CHAPTER 6 JAMESON
JAMESON
Prague at nighttime was a world unto itself, this street more than most. Vinárna ?ertovka was all of twenty inches wide, narrow enough that Jameson had to traverse it at an angle for his shoulders to fit.
Making it out the other side, he ignored the chill of the night air and turned back toward the narrow passageway, toward the surrounding walls and buildings.
There has to be an entrance around here somewhere. That thought pumped through Jameson’s brain like blood through a vein, like the constant, pulsing need at his core to push harder and faster and further.
But no—he was being discreet, and a discreet individual could not spread his arms, raise his head toward the night sky, and yell out, daring his adversaries to come and get him.
You did it once before, Alice. Do it again.
Jameson’s memory of that night wasn’t fuzzy so much as shattered, like a broken mirror missing far too many shards, but he knew he’d disappeared from this exact spot.
There had to be a trap door nearby or a wall that wasn’t a wall or something that hadn’t been marked on the old man’s map of Prague’s secret passages, which Jameson had unearthed his last time in the City of a Hundred Spires.
He searched and found nothing.
Searched more and still found nothing.
Eventually, with a roar building in his throat and pressure mounting in his head, Jameson gave up on Vinárna ?ertovka and made a beeline for one of the passageways he had found his last time in Prague.
But this time, the wall in question, near the Basilica of St. James, didn’t open.
And neither did the next one Jameson tried—or the next or the next.
Every single hidden entrance had been disabled, dead end after dead end after dead end.
I have to think. I have to breathe. Trying not to explode and feeling like his insides were nothing but shrapnel, Jameson gave himself a moment—just one—to remember being in Prague with Avery, to picture her smiling slightly more with one side of her mouth than the other, to recall the way she’d taken her time inking a clue in a game of her making onto his skin.
We have so many games left to play, Heiress. Holding to that thought and trying desperately to stay in control, Jameson made his way to higher ground: the Royal Suite, located on the top floor of a luxury hotel that had once been Hawthorne-owned.
And, more importantly, Hawthorne-made.
Fortunately, the Royal Suite was unoccupied, and just as fortunately, Jameson’s childhood playroom had been lined with all manner of locks that he and his brothers had learned to pick.
No one needed to know he was here—discretion at its finest.
Slipping into the Royal Suite, Jameson turned to watch the door close behind him.
It disappeared into the wall, into a shining, golden mural, metallic to the touch, raised in parts, depressed in others, three-dimensional in the most subtle of ways.
Swirling, twisting lines made the design appear almost geometric, but if you stepped back, as Jameson had once before and did again now, you could start to pick out abstract figures—humans, objects, there one minute and, if you lost your focus, gone the next.
The first time Jameson had seen this mural, the first time he’d studied it, it had taken him seven minutes to pick out the only three perfectly straight lines of the bunch, all raised and parallel to the floor, none thicker than his smallest finger.
Three lines stacked one on top of another.
Awash in déjà vu, Jameson took the top line between his forefinger and thumb and twisted it until he heard and felt a click that allowed him to rotate the raised line clockwise forty-five degrees.
He went for the bottom one next and repeated the process—counterclockwise.
The ends of the two lines met at a point.
The third didn’t need to be rotated, only pressed into the wall, but just as Jameson braced his fingers against it, his phone rang.
Not my phone. Jameson realized that between one breath and the next. He’d turned his phone off before he’d gotten on the plane.
From somewhere deeper in the suite, the phone rang a second time.
Either Jameson wasn’t as alone as he’d assumed or someone else had been there and left a phone, quite possibly intentionally.
In either case, Jameson wasn’t about to hang back.
He made his way silently toward the sound of the ringing.
In a darkened dining room, an envelope lay in the middle of a grand table, the only light in the room coming through the envelope.
From the phone inside.
Jameson reached for a switch and flooded the room with light. He claimed the envelope and tore through it, answering the call with three—and only three—words: “Where is she?”
That was more important to him than other, perhaps more pressing, questions, like where are you, who are you, and what are you going to do to me?
“If I knew where Avery was,” a familiar voice replied, “I’d have blocked the jet you borrowed from ever taking off.”
“Alisa.” It took a moment for Jameson’s body to register: There is no threat here. “I don’t have time for this.”
“Make time,” Alisa suggested. “I would hate to have to tell Nash that you’re in dire need of wrangling. Do you really think Avery would want your brother leaving Libby’s side right now?”
Avery’s sister, Jameson’s sister-in-law, was pregnant with twins. The last thing Jameson wanted was to leave Libby even remotely exposed, and Alisa, damn her, knew that.
“You have three minutes,” Jameson said.
“I’ve replaced all of our phones, not just yours, as a security precaution. All the numbers you might need have already been loaded onto the phone in your hand. You don’t have to answer anyone else’s calls, but you will answer mine.”
“How fortunate that I excel at taking orders,” Jameson said. “Especially yours. See also: the chupacabra incident when I was nine.”
Alisa Ortega had grown up alongside the Hawthorne brothers.
