CHAPTER 90 JAMESON #2
“The end nears.” Emily looked Alice up and down. “Your end.”
Alice must have had some power still, because when she lowered the white hood on her cloak, Emily flinched slightly. “Go,” Alice said.
One word. Just one. And Emily went. One word, and Jameson and Grayson were alone with the Woman in White, the old man’s Alice, his Lyra, his one and only love. One second there was nothing in her hand, and the next, she was plunging a needle into the side of Jameson’s neck.
Grayson surged forward, pinning their grandmother against the wall.
“Gray.” It took Jameson a split second to register that he’d actually managed to speak. The feeling was returning to his body. “It was an antidote.”
Alice arched a brow at Grayson, who showed no signs of letting her go.
“You had a plan.” Grayson jerked his head toward Jameson on the ground, his tone harsh. “Was this part of it?”
Their grandmother ignored the criticism implied by that question. “Yes.”
Yes. Jameson climbed slowly to his feet. This was all part of the plan. “You meant for us to end up here.”
“A nudge here,” Alice replied. “A nudge there.”
Jameson stared her, his brain firing a thousand miles an hour.
“The old man’s game, his love letters for you.
You knew I’d find it, find them, didn’t you?
You let Avery draw a lemniscate on that note.
You knew what was hidden in the Royal Suite.
You knew where it would take me. You knew I’d end up at the Mercy eventually. ”
And then you sent me home.
“Dear boy,” Alice said, “who do you think arranged for you to become acquainted with the Devil’s Mercy in the first place?”
Jameson had become acquainted with the Devil’s Mercy more than a year earlier. A nudge here. A nudge there. “How much of it was you?” Jameson couldn’t keep himself from asking. “Avery inheriting? The way things went down with Vincent Blake? Eve inheriting his fortune?”
And now, Avery and Eve were here, the daughter of Toby’s heart and the daughter of his blood, and that most certainly did not strike Jameson as a coincidence.
“It was always you.” Grayson dropped his hold on Alice as he echoed the old man’s words from that final message. “Always and ever you.”
Why? Jameson didn’t speak the word aloud, but Alice reacted like he had.
“Love,” she said quietly, “is a powerful thing.”
“Where’s Avery?” Jameson demanded.
“Avery Kylie Grambs is exactly where she needs to be.”
Avery Kylie Grambs. A Very Risky Gamble. Alice’s use of Avery’s full name did not strike Jameson as coincidental. What the hell was Alice playing at here?
Growing up, the old man had told Jameson that his mind was ordinary, that if he wanted to compensate for that, he had to learn to be unencumbered by the fear of pain or failure, by concepts like can’t and should, so that he might transcend his limitations and learn to perceive the world as a web of possibilities, free from constraints.
Jameson channeled that part of himself now, and what he saw took his breath away.
So many possibilities.
There was no telling how many things Alice had nudged, how long this cascade had been building, what all the moving parts here were, but two things were clear enough: Avery was exactly where Jameson’s grandmother wanted her—and so are we.
Why? Why bring us here after willingly sacrificing your own life for ours? Jameson sorted through possible answers to that question before arriving at one in particular. “It wasn’t us you wanted here, was it?”
A north wind blows, the duchess had said, when she’d sent Jameson back to Hawthorne House.
“Where’s Nora?” Grayson asked, his thoughts operating in tandem with Jameson’s.
Nora, who wants to tear it all down, Jameson thought. Nora, who was promised a place in the Crucible only to have that place given to Avery instead.
And yes, Nora had seemed to believe that Alice had been cornered into that by Emily—but what if Alice hadn’t been played? What if she’d been executing her plan, all along?
“I think it’s time,” Grayson told their grandmother, his voice more commanding than Jameson had ever heard it, “that you deal us in on this plan of yours.”
“Is that right?” Alice murmured.
“You believed in the Gilded Blade once,” Jameson replied, thinking back to her poem.
“Parts of me still do,” Alice replied. “But love…” She trailed off.
Jameson’s throat tightened. “Love is a powerful thing.”
“I loved your grandfather,” Alice said. “So much that I chose him over everything else. In nineteen sixty-seven, I could have ascended, but I chose to return to Tobias. I was given a certain amount of time to prove that he could be great, that I needed no other placement.”
“You made him,” Jameson said.
“It wasn’t all me. Tobias was remarkable.
” It couldn’t have been clearer that Alice didn’t use that word lightly.
