CHAPTER 104 JAMESON
JAMESON
Jameson had always been decent at making conversation. Jackson Currie, on the other hand, was not.
“Anyone ever threatened to shoot you if you hurt that girl?” The old fisherman was a hermit and fond enough of his shotgun that Jameson would have given it decent odds that the man had named it.
“Not in so many words,” Jameson replied. “But I’d rip my own heart out to spare hers.” He fixed his gaze on Avery in the distance, where she stood side by side with Eve.
Living, breathing, game-playing Eve.
It was killing Jameson to let Avery do this alone, but Avery’s speech at the funeral hadn’t just been a gambit to draw Eve out. Avery had meant every word of it, which was why she and Eve were standing side by side, next to a lighthouse that overlooked an isolated cliff, putting Toby to rest.
Scattering his ashes on the wind.
“Damn kids,” Jackson swore. His voice was gruff, and his eyes were very much not, and Jameson had the distinct sense that Jackson wasn’t talking about Avery, Eve, or himself.
Damn kids was Jackson’s idea of a eulogy.
Hannah and Toby, Toby and Hannah. Separated in life. Together now.
Jameson’s eyes stung, and he looked down at the leather book in his hands, a bequest of sorts from the kind of Hawthorne man Jameson aspired to someday be. Someone had once given Toby this book on the streets of Seoul, with the program for Hannah’s funeral tucked inside.
It was a book of fairy tales.
A nudge here. A nudge there. A cascade, years in the making…
Jameson and Avery hadn’t figured out the code yet, hadn’t even finished translating the text, but the illustrations spoke volumes, especially one in particular, which depicted a spider and the most intricate, most beautiful web.
Beside Jameson, Jackson suddenly raised his shotgun, a far-off figure in his sights.
That’s not good. Jameson’s mind went immediately to Avery’s mother’s family, local criminals who bore no love for any of them, but he and Avery had been careful, flying into an adjacent city, and Oren and his team were stationed around the perimeter.
They didn’t stop this visitor, though. Jameson registered her identity as she drew closer.
Nora. She was moving slowly and very possibly still injured, but Jameson nonetheless figured he might be taking his life in his own hands when he jogged to intercept her before she could get anywhere near Avery and Eve and the lighthouse.
“Let them finish,” Jameson said.
Nora looked past him, her gaze settling on Eve. “He was right, it seems.”
“Who was?” Jameson asked. Angry stitches were still visible in Nora’s skin, cutting across her collarbone and disappearing down into her shirt. There was no telling how many other injuries she had, how many scars she would be adding to her collection.
“A scholar,” Nora said, leaving it at that.
Brady Daniels. “He found me at the private hospital that a rather cryptic British gentleman had me sent to. Switzerland. The Alps. Not a bad place to hide a person away, but said scholar had apparently been looking for me for some time, before Vantage, even.”
Jameson wondered if he’d ever be able to hear the word Vantage without an avalanche of memories hitting him so hard he could barely breathe.
“The scholar wanted to know,” Nora continued, “if I’d truly done what I set out to do and destroyed the Gilded Blade.”
“And did you?” Jameson asked, wary about the fact that she was here at all.
Avery had come through the Crucible and returned to the world, to a massive fortune and a position of power.
Eve had died but lived in truth. Jameson suspected Nora was fully capable of reading quite a bit into those two facts, even without knowing that the leather book in Jameson’s hand might well hold a list.
Family lines.
The holders of those lines.
The web.
“I thought my job was done.” Nora’s accent was harsh, but her tone was almost meditative. “But in that hospital in Switzerland, I found an envelope on my bedside table. And do you know what was in it?”
“A letter from my grandmother?” Jameson guessed.
“No,” Nora replied simply. “This.” She held up a chain, a delicate, rose-gold chain with a matching rose-gold charm on the end—not a fleur-de-lis but a heart. “It’s engraved,” Nora said. “Front and back.”
“May I?” Jameson asked, and at Nora’s curt nod, he took the necklace and examined the charm. On the front, engraved into the metal, there was what appeared to be a set of initials:
N.A.V.
Jameson turned the charm over. On the back, there was a name: Aristotle. Jameson stared at the letters in Aristotle, playing with them for a moment, trying to anagram them, and then he stopped.
