CHAPTER 53 JAMESON
JAMESON
It was one minute until midnight, London time, and Jameson was ready.
He’d followed the instructions he’d been given exactly: He’d gone where he’d been told to go, sat at the table where he was supposed to sit, ordered the food he was supposed to order, pocketed the key card that came with his check, slipped into the proper restroom—and out of it through a hidden door.
All of that had brought him to a secret elevator.
He pressed the call button at midnight on the dot.
The elevator doors took their sweet time opening.
The moment they parted enough for his body to fit through, Jameson moved.
He was inside the elevator and holding the key card up to a pad in a heartbeat.
The buttons inside the elevator lit up, and Jameson used them to enter the code he’d been given. By the time he hit the last number, the elevator doors were three-quarters closed—and someone else squeezed through them with a fraction of a second to spare.
Jameson had no time to react before the elevator went pitch black—and plummeted.
“Savannah?” Jameson’s voice echoed through the darkness.
“What the hell are you doing here?” This couldn’t be happening.
Jameson had been given one ticket to the Devil’s Mercy.
One. Xander hadn’t even been allowed to come with him.
Jameson had done everything he’d been told to do precisely as he’d been told to do it.
And Savannah was going to ruin his only chance to get into the Mercy… And without the Mercy…
Avery.
“You can’t be here, Savannah,” Jameson gritted out.
The came to a sudden, jarring stop. The doors parted, and Savannah stepped out and into a cavern. “And yet, I am.”
It was eerie how much she sounded like Grayson—the cadence of their speech, their intonations, the maddening surety with which both of them habitually spoke. Jameson would have hated the reminder of his brother even if Savannah’s presence here hadn’t threatened to ruin everything.
Jameson grabbed her arm. “Savannah, I swear to you—”
“That you are not particularly attached to your right hand? Message received.”
“I’m left-handed anyway,” Jameson quipped reflexively. “And I could take you.”
“But would you?”
Jameson realized then how hard he was gripping her arm. Cursing, he dropped his hold on Savannah. “Please. Get back in that elevator.”
“Do you see a call button?” Savannah said, and Jameson realized: There wasn’t one. He’d been told once that there were many paths to the Devil’s Mercy: hidden entrances, hidden exits, all roads leading to the same place—for those whose presence was allowed.
Hers isn’t. And yet, here she was. Jameson narrowed his eyes as he came to the obvious conclusion. “Rohan sent you.”
Rohan had known that Jameson was looking for a way in. He’d probably known exactly where—and to whom—Jameson would go to get it. Damn it, Rohan.
“Rest assured, Jameson, Rohan took great pains to leave the dirty work of finding a way in to me.” Savannah raised her chin and took in the dimly lit world around them. They’d arrived at what appeared to be some kind of nexus. A single torch lit the wall. Five paths spiraled outward.
Jameson had been told to look for the emerald path.
It took him a moment to see it—the flecks of green gemstones in the otherwise dark ground.
“I won’t protect you,” he warned Savannah, but that was a lie.
She was Grayson’s sister, and that mattered, no matter how hard Jameson tried to tell himself that it didn’t.
“I have all the protection I need.” Savannah didn’t say another word as she followed one and only one step behind Jameson—down the emerald path.
Eventually, they came to a golden door. Familiar words were etched over the doorframe: Where angels fear to tread, have your fun instead. But be warned…
“The house always wins,” Savannah said behind Jameson.
“Indeed it does.” A figure slipped out of the shadows.
I know you, Jameson thought. A year and a half earlier, Jameson had encoded the boy as being eleven or twelve, but the boy looked a lot older now—fourteen, at least, and a great deal taller and broader through the shoulders than he’d been the last time Jameson had seen him.
“You, I was expecting,” the boy told Jameson. “Her, on the other hand…”
Savannah slipped past Jameson. “I’m here to see the duchess,” she announced. “And to call in a debt.”
“You’re here without invitation. And you”—the boy turned on Jameson—“were not authorized to bring a guest.”
“He did not bring me,” Savannah said haughtily.
“In that case,” the boy replied, looking Savannah up and down, cocking his head to the side, “it would be wise for him to step aside.”
“I can’t do that.” Jameson wished he could, but that didn’t stop his next words from coming out as a borderline growl. “I can’t let you hurt her.”
“Pity, that,” the boy said.
“You sound just like Rohan.” Now it was Savannah’s turn to look the boy up and down. “The tilt of your head. The way you stand. It’s uncanny.”
“Is it?”
Savannah took another step toward the threat. Damn it, Savannah.
Jameson prepared himself to move, to shove Savannah behind him if necessary, but the boy stood eerily still as Savannah reached back and began to unzip her smoky gray gown. She stopped halfway down and slipped the gown off her shoulder.
What the hell is she doing?
The boy stepped forward—far too close to Savannah for Jameson’s liking—and eyed the skin that Grayson’s sister had bared.
He’s not just looking. He’s reading, Jameson realized. Rohan—he’d inked a message of some sort directly onto Savannah’s skin.
“Rohan was the house before,” Savannah said, her voice quiet and somehow, in true Grayson style, all the more terrifying for it. “He will be again. And he marked me for a reason.”
Jameson shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and did his best to silently warn the boy: If you go for her throat…
But the boy didn’t. With the slightest bow of his head, he stepped aside, clearing Savannah’s path to the golden door.
She pushed it open and stepped through, and Jameson surged past her. “Stay behind me this time,” he ordered—for all the good that would do.
Eventually, one long, twisting corridor later, they both stepped into a room Jameson recognized, an upscale bar that held a ledger devoted to long-term bets. The last time Jameson had been in this room, two men had wagered on whether or not he would get himself killed before he turned thirty.
