Clary had only met her father's new assistant twice, even though he had been with Valentine for nearly three years now. But as soon as Clary was walking up to him, he seemed to recognise her and he smiled in surprise.

"Are you here to see your father?" He asked. Clary pursed her lips together for a moment, because she was already feeling on edge, and now Valentine's assistant was asking her stupid questions.

"There's literally no other reason I would be here," she snapped out. The assistant's smile dropped a little, his eyes flicked to the side but he jerked his head in a nod. He walked toward the double doors that lead into her fathers' office, and Clary waited as he ducked his head inside and said something quickly to her father. Clary's eyes moved around the long hallway with rich blue walls with it's cream carpets, and she remembered coming here a lot when she was a kid.

Valentine would yell at her and Jonathan for running and for using coloured pens rather than pencils, saying that they would stain the carpet. Then he would ask them why they weren't with their nannies and then they were being escorted out.

"Clarissa?" Valentine sounded confused as she looked back toward the door and saw her father standing there, and the assistant was walking back over to his desk. "Come in." Clary nodded and walked through the door, into his office. The view from the windows that wrapped around the corner of the building. "Is everything okay? You don't visit me here often."

"It's not like you're here often," Clary pointed out and Valentine just ignored the comment.

"What's going on?" He asked her, sitting down on the corner of his desk and looking at her steadily. Clary licked her lips and swallowed hard, tapping her fingers against the back of her phone.

"Why is Jon not coming back?" Clary asked firmly. Valentine's eyes widened in surprise for a moment before his eyebrows pulled together and his lips tightened in the corners.

"You know your brother," Valentine was already moving, his eyes no longer on Clary's, shifting from off the desk and moving behind it to where he would have been sitting before. "He's off on the yacht, having a great time, probably drinking himself into a stupor every night." Clary narrowed her eyebrows, pursing her silver-painted lips.

"I heard you on the phone," she replied and the hand that was stretching out for a pen froze, fingers pausing in midair. "You left a message on his phone telling him that he wasn't allowed to come home. You were the one telling him not to come home." Valentine clicked his tongue before looking up at Clary, and the expression on his face wasn't a happy one.

"You shouldn't be listening in on conversations you're not invited into. You're old enough to know that, shit," Valentine's voice was stern and Clary's expression shifted into one of disbelief.

"You can't talk to me like I'm five," Clary stated. "You weren't around then to act like you cared about my manners, so you can't start acting like you care about them now because it suits you. I want to know—"

"Clarissa!" Valentine's voice was harder now, getting close to angry, which she had only ever really heard when he was on the phone with someone for work. It wasn't as though he was around her enough to get angry at her, although she remembered a few fights between her parents when she was younger. This was the first time it was directed at her, though, and it kind of shook her, needing to force herself not to take a step back. "This isn't something I'm going to continue discussing with you!"

"I know about the Reapers Sons," Clary stated, finding her footing again and bracing herself, the fingers of the hand that wasn't gripping her phone curled inward, biting into the soft skin of her palm. "I know about Sebastian and Max and the DEA and the police and the lies."

Valentine clearly hadn't been expecting that.

His eyes went wide, and this time, they didn't settle back down, even though it was clear that he was trying to control his expression.

"I know that you sold them out to save your own ass, and then you shipped Jonathan off because you were scared that they were going to lash out and take out their anger on him—"

"They would have," Valentine hissed out, his shoulders tensed and the blood drained from his face as he rested his hands down on the edge of his mahogany desk, gripping at it so tightly that his knuckles went deathly white. "You have no idea the things that they are capable of, Clarissa, and—how do you know any of this? Did Jonathan tell you?" He clicked his teeth together angrily as his eyes flicked over his desk, probably looking for his phone. "I told him not to talk to you about any of this. That stupid fucking kid—"

"Jonathan didn't tell me," Clary interupted him. "Jace did." Valentine looked confused for all of two seconds.

"...The son of Stephen Herondale?" Valentine uttered after a few moments of tense silence.

"Yes," Clary replied evenly. "Jace Herondale." Valentine clenched his jaw so tight, the veins in his neck popping out and looking as though they were on the verge of bursting. "He told me what you did. He told me what you said, and how you framed them with the police—"

"I did not frame them!" Valentine launched himself to his feet on the other side of the desk, slamming his hands down and not looking as though he cared at all about the fact that he was messing up the papers underneath his hands. "They're thugs. They're criminals. They were arrested for having drugs and weapons on them. They're just bikers—no one." He kept on ranting but Clary blinked as she stared at him.

