CHAPTER 90 JAMESON
JAMESON
Jamie.” Grayson’s voice pulled Jameson from darkness—not all the way but enough for Jameson to realize that Slate’s manacles were empty and Emily was standing right in front of Grayson, pulling at his chains, like she was frantic.
Pretending to be Eve, Jameson realized.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” Emily-as-Eve promised, the consummate actress. Don’t let her fool you, Gray. Jameson couldn’t move, couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t manage a single word. Look at her.
“This group,” Emily said hoarsely. “It isn’t what I thought. The Crucible—it isn’t what I thought.”
Jameson tried to catch his brother’s eyes, but he couldn’t make his own focus, couldn’t do more than make out the fuzzy edges of Grayson’s body.
“Where’s Avery?” Grayson demanded.
Est unus ex nobis. Nos defendat eius. Even in chains, Grayson knew what mattered. Jameson managed to get his lips to part, but he couldn’t make a sound, not a single damn sound.
If you won’t talk to me, Emily had whispered, you won’t talk at all.
“I don’t know where Avery is,” Emily professed. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
Look at me, Gray. Look at me, so I can warn you. Jameson had to warn him—his brother, who had come back for him, for Avery, because she was one of them and had been almost from the start.
“You’re lying,” Grayson accused.
That’s right. She’s lying. And she isn’t Eve.
“I’m not a monster,” Emily said, doing Eve’s wounded, weaponized vulnerability to a T. “I never have been. You just see what you want to see when you look at me.”
Jameson waited for Grayson to look in his direction again, and through sheer force of will, Jameson managed to move his lips, parting them, bringing them soundlessly back together.
Em.
“I picked the lock on my manacles,” the viper in question was saying. “You have to hold still if you want me to do the same for you.”
“Get Jameson down first.”
“Jameson can’t help us. The Ascendants—any or all of them could return any minute. We don’t stand a chance if I don’t get you out of these.”
“Get my brother down first.”
Jameson tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t, couldn’t get his lips to so much as part again.
And then Emily was there, making a show of picking the locks on his manacles. The right one snapped open. Jameson’s right arm fell, useless, to his side. The left manacle was next, and without it to hold him up, Jameson fell to the ground.
Unable to move, he looked up at the first girl he’d ever kissed, a girl who’d loved going fast and taking risks and proving that she had absolutely no fear. Emily bent down, taking his pulse, and lowered her face toward his to whisper: “Your brother knows.”
Jameson hadn’t figured it out, hadn’t realized who she really was. Slate had, and Emily had gotten rid of him before Grayson had woken up, but somehow, Grayson still knew. And Emily knew that he knew, but Grayson didn’t know that.
You aren’t playing her, Gray. She’s playing you.
The next thing Jameson knew, Grayson was free—free and kneeling next to him. Jameson couldn’t even feel his brother’s fingers as Grayson took his pulse. Nearly his entire body was numb.
She knows that you know, Gray.
“What happened to him?” Grayson demanded.
“Poison?” their captor guessed.
Grayson stood and paced the perimeter of their cell. The walls were made of stone. There was no door.
“Tell me about the Crucible,” Grayson ordered. If he intended to attack, he was taking his sweet time, and for whatever reason, Emily let him.
It was never you for me, she’d told Jameson. It was always him.
“Tell me what the Gilded Blade did to you, Eve,” Grayson said, gentling his tone.
“What they did to all of us?” Emily said, her voice quiet but fiery somehow, a faraway look in her eyes.
“It starts with rooms. Locked rooms—so many of them, each a puzzle, and after a while, you start to wonder if you’ll die solving them…
or not solving them. But if you keep going, if you push yourself all the way to the brink, if you’re smart enough and able to think outside the box, eventually, you come to a room where there is a long line of champagne flutes in every color of the rainbow, each one holding a different liquid that most definitely is not champagne, all sitting on a table with the words pick your poison carved into the wood. ”
That matched what Emily had told Jameson before, and it occurred to him that she might not be lying. She’d been through the Crucible. She’d survived it, ascended.
“If you choose the right flute,” Emily continued, “the right poison, you lose consciousness but not your life. Then and only then have you proven that you deserve to be a Candidate, that you were not chosen in error. And the next thing you know, you’re waking up in a four-poster bed, on a down mattress, in a room where everything is hundreds of years old. ”
“But it isn’t over.” Grayson did not phrase that as a question.
This is an interrogation, Jameson realized. Only Grayson didn’t know that Emily knew that, too.
“It’s never over,” Emily said. “The training. The trials. And if you make it far enough, you’re told to choose your gown, then to choose your name, and then, finally, to choose your weapon.”