She was not easily deterred. “We both want Avery home, and we both have our limitations. Yours, Jameson, involve self-control and risk assessment. Mine involve the fact that Oren and I cannot be observed making waves. I deeply suspect the instructions in Avery’s note were for our benefit, not yours. ”
Except for the lemniscate, Jameson thought. One way or another, that was for me.
“You think Avery wanted me to look for her?” Jameson asked Alisa, his voice coming out hoarse.
“I think Avery knows you well enough to know that nothing she said could keep you—or Grayson, for that matter—from looking for her.”
Even just hearing his brother’s name hit Jameson in a dark and hollow place.
“Your three minutes are almost up,” he told Alisa.
“Then allow me to be concise: I’ll run point, manage the press, and keep a lid on the situation by any means necessary.
You’ll keep me up to date on your progress, and I’ll keep you apprised of anything else anyone manages to dig up.
To that end, I can already tell you that the trio we’re looking for—Alice, Calla Thorp, and one as-yet unknown—seem to operate by certain rules. ”
Jameson steeled himself against the sound of his grandmother’s name. For more than a year, he’d avoided speaking it, but he was done with that now, done burying his head in the sand. The time for watching was already over.
Avery was already gone.
“What rules?” Jameson said, his voice coming out calmer than he felt.
“Each member of the group has an assigned role: Watcher, Hand, or Judge. Make of those terms what you will. Alice appears to be the current Judge. From what Grayson and Lyra have determined, the group operates in the shadows—as vigilantes, possibly assassins. There’s enough of a ritualized element, in my opinion, to justify calling them a cult. ”
Assassins.
Cult.
Bile rose in the back of Jameson’s throat as darkness blanketed his mind. A single shard of memory sliced through. Pain. Little cuts. And a voice, a somehow familiar voice: “I think we can agree this situation merits more than watching.”
“Members of the group appear to move up in rank over time,” Alisa continued, bringing Jameson back to the present.
“Watcher to Hand to Judge. The recruitment process for new members is unclear, but it seems to require a woman leaving her old life behind, either by disappearing or by faking her own death.”
“You think that’s what this is.” Jameson’s voice caught in his throat. “Avery. You think she might have gotten the kind of invitation that Gigi was warned about. You think she said yes.”
“I think that the only way Avery would have said yes to anything was if she was given certain assurances in return. I think the rest of us are quite possibly safe now in a way that we weren’t before, and I think that Avery fully believes there might be a way back from this for her.”
“Might isn’t good enough,” Jameson said, choking on the words.
“Agreed, which is why you and Grayson will find out as much as you can about this group as quietly and discreetly as you can. If it starts to look like Avery won’t come through this—whatever this is—I want to know exactly who we’re fighting.”
“I’m in.” There was no use in Jameson pretending otherwise, not with Alisa. “And your three minutes are up.”
“You gave me four. Stay in touch, Jamie.”
Jameson hung up the phone, and he let himself imagine what Avery would have said if she were there: You and Alisa actually agree about something? First time for everything, I suppose. Jameson could almost hear her voice. He closed his eyes and summoned up the image of Avery in his mind.
Is Alisa becoming more of a wild card or am I actually developing common sense? he imagined quipping back.
Be careful, the Avery in his mind whispered.
Am I ever anything else?
And just like that, the daydream ended. Just like that, Avery was gone.
Jameson stalked back to the mural, to the three lines.
He put his hand on the middle one and pushed.
It sank halfway into the wall. Together, the three golden lines now made an arrow that pointed to the right—to a wall that began to rise the moment the arrow was formed.
It disappeared into the ceiling, revealing a new wall beyond.
Three lines. The wall behind the wall. Jameson had done all of this before.
A piece of seemingly blank blueprint paper was tacked up on the hidden wall.
On a white column to the front and side of it, there was a marble bust depicting a Grecian-looking woman from the shoulders up.
Elsewhere in the foyer, there was an elaborate end table made of the exact same marble as the bust, carved to look, in part, like a lion.
Jameson made short work of crouching and reaching into the lion’s mouth—and down.
He hooked his fingers around what he knew to be a set of pearls.
He’d returned them to their hiding place last time, once he’d finished, another game for Avery to play.
He’d promised her once that there would always be more mysteries, more hidden passages, more games. Theirs was supposed to be an epic story, one with no end.
“You’re fine, Heiress.” Jameson willed Avery to come to him again or, barring that, willed her to somehow hear him, wherever she was. “You’re coming back. And if you aren’t—aren’t fine, can’t come back—I’ll find you myself.”
He cut back over to the bust and slipped the pearls around its neck.
The moment he did, the foyer went dark. Black lights embedded in the wall lit up, and a map appeared on the blueprint paper—the same map that had once led Jameson to hidden passage after hidden passage throughout Prague, to tunnels beneath this ancient city, a world unto themselves.
He’d assume when he’d found the map that it was nothing more than one of the old man’s games.
But now—now, Jameson scoured the map in question. There had to be something he’d missed, another entrance, a detail, no matter how small.
Hide and Seek, he thought. This is just another game of Hide and Seek, Heiress—so here I come.