Chapter 12

Scaling that wall was impossible. It was at least twenty feet tall, with no hand- or footholds and cameras everywhere.

But I knew better than most: Some people lived for impossible. Jameson. Me.

If I ended up on the news for this, Alisa was going to kill me. And Jameson. Probably Oren, too, for standing by and letting it happen. But what was life without a little risk?

I waited until dark. I made a plan. I executed it.

And in the end, I ended up with the spray paint. I had the distinct sense that even holding the can near the wall might get me arrested, but I didn’t have the luxury of hesitating if I wanted to make it through two more clues by midnight.

For what felt like the hundredth time, I scanned the wall. Now that I had the paint, what was I supposed to do with it? A possibility wormed its way into my mind.

I turned my left hand over and used my right to spray my own palm. Possibility confirmed. Whatever was in the canister, it wasn’t paint. My money was on it being a chemical trigger for invisible ink. That made the next question: What part of the wall did I need to spray?

In between one heartbeat and the next, I suddenly realized that the answer was none of it.

When I’d gone to use the liquid in the glass vial on the back of my postcard, Jameson’s response had been not yet. As in, the postcard hadn’t come into play… yet.

Going on instinct, I put ten feet of space between me and the wall, and then I removed the postcard from my back pocket. It was more worn now than it had been before. With a grin, I flipped it over. I shook the canister in my right hand, then sprayed the back of the postcard.

Letters appeared almost immediately—three of them, a single word. ICE.

I figured out quickly enough that Prague had a well-known bar where the gimmick was that everything was made of ice.

At the door, a bouncer handed me a full-length parka and a pair of white leather gloves. “Yours to keep,” the bouncer told me in a tone that made me think this was very much not the normal order of things.

I slipped on the parka. It was snow white and went all the way to my ankles, with a hood lined with faux fur that was mind-blowingly soft to the touch. I slipped on the gloves next—a perfect fit. Clad for deepest winter, I entered the bar.

Small. Sparkling. Freezing.

I pulled up the hood and took a moment to breathe it all in. Everything around me was made of ice—the bar, the lone table positioned in the middle of the room, the walls, the ice sculptures staring at me from all sides.

Jameson was standing behind the bar. He placed a glass on its icy top, and it took me a moment to realize that the glass was made of ice, too.

Without warning, the lights in the room changed color, casting the ice in a deep purple-blue glow. As small as this space was, I felt like I’d stepped into the arctic.

Like it was just Jameson and me at the ends of the earth.

“What can I get you?” He placed his elbows on the bar and leaned forward, fully committed to playing the bartender. He wasn’t wearing a parka, but if he felt the cold—at all—he didn’t show it.

I leaned forward and pushed the hood back from my face. “How about my fifth and final clue?” I proposed.

“That you’ll have to work for.” Jameson smiled. It was cold enough that I could see his breath—and my own—in the air. Separated only by the solid-ice bar, the two of us were close enough that my breath caressed his, the briefest, lightest touch.

“What can I get you,” Jameson repeated, “to drink?”

“Surprise me.”

Jameson turned and reached for a glass bottle on an ice shelf, and my gaze lit on the back of his pants—more specifically, to the chisel tucked into his waistband.

Ice plus chisel plus having to work for my next clue… The math there wasn’t hard—but getting the chisel away from him might be.

By the time Jameson was pouring a mystery drink into my carved-from-ice glass, I’d formulated a plan.

I took off one of my gloves and ran my finger around the edge of my glass. Slowly. Deliberately. Jameson’s gaze lingered on my finger. I picked up the glass and took a drink. As cold as the liquid was, it burned all the way down.

Across from me, Jameson poured himself a drink. I needed to get him to this side of the bar.

Setting my ice glass down, I pulled my glove back on. Slowly. Deliberately. His gaze tracking my movements.

“Feel like a dance?” I asked. There was no music—just the two of us, but that was enough.

Jameson slid over the top of the bar.

I held out my gloved hand. He took it, then pulled me in. Even through my parka, I could feel the hard lines of his body. That was the thing about knowing someone the way that I had come to know Jameson Hawthorne: Every touch triggered the memory of a thousand others.

My body anticipated every move of his. Our breaths met in the air between us like smoke. I could almost hear music starting to play as the two of us began to slow dance. I felt it—the music that wasn’t playing and the thing rising between us like a living, breathing force.

I, too, was becoming very fond of Prague.

“Feel like playing I Have A Secret?” Jameson asked as we danced. “You still haven’t guessed mine.”

I recognized the distraction for what it was but didn’t shut it down. I knew as well as Jameson did that the two of us were playing more than one game right now.

Earlier, I’d identified three possibilities for his secret: that he’d found something, that he’d done something, that he’d met someone.

“You found something.” I made my guess, committing to one possibility of the three.