Still plenty of time for that. Jameson automatically scanned the room for the symbol: a triangle inside a circle inside a square.
Nothing. Casting a warning look at Savannah, Jameson asked the bartender for the ledger.
The man—who was, in a word, sizable—placed the ledger on the bar and grabbed Jameson’s wrist the moment he tried to pick it up.
“I have a message for you,” the bartender said calmly, “from the current Factotum.”
The duchess. “I do love messages,” Jameson replied.
“She once promised you a favor. Don’t waste it tonight. Don’t ask for something she cannot give you without devastating consequences for you both. Save your favor, and when the time is right, you’ll know.”
The bartender let loose of Jameson’s wrist, then turned his attentions to Savannah. “She’s expecting you—in the atrium.”
Savannah did not have to be told twice. She made her way toward the door the bartender had nodded to, and Jameson made to follow—with the ledger.
“That stays here,” the bartender said. “And you have the Factotum’s word that no harm will come to Savannah Grayson this night. I would suggest you give the two of them a moment. You’ll not be getting ahold of that ledger twice.”
There’s something in the ledger. Jameson felt that—in his bones, in his blood, in every hollow of his soul that needed to find something at the Mercy this night. The old man had left that puzzle in Tuscany for Alice for a reason.
He’d known something—and wanted her to know that he knew it.
His heart thudding like a slow and steady war drum in his chest, Jameson checked the urge to go after Savannah and went through the ledger page by page, scanning each and every bet that had been placed over the past two centuries, stopping only when he came to the one that had been placed on his life, a year and a half earlier.
There, in the margins of the ledger, was a message written in tiny, perfect script.
Go home, dear boy.
Alice. Jameson barely stopped himself from saying the name out loud. Alice was the only person who had ever called him dear boy.
She’d known he would come here. Her words rang with warning.Which means there is something to be found here.
Jameson closed the ledger and made his way toward the atrium, stepping into the massive room to find it empty but for Zella and Savannah, who stood in the center of the atrium.
Jameson’s gaze was drawn—eerily, magnetically drawn—to the massive lemniscate in the black-and-white granite beneath their feet.
Infinity. Jameson stared at the symbol, striding toward the duchess and Savannah.
Avery’s note. Jameson had been so sure the lemniscate that Avery had left for him had been a reference to the ring he’d given her, to Prague, but here one was in the Devil’s Mercy in a grand room he and Avery had visited before.
The world around Jameson seemed to fall into slow motion as he stopped just short of Savannah and Zella and turned, taking in everything he could see: the domed ceiling, the soaring archways leading farther into the club, the Roman-style columns that encircled the lemniscate, half surging up to the domed ceiling and half no taller than Jameson’s shoulder.
Each of the smaller columns held a golden pan, and floating in the water in each and every one, there was a flower. A lily.
A calla lily.
Jameson didn’t even remember moving, but suddenly, he was standing dead-center of the lemniscate, and Savannah and Zella were staring at him.
This is something. Jameson didn’t know what to make of those calla lilies. He could hardly feel his own body, his mind was racing so fast. On some level, he was aware of Zella pressing something into Savannah’s hand. A ring?
Jameson blinked, and suddenly Savannah was running back the way they’d come.
Why? What’s happening? What is this? Jameson could barely even hear his own thoughts over the wordless roar building in his mind.
Every time he blinked, he saw an electric image of a calla lily, like lightning cutting through velvety darkness.
He saw an entire sea of calla lilies washed up on Hawthorne Island in the wake of Avery’s disappearance.
“You have questions,” the duchess said beside him. “Do not ask them.”
Jameson had been warned not to ask the duchess for a favor that would lead to devastating consequences for them both. Where is she? Where is Avery? What have they done with her? What do you know?
Jameson’s brain pounded. His throat burned with every single question he did not ask. “Calla lilies,” he said instead. It would be one thing if he’d thought the flowers were Zella’s design choice, but the lilies-in-water décor predated her tenure as Factotum.
A year and a half earlier, Jameson had stood in this room and seen the exact same thing.
Fresh calla lilies, floating on water. In this year’s Grandest Game, Jameson had designed a music box puzzle and he’d put a calla lily in that music box, on a whim.
Why that flower? Why had that flower been floating around in his subconscious?
Because I saw them here.
Zella hooked an arm through Jameson’s and took him on a promenade of the room. “Was that a question?”
You have questions, she’d warned. Do not ask them.
“I am not calling in my favor,” Jameson murmured, trying for a casual smile, in case anyone was watching. “I am simply commenting on the Mercy’s décor.”
“Lovely, is it not?” Zella said.
Jameson’s gaze was drawn back to the lemniscate in the sparkling floor, and he flashed back to his first time in the atrium—to the way that Rohan had named the gemstones in the design.
Onyx. Rohan had thrown his voice in a way that had made Jameson whirl. And white agate.
Agate.
Agate.
Agate.
That gnawed at Jameson, and he had no idea why. “Onyx,” he said out loud. “And white agate.”
“It’s not onyx, actually.” Zella laid her free hand on Jameson’s forearm, as if they were the closest of friends. “It’s obsidian.”
Obsidian, Jameson thought. And agate crystal. A black gemstone and a white one—shining black and iridescent white.
And just like that, he knew where he’d seen those gemstones before—those exact gemstones.
Go home, dear boy, Alice had written in the margins of the ledger.
Beside Jameson, Zella lifted her right hand to her mouth in a gesture that looked a bit coy—and obscured the movement of her lips from anyone who might be watching.
“Go home, Jameson,” the duchess murmured. “A north wind blows.”