Jameson got me into a hot shower, and my mind raced. Decoding a clue required separating meaning from distraction. There were four elements here: the photograph; the name Margaux; the location in France; and the date, which could have been an actual date or could have been a number in need of decoding.
In all likelihood, some combination of those four elements was meaningful, and the rest were just distractions, but which were which?
“Three women.” Jameson hung a towel, warm from the towel heater, over the shower’s glass door. “A church in the background. If we scan the photograph, we could try a reverse image search—”
“—which would only help,” I filled in, the water white-hot against my chilled skin, “if a copy of this exact photograph exists online.” Still, it was worth a try. “We should try to locate the church, figure out its name,” I murmured, steam growing thicker in the air around me. “And we can talk to Zara and Nan. See if they recognize any of these women.”
“Or the name Margaux,” Jameson added. Through the steam on the glass door, he was a blur of color: long, lean, familiar in ways that made me ache.
I turned off the rain shower spray. I wrapped my towel around my body and stepped out onto the bathroom rug. Jameson met my eyes, his face moonlit through the window, his hair a mess my fingers wanted to touch. “There’s also the date to consider,” he murmured. “And the rest of the objects in the bag.”
“A steamer, a flashlight, a USB,” I rattled off. “We could try the steamer and the flashlight on the photograph—and the pouch it came in.”
“Three objects left.” Jameson’s mouth ticked upward at the ends. “And three already used. That puts us halfway through, and my grandfather would say that’s a good point to step back. Go back to the beginning. Consider the framing and your charge.”
I felt my own lips parting and tilting up at the ends. “There were no instructions given. No question, no prompt.”
“No question, no prompt.” Jameson’s voice was low and silky. “But we know the trigger. You met Eve.” Jameson chewed on that for a moment, then turned. His green eyes looked like they were focused on something no one but him could see, as if a multitude of possibilities suddenly stretched out before him like constellations in the sky. “The start of the game was triggered when you met Eve, which means this game might tell us something about you or something about Eve, something about why my grandfather chose you instead of Eve, or…”
Jameson turned again, caught up in a web of his own thoughts. It was like everything else had ceased to exist, even me.
“Or,” he repeated, like that was the answer. “I didn’t see it at the beginning,” he said, his voice low and struck through with electric energy. “But now that it seems like the old man might be at the center of the current onslaught?” Jameson’s gaze snapped back to the real world. “What if…”
Jameson and I lived for those two words. What if? I felt them now. “You think there could be a connection,” I said, “between the game your grandfather left me and everything else?”
Toby’s abduction. The old man with a fondness for riddles. Someone coming at me from all sides.
My question grounded Jameson, and his gaze leapt to mine. “I think that this game was delivered to you because Eve showed up here. And the only reason that Eve came here was because there was trouble. No trouble, no Eve. If Toby hadn’t been abducted, she wouldn’t be here. My grandfather always thought seven steps ahead. He saw dozens of permutations in how things could play out, planned for every eventuality, strategized for each and every possible future.”
Sometimes, when the boys talked about the old man, they made him sound more than mortal. But there were limits to what a person could foresee, limits to even the most brilliant mind’s strategy.
Jameson caught my chin in his hand and tilted my head gently backward, angling it up toward him. “Think about it, Heiress. What if the information we need to find out who took Toby is really in this game?”
My throat tightened, my entire body feeling the shot of hope with physical force. “Do you really think it could be?” I asked, my voice breaking.
Shadows fell across Jameson’s eyes. “Maybe not. Maybe I’m stretching. Maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see, seeing him the way I want to see him.”
I thought about the files, about Jameson disappearing into the walls of Hawthorne House. “I’m here,” I told him softly. “I am right here with you, Jameson Hawthorne.” Stop running.
He shuddered. “Say Tahiti, Heiress.”
I brought my hand to the side of his neck. “Tahiti.”
“Do you want to know the worst part? Because the worst part isn’t knowing what my grandfather would do—and has done—to win. It’s knowing in my gut and in my bones, with every fiber of my being, why. It’s knowing that everything he’s done in the name of winning, I would have done, too.”
Jameson Winchester Hawthorne is hungry. That was what Skye had told me during my first few weeks at Hawthorne House. Grayson was dutiful and Xander was brilliant, but Jameson had been the old man’s favorite because Tobias Hawthorne had been born hungry, too.
It hurt me to see them as alike. “Don’t say that, Jameson.”
“It was all just strategy to him,” Jameson said. “He saw connections that other people missed. Everyone else played chess in two dimensions, but Tobias Hawthorne saw the third, and when he recognized a winning move, he took it.”
There’s nothing more Hawthorne than winning.
“Just because you could do it,” I told Jameson fiercely, “doesn’t mean you would have.”
“Before you, Heiress? I absolutely would have.” His voice was intense. “I can’t even hate him now. He’s a part of me. He’s in me.” Jameson’s fingers lightly touched my hair, then curled into it. “But mostly, I can’t hate him, Avery Kylie Grambs, because he brought me you.”
He needed me to kiss him, and I needed it, too. When Jameson finally pulled away—just one centimeter, then two—my lips ached for his. He brought his mouth to my ear. “Now, back to the game.”