At the word weapon, Jameson could feel acid rising in the back of his throat, and it occurred to him that he could choke on it.
He could die, just like that.
“And after you choose your weapon?” Grayson said evenly.
“That’s when you’re introduced to one another.”
Three women, three weapons. Jameson couldn’t help thinking about what Emily had said earlier, about the fact that she’d chosen Eve only after she’d come to believe that Eve would be capable of putting Avery down.
There are years when all three Candidates survive the Crucible, Gigi had told them, but she’d also told them that the Candidates were made to believe that only one of them would survive.
What would Eve do, Jameson thought, to survive?
“Tell me anyway,” Grayson suggested silkily.
“As Candidates, you need each other,” Emily said. “To survive the most difficult trials, you need each other. I’ve never needed anyone—or been needed—like that.”
It was you and Calla and Zella, Jameson thought. And Calla did not survive. Jameson wondered if Emily and Zella had learned Calla’s true name after her death, or if Calla Thorp had flouted the rules that forbade its use.
He wondered how Calla had failed.
“What name did you choose?” Grayson made his next move.
“Would you believe me if I said Lyra?”
Grayson met Emily’s eyes. “Have I believed anything you’ve said?”
He knows, Jameson realized, that she knows.
“It’s good to see you, Gray.” Emily smiled.
“What did you do to Jameson?” Grayson’s tone was anything but controlled.
“Among other things, I’m quite adept at… natural remedies, shall we say? Arcane ones.”
Grayson was quiet for a moment—but only a moment. “I always did see what I wanted to see when I looked at you.” Grayson nodded, hard-jawed, to one of the four stone walls. “Believe me when I say that you want to trigger that to open.”
“What good would that do you?” Emily asked. “You won’t leave your brother, and you won’t get anywhere with him weighing you down. And before you come at me, Grayson, keep in mind that my training has not been limited to poisons.”
The Kyrie. Jameson couldn’t make out a single scar on Emily’s exposed skin, but he couldn’t help but think of Nora and her training, of what it meant that Emily had trained for four years in anticipation of taking up the mantle of the Hand of the Gilded Blade.
“Are you a true believer, Emily?” Grayson said, his tone cutting.
“I can act the part,” Emily said. “But I wasn’t chosen as a Candidate because of my belief in the cause.
The Judge prior to Alice chose me to get in your grandmother’s head.
I was chosen because I had a Hawthorne connection, an ambitious streak, and a knack for getting my own way.
I like to think I was part of a grand cascade to make sure Alice Hawthorne did not stay the Judge for all that long. ”
Four years, Jameson thought. Not fifteen or twenty.
“You forced Alice to call the Crucible.” Grayson did not so much as raise his voice. “You used us to do it.”
“It’s nothing personal, Gray.” Emily smiled coyly. “There’s only so much training a girl can take, and I’m ready to do far more than watch.” She reached up to touch Grayson’s face. “I did love you, you know. More or less.”
“What do you want?” Grayson demanded.
“What don’t I want?” Emily said. “But for now, I’d settle for a kiss.”
Ignore her, Gray. Stonewall her. You know she hates being ignored.
“Never,” Grayson told her.
“Kiss me like you mean it,” Emily said, leaning toward him, dropping her hand from his face and putting it on his chest, “and I’ll trigger one of the two hidden doors in this room to swing open and let you and your brother go.”
No, Jameson thought. She won’t.
“I always meant it, Emily.” Grayson’s expression went smooth as glass. “You’re the one who played games, not me.”
Emily’s hand traveled from his chest back to his face. “It was always you, Gray. You know that, don’t you? It was never Jameson. It was always you.” Her other hand made its way to the other side of Grayson’s jaw. “Kiss me.”
Never, Jameson thought, echoing his brother’s earlier statement—just as Grayson brought his lips to hers. And when it was done, when he pulled back, Emily stared at Grayson like he was the ghost.
“Were you pretending that I was her?” Emily asked. “Your precious Lyra?”
“Did I kiss you like I meant it?” Grayson replied.
“Yes.”
“Then it stands to reason,” Grayson said, “that I was pretending that you were her. Now pay up.”
The look in Emily’s eyes was murderous, but before she could do a damn thing, a portion of the wall swung open, fate making good on Emily’s promise before she had a chance to renege on it.
A woman clothed in a white cloak stepped into the room.
“You’re needed elsewhere, Watcher.” Alice. Memories hit Jameson from all sides the moment he heard his grandmother’s voice. “The final trial is about to begin.”