Thugs.

Criminals.

No one...

Clary could accept that she wasn't the best when it came to thinking about other people. She didn't really...View it as a fault, it just wasn't something that was high up on her radar. And it was undoubtedly influenced by her parents and the people around her, who didn't really take into account her or her brothers feelings when they were younger.

But Maia wasn't no one.

Magnus wasn't no one.

And a kid who spent his sixteenth birthday in prison because her father twisted the truth and threw him under the bus, along with Sebastian—he wasn't no one.

And then there was Jace, as reluctantly as she had to admit to herself.

All of them had friends and family, and this tight knit little community in the biker gang they were in who cared deeply about each other and who they loved in return. And despite their faults and flaws and the horrible circumstances that she had since found out about, she was pretty sure that they had cared about her as well. At least Maia and Magnus. She guessed that Isabelle really didn't give a shit and probably most of the others, but that was because of the pain her family had cost them.

Sebastian and Max had been doing something wrong, Clary wasn't going to argue with that, and at some point in time, they had a high chance of going to prison eventually, but this particular time, it had been because of her father.

"What were you doing talking to them?" Valentine was still talking but Clary only started listening again at that point. "Did they come to your school?" His eyes got even wider and he moved around to stand on the other side of his desk, in front of her. "Did they hurt you?"

"No, they didn't hurt me," Clary resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She'd come home for over a week with a bruised face and a split lip and he hadn't even acknowledged it, although it wasn't really like he had been around. Never around.

"Then what were you doing with them? Why did they tell you all of this? And," he clicked his teeth together, eyebrows furrowing, his voice lowering, as though he was almost talking to himself. "How did they find you? I managed to keep you and your mother well separated from myself—it's not like your mother or you kids are around the hotels much, and we never got to social events together...I have a permanent address here in the hotel, rather than at the house. They only found out about your brother because of his stupidity, buying drugs from just anyone on the street and then telling them his full name. They mustn't have looked much deeper once they knew that I had a son."

"It was an accident, Jace didn't know who I was when we met," Clary began before shaking her head. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that I know why you sent Jonathan away, and I know what you did to piss these people off."

"What I did, was save our family from any embarrassment. From putting any of our futures at risk. To ensure that my business wouldn't suffer financially—the business that pays for that house you live in, and the car you drive, and the school you attend and the credit card you always use," his voice was getting louder again, and accusatory.

"But it was still wrong!" Clary protested, her own temper rising, along with the volume of her voice.

"So what are you going to do?" Valentine asked, crossing his arms over his chest and staring down at his daughter. "Are you going to go to the police? Tell them what your father and your brother did?"

"Jonathan knows what happened?" Clary asked, frowning, although she should have processed that already, given her father had thought that Jonathan had been the one to tell Clary all of this.

"Yes, so any type of trouble you're thinking about causing, you'll be making things just as bad for your brother," Valentine shot out at her and Clary almost flinched at that.

It was like he was trying to threaten her.

This was her father.

He had lied and manipulated the police to save his own ass.

He had then lied and manipulated the actual justice system in court, under oath, to keep up the lie.

And then he'd sent Jonathan away, and undoubtedly sworn him to secrecy, which would explain why he was hardly ever messaging Clary, and why there was so much strangeness around him coming back.

And now he was trying to threaten her, telling her that if she went to the police, then she would be dragging her brother down with him.

Did that count as blackmail?

"Why did you..." Clary swallowed hard. "Why did you do it?"

"I already told you, Clarissa," Valentine let out a huff, as though she was boring him. "I had to protect everything I've built."

"But if you knew it was a risk going into business with them in the first place, why did you do it?" Clary pointed out.

"I'm not going into this any further you," Valentine told her firmly, as though him just saying the words was enough to make this whole matter closed for any further conversation. "And I don't want to hear anything else about it. Any silly ideas you have of going to the police and telling them about what really happened, you put out of your head—you have no idea what kind of damage you could do." He abruptly sat back down at his desk, craning his neck downwards to indicate the conversation was over, his shoulders tensed.

Clary stood there for a few more moments, staring at the top of her fathers head, her breathing coming out a lot heavier than normal, still trying to take in the situation.

Finally, she turned around and headed toward the door.

"The damage you could do," she repeated his words back under her breath as she shoved open the door and stalked toward the elevator, ignoring the assistants' questions as she passed by his desk.