Blair didn't have a chance to think about how much her words would tempt Irene before they fell out of her mouth.
"Over my dead body will you stay here tonight!" she snapped at Jack. "You are still underage, and I still say where you will live."
Jack shook his head, all sullen teenage boy who knew better than everyone else, especially his mother. Irene was right, Blair knew; there was a lot of Victor in Jack. Victor had steadfastly transferred his own disdain for Blair to her son. The sensitive, intuitive (if smart-mouthed) Jack who would stick up for her against anyone was gone.
"You can't make me," said Jack, planting his feet firmly. A chill ran through Blair. Jack was standing in the exact same place Victor had been when she'd last seen him alive, as if she needed another reminder that her son was on dangerous ground.
She looked hard at Jack. "I will call Shaun and have him throw you over his shoulder and carry you back to La Boulaie if I have to." She held up her phone. "And I'll videotape it, too." She stopped short of threatening to upload the video onto MyFace to see if Jack liked that as much as poor Shane Morasco had. There were too many battles to fight to bring that one up.
"Fine," spat Jack, in a way Blair interpreted as fine, I'll just come back later, the same as I did the night Victor died and I almost died with him.
"Good," said Blair sweetly. She wrapped her arm around Jack and held on so he couldn't shrug it off. "Tea, do you and Dani want to come stay with us?"
Tea was firmly in lawyer-mode. "We're not going anywhere, because we're going to get an injunction," she announced.
Blair was secretly relieved. That meant two fewer distractions while she tried to keep Jack from destroying his life, not to mention Todd's. She wrestled Jack out the door.
Starr paced nervously across the space in front of her father's cell and took a drink of water to soothe her suddenly dry throat.
"If we don't know what it is, how can we stop her from trying to kill us? Do you think she even knows what it is? The note was from Irene, right?"
"Of course it was from Irene." Todd's eyes locked with Starr's; she remembered this conspiratorial look well. "Shorty, you need to break me out of here."
"I can't do that!" Starr objected.
"Why not?" Todd asked, sounding for all the world like this was a normal request all fathers made of their daughters. "I heard you broke the other guy out when you were, like, eleven."
"That was a moving van!" Starr protested. She wondered where Todd had learned about that. He probably had read that stupid semi-authorized biography after all. In a way, that was better than telling him herself everything that she had been through with Victor without realizing that he was an imposter. "All I had to do was get it to stop."
"Now all you have to do is get this door open." Todd gave the lock a rattle.
"The only way they're going to open that door is if they're going to take you to be arraigned, which they're not, or to give you food, which they already did, or if they think you're dying…" A long-forgotten thrill rushed through Starr. She knew that she had to stay mature and safe for Hope. Childhood games had ended the moment she decided to raise her own child. But Irene had specifically threatened Hope, and there was no chance of stopping Irene while Todd was behind bars. "Lean forward!" Starr instructed.
Todd obeyed, but protested as Starr rubbed her water into his hair and shirt. "What's the idea?" Todd demanded.
"You have to look like you're sweating," Starr hissed. "You're going to fake a heart attack."
"Heart attacks are for old guys. People like Clint Buchanan."
Starr ignored him and carefully patted water onto his face. Guilt threatened to temper her adrenaline rush. How could she ever have thought that any other man could be her father? How had it been so obvious to Irene's organization that she could be so easily tricked?
Todd brushed Starr's hands away and reached through the bars to cup her cheek in his hand instead. "Thank you, Shorty," he said quietly.
"Don't make a habit of this," she tried to joke.
"You ready?"
"As ready as I'll ever be. Go lie down on the floor. When the guard comes in to check on you, you'll have to jump up and overpower him."
"And you have to stay back. I'll tell everyone I tricked you, too."
Starr nodded. That made the most sense, even though part of her wanted to protest that she was going to tell the world that her father was innocent and she was standing by him, even to the point of breaking him out of jail.
As Todd took his place on the floor, Starr opened her mouth to scream.
She'd done a lot of acting in her life. There had been leads in more than one school musical. Even before that, there had been schemes: Really, Mom, I just want you to drop the charges against Dad so the kids at school won't make fun of me. Really, Dad, a man came into the yard and tried to kidnap me.
For the most part, it had come naturally. But nothing came as naturally as the scream that ripped out of her throat. She was scared for her daughter. She was scared for the rest of her family. She was frustrated by Jack's stupid lies. She was furious at the people who had locked her father up and used her stupidity to help keep him there.
She should have started screaming before today. It felt good.
When the guard came running, she hysterically described her conviction that her father was having a heart attack. Part of her believed that Todd really had fallen ill—who knew what Irene had done to his body that might come back and haunt him?
The guard was unmoved. "He's faking. He's done that to get himself out of prison before. He was fine an hour ago, you know that."
Starr cried harder. "Things happen all of a sudden. Every minute counts, he's lying there dying, and you don't even care! You're trying to take him away from me just when I got him back! He doesn't even belong in there! My brother Jack is a liar, everyone knows that! Lock me up instead, that'll make Jack just as happy, you should see how much he hates me!"
The commotion drew another guard, and Starr winced inwardly. Two guards would make this harder; perhaps she'd overdone it with the choking sobs. It was like there were two of her: one that was genuinely hysterical, and another that was cool and calculating. She wondered if this was something like what Aunt Viki felt when her alters came out.
One guard unlocked the door and went to Todd's side; the other covered him from beside Starr. She could feel the plan slipping away. The only thing worse would have been the second guard drawing his gun.
That, she could stop.
She lunged for the guard and grabbed the gun herself.
Her ears were ringing, but somehow she heard her father's disbelieving "Starr?" over the guards' stream of profanity.