“And I see so much of him in the four of you.” She reached out to touch Grayson’s shoulder.
“An unparalleled force of will, the ability to make things happen, to wield the type of unspoken power that is so impossible to deny.”
Alice’s eyes locked on to Jameson’s next.
“Fearlessness. Hunger. Passion. Drive. That uncanny ability to take the most outlandish risks and walk away unscathed from things that ordinary men would not walk away from at all.” Alice smiled.
“Your brother Xander has your grandfather’s unabashed sense of self, his mechanical genius, not to mention the ability to think so far out of the box that there might as well not even be a box.
And then there’s Nash.” Alice shook her head in a rueful sort of way that reminded Jameson that she’d known Nash.
“Even as a child, Nash had the ability to tune out all the noise. He was steady and sure and willing to fail fifty times over if that was what it took to prove the fifty-first time was the charm. Always so independent. He’s grown into the kind of man who is gentle but never weak.
He has that way about him, that very rare way that says to anyone who needs to hear it, You are safe with me. ”
“The old man wasn’t like that.” Grayson’s voice came out tight. “At all.”
“Perhaps not with you,” Alice replied.
“We’re better men than Tobias Hawthorne ever was,” Jameson said. It had never been difficult for him to believe that when it came to Grayson or Xander or Nash. But saying the words to Alice, Jameson believed it of himself, too.
He was a better man. A good man.
“That’s always the hope for anyone seeking to truly leave their mark on this world, isn’t it?” Alice said. “To create a legacy where your strength lives on in someone or something better than you ever were?”
Jameson could hear the old man saying, in his final message to Alice, that she had her legacy and that Jameson and his brothers were the old man’s. I leave them as works in progress and ask only that you save your judgment for when they are done.
And here was Alice, rendering that judgment at long last.
But Jameson heard more in what she’d just said than that. “We aren’t your legacy,” Jameson said. She’d said someone or something. “However this grand plan of yours is meant to end—that is.”
Love was a powerful thing, but for Alice, it clearly was not the only thing. My story is that of a mother and a wife, she’d written all those years ago. What more could any woman want from life?
But Alice did want. She wanted, and she planned, and she made things happen, and for the first time, it occurred to Jameson that it might not have been an accident that he’d seen her in Prague, that she might have meant for him to, that it was fully possible she’d started the ball rolling on purpose.
A nudge here. A nudge there. To what end?
“Why is Avery here?” Jameson searched Alice’s eyes for some sort of answer. “Why is Eve? And Nora.” They’d led Nora here. “What exactly is your plan? What’s the endgame here?”
In response to that question, Alice raised the hood on her cloak. “Sometimes,” she said, “a phoenix needs to burn.”
Jameson stopped breathing. The explosives. “Take me to Avery,” he said, the words coming out halfway between an ultimatum and a plea.
Alice laid her palm on the stone wall and triggered a new passageway to open. “This tunnel will lead you out. All the way out.”
“I’m not going anywhere without her.” Jameson would have died for Avery Grambs. In a heartbeat. In an instant. Like the sun and the moon, I loved her.
“There is a path forward,” Alice said calmly. “But only one. Your Heiress will not find it with you there. You will be nothing but a distraction, so you must ask yourself a question, dear boy: When I chose my heir, when I sent Avery to you, did I choose well?”
Jameson was a fighter. He wanted—with every cell in his body, with all he was and all he ever would be—to fight. For Avery.
For you, Heiress. Always you.
“Do you remember the mural in Prague?” Alice said intently.
“Orpheus and Eurydice. Surely you recall how that story ends. Tell me, dear boy, will you look back over your shoulder in doubt, or will you trust her to be capable of following you out? Is Avery Kylie Grambs all I believe her to be? Do you see her, Jameson? Truly see her?”
In that poem of Alice’s, she’d said that at times her husband had seen her—but only at times.
“Avery’s never the damsel.” Grayson’s voice hitched. “It’s always us.”
“There’s a path forward for her,” Alice told Jameson. “She can survive. She can change the world. All you have to do is let her.”
“I can’t.” Jameson shook his head. “I can’t leave her here. You can’t ask me to—”
“I can,” Alice said. “And you must.”
A nudge here. A nudge there.
“It goes both ways.” Grayson gripped Jameson’s shoulder. “Family goes both ways, Jamie.”
“There’s a path forward,” Alice said again. “But only one, and the two of you must go. Now. And whatever you do, dear boys, don’t look back.”