really. A statement, but one to which London needed to respond. And the last time she’d seen her mother face-to-face came rushing back to her in all its vivid and horrid detail.
She was a senior in high school, studying world affairs. Terrorism hadn’t entered the American consciousness the way it would after 9-11, but Iran, Iraq, and Libya were all included in the curriculum in her class.
The unit was about the Iran-Iraq war, which had ended the year London was born. As her teacher discussed the important figures in Iran following the war, he projected photos and biographical facts about each on the screen at the front of the class.
“Mohammad Rouhani,” the teacher had said as the image dissolved from one man’s face to another. “This man is the principal advisor to the Supreme Leader in Iran. He’s held that position since 1989, and is considered to be one of the most dangerous war criminals in the world. Rouhani was the Commanding General of armies that conscripted children, slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, and violated the Geneva Convention protocols for prisoners of war.”
As the teacher moved on to other key individuals, London had looked at the image of Rouhani, unable to take her eyes off of it, something about his face tugging at a thread in her memory.
“Hey, L?” her friend Monique had whispered. “Do you have any relatives in Iran? Cause that dude looks just like you.”
When she’d gotten home at the end of the day London needed to know more about the man in the picture at school. A lump had formed in the pit of her stomach as she logged in to her mother’s computer and began by searching his name. And after an hour she didn’t know much more, but he had definitely been in Iran when her mother was a university student and London was a baby in Tehran.
She had a large picture of Rouhani up on the screen when Farrah arrived home from work. She walked into the room chattering about the dinner she had planned. She busied herself hanging her jacket, setting her briefcase down, and it wasn’t until she finally turned and saw the image on the monitor that she stopped talking.
Her gasp was audible, and the weight in London’s gut sank further.
“Where did you get that?” Farrah demanded, her face pale. Her hands shook as she walked toward the desk where London sat.
“Who is he?”
“Where did you get it?” Farrah repeated.
“We’re studying him at school. But you know him, I can tell.”
Farrah reached the computer and her hand snapped out to click the power switch off.
“Mom!” London shouted.
“He’s a very bad man. I’m sure they’ve taught you that in school, and it’s all you really need to know.”
“I’m not five, Mom. You can’t just say he’s a bad guy and expect me to be satisfied with that. You obviously know him. How? When?”
Farrah exhaled a shaky breath. “I knew him when I was a university student before you were born.”
“How? He looks older than you. Was he one of your professors or something?”
Farrah sat down in a nearby armchair. “Please don’t make me do this, London,” she pleaded.
Later London would wonder why she’d persisted. Maybe it was as simple as teenage antagonism, but if she were honest with herself it was more a premonition, a strong instinct that there was something crucial there she needed to know. Whatever the root cause, the result was that in that moment she could no more drop the line of questioning than she could have sliced off her ow
n hand.
“Tell me, Mom. I have to know.” Her voice dropped to a mere whisper. “I deserve to know.”
Farrah gave one sharp nod and then admitted that everything she’d ever told London about her father, her origins, and her immigration to the U.S. was a lie. Farrah Amid was a twenty-year-old student at university in Tehran and a member of a radical student activist group who opposed the regime that had taken control of the country after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The group used any means necessary to infiltrate the highest levels of the government, feeding information to groups outside of the country who they hoped could help overthrow the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah, who had spent nearly a decade purging the nation of any Western or Non-Islamic influences.
Tears trickled down Farrah’s cheeks as she described to London that she was assigned to foster an involvement with Rouhani in order to get secrets about the Iran-Iraq war and the Iranian military.
“It was made clear to me that I was to use any means necessary to get close to him, London.”
London’s stomach soured and her eyes burned. She shook her head sharply from side to side. No.
“They selected me because of the way I looked. Once they’d arranged an introduction for me I made it clear to him that I was looking for someone who could help me pay for school and that I would trade sexual favors for that help.”
“Mom,” London sobbed.
Her mother stood and trembled with emotion. “You wanted to know. As long as we’ve gone this far you need to hear it all. You need to understand.”
Farrah walked the length of the room, her arms hugging her stomach as if she was straining to keep her insides contained.
“We started an affair. He wasn’t distasteful and I was the darling of the rebellion, willing to give up my very virtue to serve the cause. I gained valuable information and everything was going smoothly…until the day I discovered that I was pregnant.”
The Kingmaker (Powerplay #1) Page 19