"Hands behind your back!" she ordered. "Dad, get the other gun. Both of you, side by side against the bars."
They did as she said. If only life could be like this all the time. Jack, tell the truth and stop being a bullying douche. James, stop whining about how Hope doesn't like you. Baz, knock it off with trying to get sleazy Rick the porn guy to represent us. Dani, if I hear one more screech about how Victor was perfect but how dare I not tell you he was an imposter, it'll be the last thing you say for a long time. And Cole, knock it off with the puppy dog eyes—you made your own damn bed, and mine, too.
"Cuff them to the bars. Gag them," Starr directed Todd.
Oh, she could get used to being the brains of the operation.
She locked the cell behind the guards and tossed the guns into another locked cell.
"We could use those!" Todd objected.
"You wouldn't be here if you hadn't stolen Aunt Dorian's gun. You don't need any more guns."
"How do you expect me to get rid of Irene?"
She handed Todd the keys to her car. "You drive. I'll think."
She scanned through her voicemails and texts as Todd pulled smoothly out of the parking lot, no rush, not a care in the world.
"They read Victor's will and it gave everything to Irene," she reported. "How does that even make sense? Irene showed up and kicked Tea and Dani out of their own house."
"Is she still there?"
"I guess. Mom and Jack went home, and Irene called the cops on Tea and Dani because they wouldn't go. I think Tea was trying to make some kind of legal point? Anyway, don't go there. The cops are probably still there. They'll send you right back to jail, only this time I'll be in the cell across from you."
"You shouldn't have grabbed that gun," Todd scolded. "No way I can say you weren't an accomplice now."
"You're welcome," said Starr sarcastically.
"We have to get rid of the car." He pulled into the perpetually crowded lot of a shopping center. "You had to have vanity plates that say 'twinkle' with a pink border?"
Starr shrugged. "I wasn't planning on it being a getaway car."
They abandoned the car and cut through the woods toward La Bolaie by mutual agreement. Starr desperately needed to see that her family, especially Hope, was all right. She could tell that Todd felt the same.
"It's the perfect place to go, anyway," Todd added. "Jack's the one who put me in jail and your mother's been backing him up, publicly. It's like when you were little and your mom hid out from the mob at the penthouse because everyone knew she hated me."
"When you pretended my baby-sitter was dead," said Starr coolly. "That was a rotten thing to do."
"Yeah. Sorry."
They slipped inside as quietly as they could and went to Starr's room to regroup. She was struck hard with the memory of the time she'd hidden Cole here to help him detox. She'd been 17 years old, mourning her dead baby, and Victor had gotten a court order to force her to leave La Boulaie and move in with him. He hadn't wanted to give her time to so much as pack a change of underwear.
How could she have thought he was her father?
As Todd sat in her desk chair and turned on her computer, she wished that she could freeze the moment and extend it back over the past eight years.
Blair closed her eyes as Sam gave her a goodnight hug. Jack's constant stream of lies and vitriol made her appreciate her younger son that much more.
But Blair couldn't afford to give herself over to Sam completely any more than she could afford to think about her own grief for Jack or Todd or Victor. If she fell apart, there was no one to pick up the pieces. Not fragile Addie, who had lived most of her life in an institution. Not Dorian, who was off in Washington and eager to send the first Todd the way of the second. Not Tea, crazed with loss and the knowledge that she hadn't finally taken Todd from Blair after all. Not Starr, still a child and once again under her father's spell. And certainly not Todd, back behind bars and with more reason to hate Blair than Victor had ever had.
Blair left Sam's bedroom door wide open so Jack would have no chance of sneaking past her and returning to Tea's house.
Or perhaps it really was Irene's house, now.
To Blair, it would always be the house where Victor had made his ridiculous love nest with Marty, where he had planned to steal Hope away and leave his own supposed children forever.
In retrospect, they would have been better off.
She pulled an ornate volume of fairy tales from Sam's shelf. "Should we read some of these tonight?" she asked.
"No! Spiderman!" Sam pointed at a dog-eared book that was lying on the floor.
"Of course, Spiderman," she agreed.
She had read the story to Sam many times before, so it was not hard to read and watch Jack's door at the same time. The door cracked open twice, then closed again.
Blair kept reading after Sam fell asleep; she kept reading after she heard the telltale sounds of Starr returning home. She stopped only when her phone buzzed with a text from Christian:
Out of Llantano Pumpkin Stout. Delivery did not come this morning. Here now, but they won't take my signature, they want yours. Want to come or should I tell them to get lost?
She quickly tapped out a message to let the idiot go. Mind games with Jack in the morning and an emotionally charged will reading in the afternoon were enough. She didn't need to deal with an incompetent deliveryman in the evening, too. Everyone knew that Christian managed Capricorn and was perfectly capable of signing a delivery slip. If this jerk didn't want to get paid, her customers would drink something else—although the local pumpkin stout was particularly trendy this autumn. This problem, unlike her other problems, could be solved. And venting with Christian would do her some good.
She changed her mind.
Give me 20 minutes.
She could get someone else to play jailer for an hour while she got things squared away at Capricorn.
Quickly, she discarded the casual clothes she had been wearing and stepped into a slim blue dress. As she reached behind herself to close the long zipper, her back twinged in protest. It had already been the latest long, stressful day in a series of long, stressful days.
"What's the point of having a grown up daughter if it isn't this?" she asked aloud. She quickly brushed into Starr's room. "Starr, can you zip…"
Then she forgot what she was going to stay. With the dress hanging off of her, she stared at Todd as he jumped awkwardly to his feet.
"Starr," Blair managed when she had regained her breath and closed the door, "Haven't I told you to stop breaking people out of prison?"