CHAPTER 23 JAMESON
JAMESON
Nighttime in Tuscany was nothing like nighttime in Prague.
It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet, and the moon was already unspeakably vivid in the night sky, as were the stars.
The only non-celestial light Jameson could even see was the blue-green glow emanating from the heated pool where he and Xander had found yet another hidden object an hour earlier: a frame made of braided metal.
A square frame.
A triangle. A circle. A square. Jameson’s mind hummed. A mirror. A ring of copper. A silver frame. Jameson stared holes in the night sky like it might hold the answer, like the stars or the moon could tell him what the three objects were meant to convey—or do.
The triangular mirror had been delivered an hour earlier via courier, and Xander had immediately started trying to build something out of the pieces. Copper wiring conducted electricity, and a mirror, Xander had informed Jameson, was practically a poor man’s laser.
A triangle. A circle. A square.
“We’re missing something,” Jameson bit out, and without warning, a memory hit him, one in which he’d said those exact same words to Avery in a candlelit tunnel beneath Hawthorne House, back when he was still figuring her out, back when she was a puzzle he wanted to solve and there was pleasure to be found in peeling back those protective layers of hers, one by one.
“We’re missing something. Or maybe…” Jameson leans forward to murmur his next words directly into the back of her head. “You’re holding something back.”
She neither confirms nor denies that statement. If there’s one thing he’s learned about Avery Grambs in the past couple of weeks, it’s that she is immune to the pressure to fill silences. There is nothing restless about her, nothing impulsive.
That’s the challenge. “I see how it is, Heiress.”
“Maybe there are more pieces?” Xander’s suggestion ripped Jameson suddenly and unforgivably back into the present. “We could keep looking.”
“No.” Jameson got ahold of himself. “We don’t need to keep looking.” He was sure about that, though he didn’t know why. “The answer… it’s right here.”
“You know something.” Xander deployed finger guns at Jameson. “You just don’t know what you know or how you know it. Should you so desire, I would be happy to provide an epic and, dare I say, cinematic distraction to jar it out of you.”
Jameson shook his head. “A triangle, a circle, a square,” he murmured. Why was that so damn familiar? He reached to take the pieces from Xander.
“One of us,” Xander reminded him delicately, “thinks in a minimum of three dimensions at all times, and the other one…”
“Sometimes gets stuck in two,” Jameson finished. Two dimensions. The dog-gnawing-giant-bone feeling was back. Jameson spread the objects out on the ground. A triangle. A circle. A square. The circle was bigger than the triangle but only just.
Big enough, Jameson thought suddenly, to fit around the circle. He put the two pieces together—flat, in two dimensions. The moment he saw the result, Jameson suddenly knew what had been eating at him, knew exactly what his subconscious had remembered that he had not.
“London. Seventeen months ago. The envelope.”
“I understand nothing,” Xander said solemnly, “but please go on.”
Seventeen months earlier, Jameson had met his father for the first time, and at his father’s request, he’d worked to gain entry to a vaulted institution whose very existence was a highly guarded secret.
And when he and Avery had succeeded at securing an invitation, it had arrived sealed in a matte black envelope elaborately embossed with platinum.
A triangle inside a circle inside a square.
Jameson picked up the square frame and fit it around the other two shapes, and as he did, he could just almost feel Avery’s hand on the back of his. He could just almost see her smile, subtle but electric, as he spoke the answer out loud.
“The Devil’s Mercy.”