“Multiple somethings, actually.” Jameson dipped me backward. The air in the room was so cold, but I barely felt the chill against my face as he brought me back up, as he pulled my body and my lips so close to his that I felt his next words as much as heard them. “But I think you can do better than that, Heiress.”

I knew a challenge when I heard one.

“How long have you been in Prague?” I threw out a question, my tone daring him to answer it.

Jameson Hawthorne was very susceptible to dares. “Not long.” He spun me out and back in. “In the grand scheme of things.”

In other words, on a scale of months and years and centuries, he hadn’t been here long at all. Not exactly illuminating. But given that it had been three days since I’d seen him last, I had to assume he’d spent most of that time here.

“You didn’t set this game up in a day,” I argued.

“I never said that I did.” Jameson smiled. There was absolutely nothing to trust in that smile. It was an I got you, clear as a bell.

Something occurred to me—something that should have occurred to me much earlier. “And when exactly am I supposed to set up mine?”

Today we played his game. Tomorrow, Jameson was supposed to play mine. It was possible I’d overlooked a key detail in the middle of our negotiating the night before.

In my defense, he was a very good negotiator. “Always read the small print, Heiress.”

Always look for the catch, I thought. Jameson had been raised doing that every single day under his grandfather’s tutelage. Billionaire Tobias Hawthorne had always had an eye for loopholes.

“You stacked the odds in your favor,” I accused.

“Of course I did, Heiress, but don’t tell me your mind isn’t already working at warp speed, plotting out the details of your game while playing mine.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t have to tell him that. I had his attention—and that had been step one of my plan. All I had to do was keep him distracted just a little bit longer.

“You’ve been watching me all day. Anything I do, you see.” I allowed my arm to wrap just a bit farther around Jameson’s back. Next I would slide it down—inch by inch—toward that chisel. “Maybe I can think about my game, but I can’t do anything.”

“That’s not why I’ve been following you,” Jameson murmured. “I’ve been watching you play this game because I want to see it through your eyes.”

Neither of us stopped dancing. My head was cradled against his chest, tucked just below his chin, my gaze aimed upward and his down.

“I’ve seen the world, Heiress. Been there, done that. I’m jaded. But there’s nothing the least bit jaded about you. If you could see the way you look when you step into a new place for the first time…”

There was a timbre to his voice that made me ache to listen to it more, but I stayed on task, sliding my hand down his back and closing my fingers around the chisel.

Success! I didn’t want to stop dancing, I didn’t want to pull away, but I wasn’t about to give my opponent a chance to take the chisel back. Over my body’s strenuous objection, I put space between us.

Jameson eyed the way I was holding the chisel. “Plotting a murder? The heiress in the ice bar with the chisel.”

“Trust me, Hawthorne, if murder is ever on my mind, you’ll know.” With a smile, I turned my attention back to my surroundings. The bar and shelves were clearly permanent fixtures, as were the walls, which made my best bet for using this chisel the ice sculptures.

A castle. A dragon. A swan. A woman. I stopped when I reached the fifth and final sculpture, the one closest to the door through which I’d entered. It was simpler than the others, with less detail, a simple symbol.

“Eight.” I ran a gloved finger over the icy outline of the shape, then turned my head sideways. “Or infinity.” I looked back at Jameson, memory crashing into me. “The bridge over West Brook.”

Jameson and I had found a clue that looked like this once before.

“I guessed that it was infinity,” Jameson murmured. “You said it was an eight.”

“I was right.”

“You usually are, Heiress.”

I turned back to the sculpture. “I’m guessing infinity this time.” Near the top of the ice sculpture, buried deep in the ice, I saw something. A glint of gold.

The chisel and I got to work. Five minutes later, I held a ring in the palm of my hand. Rather than a jewel or knot on top, the gold ring bore the infinity symbol.

Jameson took it from me, then turned my right hand over, slipping the ring onto my right ring finger.

A breath caught in my throat. Maybe it was the way his skin had brushed across mine with the motion. Maybe it was the fact that Jameson Hawthorne had just slipped a ring onto one of my fingers. Or maybe it was the knowledge, heavy in the air between us, that in our lifetimes, this probably wouldn’t be the only ring that Jameson gave me.

“Like it?”

“You know I do.” I met his eyes, and then I narrowed my own. I see you, Jameson Hawthorne. Multiple birds, one stone.

I slipped the ring off my finger and turned my attention to the inside of the band.

Four words had been engraved across the gold: LOOK IN YOUR POCKET.

I slipped the infinity ring back onto my right ring finger and then did exactly as the note had instructed.

In the pocket of the parka, I found a note, written on spiral notebook paper and folded in half four times, reminding me of the kind of note one middle schooler might slip to another.

I opened it, and the words Jameson had written there took my breath away.

Like the sun and the moon

I loved her.

Saint Avery.

Until death and beyond.