Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Three Days Earlier…

A fter working nonstop all day, I had only one thing on my mind. One person. From the moment I saw our hotel, surrounded by centuries-old buildings on all sides, anticipation began to build inside me with every step.

Into the lobby.

Into the elevator.

Out of it.

The Royal Suite was on its own floor. I noted two of Oren’s men stationed in the hall. There had been a third in the lobby. As far as I knew, that was the entire team he’d brought to Prague.

Threats against me were at an all-time low.

That didn’t stop Oren from putting his body squarely in front of mine as we walked down the hall. He opened the door to the suite and cleared the foyer and adjacent rooms before I was allowed to enter. The moment I did, I realized something: From the hallway, the door I’d just walked through had appeared as just a door, but on this side, as it closed behind us, it disappeared into an ornate, golden mural on the wall, creating the impression that the foyer had no entry and no exit—that the Royal Suite was a world unto itself.

The floor was made of white marble, but just ahead, there was a deep red carpet that looked so soft and lush that I gave in to the urge to kick my shoes off and step on it with bare feet. Nearby, two chairs sat facing the mural. The marble table between them was a work of art—literally. The front of the marble had been chiseled into a sculpture. It took me a moment to recognize its shape from the coin. The lion. A coat of arms.

“We’re clear,” Oren told me—in other words, he’d checked the rest of the suite, which raised a question…

“Where’s Jameson?” I asked.

“I could answer that question,” Oren replied. “But something tells me you would prefer if I did not.” He raised a hand to his ear, a signal that someone was talking on his earpiece. “Alisa is on her way up,” he reported.

Alisa would want to debrief about my last meeting of the day, which she had been unable to attend. For that matter, Jameson’s brother Grayson would want a report on all of my meetings—but I suppressed the urge to take out my phone.

I could answer that question , Oren had said. But something tells me you would prefer that I did not. Interpreted one way, that sounded ominous. But I knew what it looked like when Oren was coming close to thinking about possibly almost smiling.

I walked from the foyer into a dining room complete with crystal chandelier overhead and gold-rimmed china on the table. At each of the twelve place settings, there was a champagne flute. Inside the champagne flutes, there were crystals.

Thousands of them, diamond-like and small. I made my way around the table and stopped when I saw a flash of color inside one of the flutes—green, like Jameson’s eyes.

Moving carefully but swiftly, I dumped out the crystals. Among them, I found a larger gem. An emerald? It was the width of my thumbnail, and as I picked it up and turned it back and forth in the light, I realized there was something on its surface.

An arrow.

I turned the gem in my hand, and the arrow moved. Not a gem , I realized. I was holding a very small, very delicate compass.

It took me less than three seconds to realize that the “compass” wasn’t pointing north.

Jameson. I felt my lips curve. I’d never smiled like this before I’d met him—the kind of smile that tore across my face and sent a ripple of energy surging through my body.

I followed the arrow.

Coming into a living room—complete with another crystal chandelier, another lush red carpet, and windows that offered a breathtaking view of the river—I scanned my surroundings and saw another work-of-art-level marble coffee table.

On that table, there was a vase.

I let my gaze linger on the flowers. Roses. Five black. Seven red. I turned back toward the room, looking for that combination of colors, for something to count, and then I realized that I was falling into a Hawthorne trap.

I was complicating things.

Bending down, I reached into the bouquet. Victory . My fingers latched around something cylindrical and metal.

“Do I want to know?” I heard Alisa ask Oren in the room behind me.

“Do you really have to ask?” he replied.

Flashlight. I registered what I held in my hand, gave it a twist, and then corrected myself out loud. “Black light.”

Jameson wasn’t making this particularly hard, which made me think that the challenge wasn’t the point. The anticipation was.

“Can one of you turn off the lights?” I called back to Oren and Alisa. I didn’t look back to see which one of them fulfilled that request.

I was too busy having my way with the black light.

Arrows appeared on the floor. It was just like Jameson to not even bat an eye at the idea of invisibly defacing the single nicest hotel suite I’d ever seen.

“Key word invisibly ,” I murmured under my breath, as I followed the arrows out of the room and into another and another and out onto a balcony. The arrows took me to the edge of the balcony—and that view of the river—and then they turned back toward the building… and up the closest wall.

The exterior of the hotel was made of stone, not brick—and that meant there were handholds. Footholds. Possibilities.

Still barefoot, I began to climb.

“I distinctly remember saying no roofs!” Alisa called after me.

I was too busy climbing to respond, but Oren offered a response of his own: “Threat assessment, low.” I stifled a grin, which proved to be a losing endeavor when my head of security continued, “I believe I saw a champagne bottle in the kitchen with your name on it, Alisa. Literally.”

