CHAPTER 41

Eventually, the car slowed to a stop. Eventually, reality crashed down around us. Oren was there, with a team in tow. Uh-oh.

“You and I,” my head of security told Jameson the second we exited the car, “are going to be having a little talk.”

“I’m a big girl,” I said, eyeing the backup Oren had brought with him. “If you want to yell at someone, yell at me.”

Oren didn’t yell. He did personally deposit me back in my room and indicate that we would “talk” in the morning. Based on his tone, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would survive a talk with Oren unscathed.

I barely slept that night, my brain a mess of electrical impulses that wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop firing. I still had no idea what to make of the names highlighted in the Red Will, if they really were a reference to the boys’ fathers, or if Tobias Hawthorne had chosen his grandsons’ middle names for a different reason altogether.

All I knew was that Skye had been right. Jameson was hungry. And so am I. But I could also hear Skye telling me that I didn’t matter, that I was no Emily.

When I did fall asleep that night, I dreamed of a teenage girl. She was a shadow, a silhouette, a ghost, a queen. And no matter how fast I ran, down one corridor after another, I could never catch up to her.

My phone rang before dawn. Groggy and in a mood, I grabbed for it with every intention of launching it through the closest window, then realized who was calling.

“Max, it’s five thirty in the morning.”

“Three thirty my time. Where did you get that car?” Max didn’t sound even remotely sleepy.

“A room full of cars?” I replied apologetically, and then sleep cleared from my brain enough for me to process the implications of her question. “How did you know about the car?”

“Aerial photo,” Max replied. “Taken from a helicopter, and what do you mean a room full of cars? Exactly how big is this room?”

“I don’t know.” I groaned and rolled over in bed. Of course the paparazzi had caught me out with Jameson. I didn’t even want to know what the gossip rags were saying.

“Equally important,” Max continued, “are you having a torrid affair with Jameson Hawthorne and should I plan for a spring wedding?”

“No.” I sat up in bed. “It’s not like that.”

“Bull fox-faxing ship.”

“I have to live with these people,” I told Max. “For a year. They already have enough reasons to hate me.” I wasn’t thinking about Skye or Zara or Xander or Nash when I said that. I was thinking about Grayson. Silver-eyed, suit-wearing, threat-issuing Grayson. “Getting involved with Jameson would just be throwing gasoline on the fire.”

“And what a lovely fire it would be,” Max murmured.

She was, without question, a bad influence. “I can’t,” I reiterated. “And besides… there was a girl.” I thought back to my dream and wondered if Jameson had taken Emily driving, if she had ever played one of Tobias Hawthorne’s games. “She died.”

“Back the fax up there. What do you mean, she died? How?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

I pulled my comforter tight around me. “Her name was Emily. Do you know how many people named Emily there are in the world?”

“Is he still hung up on her?” Max asked. She was talking about Jameson, but my brain went back to that moment when I’d said Emily’s name to Grayson. It had gutted him. Destroyed him.

There was a rap at my door. “Max, I have to go.”

Oren spent more than an hour going over security protocols with me. He indicated that he would be happy to do the same thing, every morning at dawn, until it stuck.

“Point taken,” I told him. “I’ll be good.”

“No you won’t.” He gave me a look. “But I’ll be better.”

My second day—and the start of my first full week—at private school shaped up much like the week before. People did their best not to stare at me. Jameson avoided me. I avoided Thea. I wondered what gossip Jameson thought we would provoke if we were seen together, wondered if there had been whispers when Emily died.

I wondered how she’d died.

You’re not a player. Nash’s words of caution came back to me, again and again, every time I caught sight of Jameson in the halls. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.

“I heard that you have a need for speed.” Xander pounced on me outside the physics lab. He was clearly in high spirits. “God bless the paparazzi, am I right? I also heard that you had a very special chat with my mother.”

I wasn’t sure if he was pumping me for information or commiserating. “Your mother is something else,” I said.

“Skye is a complicated woman.” Xander nodded sagely. “But she taught me how to read tarot and moisturize my cuticles, so who am I to complain?”

Skye wasn’t the one who’d forged them, pushed them, set them to challenges, expected the impossible. She wasn’t the one who’d made them magic.

“Your brothers all got the same letter from your grandfather,” I told Xander, examining his reaction.

“Did they now?”

I narrowed my eyes slightly. “I know that you got it, too.”

“Maybe I did,” Xander admitted cheerily. “But hypothetically, if I had, and if I hypothetically were playing this game and wanted, just this once—and just hypothetically—to win…” He shrugged. “I’d want to do it my way.”

“Does your way involve robots and scones?”

“What doesn’t?” Grinning, Xander nudged me into the lab. Like everything at Country Day, it looked like a million dollars—figuratively. Probably more than a million dollars, literally. Curved lab tables circled the room. Floor-to-ceiling windows had replaced three of the four walls. There was colored writing on the windows—calculations in different handwritings, like scratch paper was just so passé. Each lab table came complete with a large monitor and a digital whiteboard. And that wasn’t even touching on the size of the microscopes.

I felt like I’d just walked into NASA.

There were only two free seats. One was next to Thea. The other was as far away from Thea as you could get, next to the girl I’d seen in the archive. Her dark red hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her coloring was stop-and-stare striking—hair that red, skin that pale—but her eyes were downcast.

Thea met my gaze and gestured imperiously toward the seat next to her. I glanced back toward the red-haired girl.

“What’s her story?” I asked Xander. No one was talking to her. No one was looking at her. She was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, and she might as well have been invisible.

Wallpaper.

“Her story”—Xander sighed—“involves star-crossed love, fake dating, heartbreak, tragedy, twisted familial relationships, penance, and a hero for the ages.”

I gave him a look. “Are you serious?”

“You should know by now,” Xander replied lightly, “I’m not the serious Hawthorne.”

He plopped down in the seat next to Thea, leaving me to make my way toward the red-haired girl. She proved to be a decent lab partner: quiet, focused, and able to calculate almost anything in her head. The entire time we worked in tandem, she didn’t say a single word to me.

“I’m Avery,” I said, once we’d finished and it became clear that she still wasn’t going to introduce herself.

“Rebecca.” Her voice was soft. “Laughlin.” She saw the shift in my expression when she said her last name and confirmed what I was thinking. “My grandparents work at Hawthorne House.”

Her grandparents ran Hawthorne House, and neither one of them had seemed overly enthused about the prospect of working for me. I wondered if that was why I’d gotten the silent treatment from Rebecca.

She’s not talking to anyone else, either.

“Has someone shown you how to turn in assignments on your tablet?” Rebecca asked beside me. The question was tentative, like she fully expected to be slapped down. I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that someone that beautiful could be tentative about anything.

Everything.

“No,” I said. “Could you?”

Rebecca demonstrated, uploading her results with a few clicks on the touch screen. A moment later, her tablet returned to its main screen. She had a photo as her wallpaper. In it, Rebecca looked off to the side, while another, amber-haired girl laughed directly into the camera. They both had wreaths of flowers on their heads, and they had the same eyes.

The other girl wasn’t any more beautiful than Rebecca—and probably less—but somehow, it was impossible to look away from her.

“Is that your sister?” I asked.

“Was.” Rebecca closed the cover on her tablet. “She died.”

My ears roared, and I knew, then, exactly who I was looking at. I felt, on some level, like I’d known it from the moment I’d seen her. “Emily?”

Rebecca’s emerald eyes caught on mine. I panicked, thinking that I should have said something else. I’m sorry for your loss—or something.

But Rebecca didn’t seem to find my response odd or off-putting. All she said, pulling her tablet into her lap, was “She would have been very interested to meet you.”