I would just have to hope that Emma was the guilty party and that she would be forced to obey Cyrus.
Of course, I was getting way ahead of myself. First, I had to find a way to convince Cyrus to call off the dogs.
My first inclination was to pick up the phone and call him, but even in my depleted mental state, I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t have enough clout to enter into a negotiation with Cyrus myself, and Anderson would not appreciate me going behind his back. I’d done it once before, and had the feeling I’d just barely escaped a date with his Hand of Doom.
I printed out the article about the fire, sticking it in a manila folder so I didn’t have to see the headline and the photo anymore. Then I ducked into the bathroom to wash my face and put on some makeup, trying to make myself look more normal than I felt. The concealer lightened the dark circles under my eyes, but it didn’t make them go away completely, and there wasn’t any makeup in the world that could conceal the stark expression in my eyes. I wanted to look calm, strong, and completely reasonable when I pleaded my case to Anderson, but the reflection in the mirror told me I was falling short.
There was nothing to be done about it, so I grabbed the manila folder and marched down to the second floor, hoping Anderson would be in his study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, Anderson wasn’t at his desk. He didn’t go out much, so chances were he was in the house, most likely somewhere else in his own private territory in the east wing. The rest of us weren’t allowed to venture into the east wing except in case of emergency, and I wasn’t sure this would qualify in his book, no matter how urgent it felt to me.
I stepped out into the hallway. “Anderson?” I called, hoping he was within earshot.
A door down the hall opened, and Anderson stuck his head out. His hair was slicked back from his face with water, and I caught a glimpse of bare shoulder, though he used the door to shield his body from view. If I weren’t such an emotional wreck, I might have tried some wisecrack about our mutual propensity for interrupting showers, but I couldn’t muster even a hint of humor.
I must have looked even worse than I thought, because Anderson didn’t wait for me to speak.
“Just let me throw some clothes on,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
I nodded, my throat tightening up on me as my mind insisted on flashing me an image of the poor, injured mother trying desperately to get her baby to safety while the building burned around her and smoke stole her breath. I had always been a bit of a bleeding heart, and I had the unfortunate tendency to let other people’s misery become my own. I would never have made it as a health-care worker of any kind, being completely unable to hold myself at the distance necessary to maintain sanity. I told myself not to think about the doomed woman, or to imagine what she must have felt in the final minutes of her life, how terrified and utterly devastated she must have been when she’d realized she wasn’t getting her baby out.
I made a fist and banged it hard on my thigh, trying to force myself back from the brink. The last thing I wanted to do was start this conversation with tears already running down my cheeks, and my eyes were burning in that familiar, ominous way. At least I could hand the article to Anderson instead of having to tell him what had happened.
Taking as deep a breath as my tight throat would allow, I stepped into Anderson’s office and took a seat in front of his desk. I swallowed convulsively, hoping that would loosen my throat—and hoping that Anderson would take his time getting dressed so I could regain my composure.
I was going to be asking Anderson to have a civilized conversation and even negotiate with the man who’d ordered Erin’s death, and I was going to have to bring up the possibility that Emma was the one responsible for the fires. No matter how cold Anderson might have acted when Emma had come by to drop her bombshell, I knew he wasn’t going to want to accept the possibility