N.A.V.
“Those aren’t initials,” he said. “Natura abhorret vacuum. It’s a quote. Aristotle.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum.” Nora looked again to Avery and Eve, and this time, as if she felt Nora’s eyes on her, Avery turned around. “It’s the idea that if you create a power vacuum, someone will fill it.”
A hundred yards away, Avery and Eve started toward them.
“The head and heir of the Kyrie line are dead,” Nora continued. “It need never be what it once was, but the family—that very dangerous family—will be looking for someone to follow, and I was raised as a daughter of the house. They will accept me, especially if I show up with a Woman in Red.”
Eve, Jameson thought.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” he said. “But if you fill it—”
“I can make the Kyrie into something new,” Nora finished.
Jameson saw it then, laid out before him in all its glory—Alice’s plan. Avery. Eve. Nora. Jameson’s mind whirred. And Zella. Alice had mentored Zella, too.
Sisters, of sorts.
Alice’s heirs.
A phoenix, rising from the ashes.
The Gilded Blade reborn.
There would be no killing this time, Jameson knew. No Crucible. And the women of the web—some of them, like Avery, might be ready to own their power and step into the light, to mark themselves as forces in this world. But for those who couldn’t, for those in more precarious positions…
Eve would be the one who moved through the shadows. The one who made contact. The one who, if she needed to, could bring people to Nora for protection.
Jameson had trained his mind to see possibilities, and now, he saw it all.
Before Nora said a single word to Avery or Eve or they to her, before any of it unfolded the way Jameson knew it would, he saw it all: Zella, the Proprietor of the Devil’s Mercy; Avery, Eve, and Nora at the helm of something new.
Not Ascendants. Not bound by old rituals or old rules.
A force for good.
But even though Jameson could see exactly how this would play out, even though adrenaline flooded his veins at the sheer possibility of it all, he also knew: This wasn’t his story.
So he handed Toby’s book to Avery, and Jameson went to wait for her on the cliff.
Years earlier, Jameson had been told that, in comparison to his brothers, his mind was ordinary.
And all of them had been raised to believe that nothing was ever enough, that they weren’t.
For years, Jameson had felt, on a bone-deep level, like the old man was right about that, had felt like he wasn’t yet the man he was supposed be.
Jameson had told Avery as much in Prague, when he’d given her the infinity ring and promised that someday, he would be that man.
That he’d be ready. That he’d be worthy.
But now, more than ever, Jameson was realizing that Xander had been right when he’d said that no one was ever really done.
Done changing.
Done growing.
Done becoming.
Just look at Avery. Jameson had thought she was already who she was meant to be in this world, but now? Who knew what glorious thing she’d be five years from now, or ten, or twenty? Who knew what she might do, the impact she might have?
What Jameson did know was that five years from now, and ten, and twenty—he wanted to be there at her side. And maybe it was how close he’d come to losing her, or maybe it was the fact that he was standing so close to the lighthouse and that forever had come only in death for Toby and his Hannah…
But whatever it was—Jameson knew. He was done waiting. He was going to ask. Heads, Avery would say yes; tails, she’d be sensible and say that they were still far too young, but either way, Jameson was done waiting for some hypothetical moment when everything would be perfect, when he would.
He didn’t have to be anything more than he was right now to love and be loved.
It was nearly sunset before Avery joined him on the cliff. Jameson watched as Avery laid a light hand on the cracked, aged exterior of the lighthouse. A phantom wind caught in her hair, and Avery smiled slightly, like she’d heard something in it that no one else could hear.
“Heiress.” Jameson’s voice came out low and aching, a tender whisper that had Avery looking right at him. “I haven’t picked out another ring yet,” he said, his heart suddenly beating viciously against his rib cage. “But…”
He got down on one knee, and Avery shot him one of those looks that said, I know you, Hawthorne. One of those looks that said, You never learned how to stay out of trouble, but also, You make me bold.
“I don’t want another ring,” she said.
“You’re going to be sensible about this,” Jameson inferred.
“You sound awfully sure of that.” Avery smiled a wicked little smile, and then she slipped the infinity ring off her right ring finger, moved it to her left, and reached out to pull him up off his knees. “No regrets.”