Page 54 of Sinful Palace

12

Willow

I stashedthe paper in my coat pocket and leaned back, staring into space.

It seemed clear that the note was a warning shot directed at me. Somehow, the higher members of the Order had discovered that I wanted to look into them, and they wanted me to stop before I even started. This time it was just a threat with a random dead body, but the implication was that next time, it could be mine. Or Logan’s, if he ended up helping me.

I chewed on my bottom lip, trying to figure out how they could’ve discovered my intentions so quickly. All I could think was that they must’ve somehow bugged my suite at Wonderland and heard my conversation with Logan a few days ago. Nothing else seemed possible. I hadn’t discussed it with anyone else in any other place, and I hadn’t written anything about it anywhere, either.

The fact that they were warning me against looking into them right now made one thing fairly obvious to me: they were involved with this set-up against my mother and Jamie Torrance, and they didn’t want anyone to find out.

It made me wonder yet again—why the hell did the Order even invite me to be a member in the first place? Was it just to use me in whatever way they could, like Logan told me all those months ago, or was there something more nefarious at play that I simply hadn’t grasped yet?

My shoulders slumped, and I sighed. All around me, I heard the voices of Secret Service agents and my mom, but they sounded faint and slightly warbled, like I was listening to them through water.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Madam President, but we can’t find him.”

“What do you mean you can’t find him? He was right there.”

“I know, ma’am, but he’s gone.”

“He can’t just be gone!”

“He might’ve gotten lost in the crowd somehow. We really need to get you out of here, though, so we can’t wait any longer. I’ll send you back to the White House now, and I’ll have my team continue their search. When we locate him, we’ll send him back in another vehicle.”

“Fine. Willow, have you seen your father? Hello? Willow, are you even listening?”

I snapped out of my reverie at the mention of my name. “Sorry, what?”

Mom glared impatiently at me. “Where’s your father?” she asked. “We need to get the hell out of here, but the agents haven’t been able to find him.”

My eyes widened. “He was right next to me on the float. I assumed he was right behind me when the agents started pulling me over to the car.”

“Well, apparently he wasn’t.” She cursed softly under her breath and waved her hand at the agent-in-charge leaning into the car. “Let me know when you’ve found him, okay?”

“Of course, ma’am.”

My stomach knotted as we pulled away and slowly headed down Pennsylvania Avenue. I couldn’t hear anything from outside, but when I looked through the window, I saw hundreds of panicked parade attendees running around like headless chickens, trying to flee the area as quickly as possible. I couldn’t blame them. I wanted to get the hell out of here as fast as possible too.

“What happened back there, Mom?” Jared asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. She glanced up at me again and slid her hands over Jared’s ears. “Willow, you saw that… thing. What exactly was it?”

I leaned forward. “It looked like a body from a morgue. Old and male. He was pale and blue, and there was no blood, even after he fell all that way.”

“So he was already dead.”

I nodded. “Yes. So that’s a silver lining, I guess.”

“God,” she muttered, releasing Jared from her grip so she could rub her temples. “You were right after all.”

“Huh?”

Her eyes narrowed. “About today’s parade being a terrible idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I looked down at my lap and stayed quiet.

When we arrived at the White House, we were marched into a ground floor sitting room by the Secret Service agents and told to stay there while the others in the field searched for my father and tried to figure out what the hell happened.

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