Jameson’s handiwork , I thought. He had distracting Alisa down to an art form. The last thing I heard as I latched my hand over the edge of the roof was Alisa’s response to Oren’s thinly veiled amusement.

“Judas.”

I might have laughed, if that hadn’t been the exact moment that I finished my climb and the rooftop came into view. The tiles were a red-orange color the exact shade of the setting sun. On top of the roof, there was a metal dome that gave way to a spire.

On top of the dome, one hand on the spire, was Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.

Only the gentle angles of the roof and the fact that there was a small stone terrace below the dome could even remotely justify Oren’s assessment that there was no danger here. Or maybe he just knew that Jameson and I had a habit of landing on our feet.

Carefully making my way across the rooftop, I arrived at the stone terrace. The railing looked like something an archer might have shot an arrow through, once upon a time. Stepping up onto the terrace, I did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, taking it all in.

Jameson stayed up on the dome a moment longer, then swung himself down to join me.

“Found you,” I murmured. “Twice in one day.”

There was something a little lazy and entirely devilish about the way Jameson’s lips curled slowly upward. “I have to admit,” he told me, “I am becoming very fond of Prague.”

Taking in every single detail about the way he was standing there, I noticed a tension to his muscles, like he was primed and ready. Like he was still standing up on the dome.

“Do I want to know how you spent your day?” I asked.

I was sure of one thing: Jameson hadn’t spent it here. I doubted it had taken more than half an hour for him to set all of this up. My gut said that something had driven him to do that. Something had put him in the mood to play .

I could feel an energy buzzing, just beneath his skin.

“You most definitely do.” Jameson smirked. I heard what he was really saying: I definitely wanted to know how he’d spent his day, and just as definitely…

“You’re not going to tell me.”

Jameson looked out at the Vltava River, then turned in a circle, the way I had earlier, taking in the rest of the view. The city. “I Have A Secret, Heiress.”

I Have A Secret had been one of my mom’s favorite games, one of the longest-lasting games that we’d played together. One person announced that they had a secret. The other person made their guesses. I’d never guessed my mom’s biggest secrets, had only discovered them after she was long gone and I’d been pulled into the world of the Hawthornes, but she’d always had a knack for guessing mine.

I let the full force of my gaze settle on Jameson’s vivid green eyes. “You found something,” I guessed. “You did something you weren’t supposed to. You met someone.”

Jameson flashed his teeth in a there-and-gone smile. “Yes.”

“To which guess?” I said.

Jameson adopted an innocent expression—far too innocent. “How were your meetings?”

I could practically feel the rush of adrenaline through his veins. He was so alive—up here, in this moment, right now—that a low, humming intensity rolled off him in waves.

Jameson definitely had a secret.

“Productive.” I answered his question and then took a single step toward him. “I don’t have any meetings tomorrow.”

“Or the next day. Or the next.” Jameson’s voice went a little low, a little husky. “Feel like a game?”

I grinned, but I was smart enough—and had enough experience with Hawthornes—to approach that proposition with a certain amount of caution. “What kind of game?”

“Our kind,” Jameson told me. “A Hawthorne game. Saturday mornings—clue to clue to clue.”

Jameson angled his gaze toward the stone railing behind me. I turned, and sitting on top of it, I saw two objects—one I recognized immediately and one I’d never seen before.

A knife. A key.

The knife was Jameson’s, obtained during one of those long-ago Saturday morning games with his billionaire grandfather. The key was old, made of wrought iron.

“Just two objects?” I raised a brow. Usually, in games of this type, there were more . A fishing hook. A price tag. A glass ballerina.

“I never said that.” Jameson mirrored my expression, raising a brow right back at me.

Once upon a time, he had considered me nothing more than a part of one of his grandfather’s games. Now, he’d never dream of treating me as anything other than a player.

“A game,” I said, eyeing the knife and the key.

“Technically, I was thinking we’d play two : one of my design and one of yours.”

Two games. Our kind of games.

“We’ve got three more days in Prague,” I noted.

“Indeed we do, Heiress.” He had a good poker face, but not nearly good enough.

“You’ve already made your game, haven’t you?” I demanded.

“This place—this city—practically did it for me.” There it was again, the hum of energy in Jameson’s voice that told me that he wasn’t just playing . That something had happened.

I Have A Secret…

“One day for my game,” the magnetic, adrenaline-drunk, beautiful, buzzing boy across from me proposed. “One day for yours. Each game can have no more than five steps. Player with the fastest time sets the itinerary for our final day in Prague.”

Jameson’s tone made it very clear what his itinerary would involve. I had no idea what had come over him in the past few hours, but whatever it was, I could taste an echo of it on the tip of my own tongue, a light and tantalizing thrill. I could feel Jameson’s energy pumping through my veins.

You have a secret , I thought. “All right, Hawthorne,” I told him. “Game on.”