Page 20 of Original Sins
I turned.
“You are,” she said, “the most important asset this movement has.Do you understand that word?Asset.Not man.Not son—though you are that, of course, you'll always be that.”Her smile never wavered.“There are men in this organization who have spent careers and fortunes building what you stand on top of.And there are people—small, envious, godless people, the kind that crawl around these conventions with cameras—who would give anything, to find one crack in you.One soft spot, like a late night on the wrong floor.”She reached up and adjusted my tie a quarter inch, a gesture of such tenderness it made my skin crawl.“Your father had appetites.Did you know that?Of course you didn't; I made certain of it, the way I’ve made certain of everything.A man is permitted his weaknesses, Harrison.But he’s not permitted to let them be seen.The seeing is the only sin that matters in our line of work.”
“Mother—”
“I would hate,” she went on, twisting the knife, “to watch you throw away everything your father bled for.Everything I’ve given my entire life to protect.Over some—” and here she paused, choosing the word, and set it down between us with surgical care, “—some appetite.Some sickness you indulged in.It would break my heart.And as always, I would fix it, because that is what I do.But Harrison, it would break my heart first.”She patted my chest, once, over the cross.“Am I understood?”
“There's nothing to understand,” I said, and my voice was almost steady.“I walked around the hotel.That's all.”
“Of course it is.”She was already turning, gathering herself to sweep out of the room.“The car's at nine.Don't make me send Joel to find you.”
And the use of the name a second time was not an accident, because nothing my mother did was ever an accident, and we both knew it.She let the door close softly behind her and left me standing in the Presidential suite with my hand pressed flat over the small gold cross.
Mother didn't know.I held onto that.She couldn't know—if she did, there would have been no velvet, only the knife.She suspected.Floris Mae had smelled the change on me the way she'd once smelled it on my father, and she was laying down the warning shot.A velvet-wrapped reminder that she was watching, that the security detail was watching, and that the cage had eyes and ears in every wall.It always had.
But suspicion was a lit fuse, and I had until—when?Until Joel saw something he could prove.Until I rode up from the wrong floor one time too many.Until the small godless person with the camera, the one she'd described so precisely without knowing she was describing the man who slept on my chest last night, decided he would turn on me.
And here was the vise, the thing that closed around my throat as I stood there alone: I couldn’t have Alec without losing everything.That much I'd always known.But it was worse than that now, infinitely worse, because if they found us—if Joel or my mother or the political machine ever caught the scent—they would not only take me down.They would destroy Alec, too.They would find the journalist on the twelfth floor and they would salt the earth, annihilate anyone that threatened the empire.
“Damn it,” I muttered aloud.I’d spent one night feeling more alive than I’d ever been, and the price of keeping it might be the destruction of the very man who'd given himself to me.
I had finally found the one thing worth risking everything for.
So how in God's name was I supposed to risk anything at all—when the everything I'd be risking was Alec?
ChapterTen
Alec
The door clicked shut behind Harrison, and I lay there in the wrecked bed staring at the place where he'd been.
For a man who makes his living with words, I had a remarkable shortage of them right then.I knew the symptoms, but I'd never had the disease.The stupid grin I couldn't quite get off my face.The way my chest did something buoyant and ridiculous every time I replayed him saying tonight,I'll be here.The fact that a closeted billionaire pastor had walked out of my hotel room ninety seconds ago and the room felt emptier than my actual apartment ever had.
“Oh, no,” I told the ceiling.“Fuck, I’m an absolute disaster.”
Because after years of being unbothered by pesky feelings—building a whole career, personality, and a suit of armor out of the conviction that wanting people was a sucker's game—the love bug had apparently waited until the worst possible man in America showed up and then bitten me.
And damn it, I still had a job to do.
That was the part the grin kept trying to skate past, and the dread in my gut wouldn't let it.Because here was the situation, laid out cold: I had come to Lincoln to find the engine under the machine, a power broker, or a well-documented lie with a face.And I'd found him.Harrison was the single biggest story at this convention and possibly of my entire career, and he’d just kissed me good morning with terrible breath and asked to see me tonight.
The story and the man were the same person.That was the whole problem in one sentence.I couldn’t file the thing that would make my name without it being the same thing that ended his.There was no version where I got the career and he got to keep breathing.The scoop was the knife; there wasn't a second, gentler knife hiding behind it.
And—this was the part that actually scared me—there was a third blade I hadn't expected, and it was pointed at me.Because if I sat on the biggest news story I'd ever stumbled into because I'd caught feelings for the subject, then what exactly was I?
Truth is my brand.Truth was the entire thing I had instead of a personality.I'd spent years telling myself I was the one honest man in every room, the guy who turned the lights on no matter who it burned.And now the lights were on the one person I didn't want to see burned.
I didn't have an answer.What I had was a stomach so empty it had started to eat itself.Whatever Harrison Cole and I had done to each other half the night had the metabolic cost of running a marathon.
I dragged myself up, caught my own reflection in the dresser mirror—debauched, stubbled, grinning like a fool even now—and shook my head at it.
“Food,” I said.“Figure out your problems after waffles.”
* * *
The elevator let me out into the lobby, all that marble and money and chandelier glare, and I was three steps toward the hotel restaurant when a hand caught my elbow.
“Excuse me.”
