Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Two Days Earlier…

T he Pet?ín Lookout Tower was a one-fifth-scale, not-quite replica of the Eiffel Tower located on the tallest hill in Prague, overlooking the castle. Decoding the meaning of Jameson’s second clue wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part was figuring out what to do once I got to the top of Pet?ín Hill.

Coming to a stop at the tower’s base, I looked from the silver charm in my hand up to the real thing in front of me. There were differences, but the resemblance was unmistakable. I was in the right place. Now I just had to figure out what I was looking for—and where exactly to look for it.

Inside the tower? Outside the tower? The surrounding hill?

I summoned an image of Jameson in my mind—a little windblown, a little wild. He would have climbed Pet?ín Hill himself instead of hitching a ride on the funicular, the way I had. And once he’d made it up here, with the city of Prague spread out below, I had no doubt that he would have climbed the tower to the top.

Jameson was fond of heights.

I paid the modest entry fee and made my way inside the tower—and up. Two hundred and ninety-nine stairs spiraled their way around the inside of the tower. Up and up and up. When I hit an observation deck, I went into full-on observation mode.

What Would Jameson Do?

I ran my hands over the wood paneling on the walls, examined the framed drawings that hung on those walls, scanned every inch of the floor.

And then I went outside.

Wind whipped at my hair as I walked to the iron railing. A breath caught in my throat. For as gray as the sky had been the morning before, it was crystalline now. The whole of Prague stretched out in the distance, the combined height of the hill and the tower allowing me to see for miles.

“Quite a view.” Jameson stepped into my peripheral vision and leaned against the railing.

I turned my head toward him. “Yes. It is.” I gave myself a few precious seconds to take in a different kind of view: the tilt of his lips, the dangerous spark in his eyes. Then I turned back and looked up at the peak of the tower.

Steel lattice would be easy enough to climb. “Hypothetically speaking, how many laws am I going to have to break to find my next clue?” I asked.

Jameson flashed me a glittering smile, then produced an apple seemingly out of nowhere. “None.” He took a bite out of the apple, then held it out to me. “Hungry?”

My eyes narrowing, I took the apple. Making a study of Jameson and determining that he wasn’t lying, I bit into the apple he’d given me. Crunchy, crispy, sweet. If there was a law-abiding way of finding my clue, that meant scaling the outside of the tower was out.

Jameson walked to a nearby telescope, mounted on the railing. He bent down to look through it, then adjusted the view.

I knew an invitation when I saw one.

Crossing to stand behind him, I bent to look. Jameson leaned in behind me, nudging the end of the telescope down farther and farther. I felt the heat of his body—and ignored it.

Mostly.

The telescope was pointed at the hillside now, not the view beyond it.

“I prepared a picnic,” Jameson told me, and then he turned to whisper directly in my ear. “Come find me once you find the box.”

The box. My heart jumped as Jameson took his leave.

A woman on a mission, I searched the observation deck again, then took the remaining stairs all the way up and did the same. Nothing. No loose panels in the wall, no loose boards in the floors, nothing wedged in the lattice of the railing.

No box.

A separate spiraling staircase took me down to the base of the tower, and I searched that, too. Nothing. The staircase let out into a gift shop. I paused. I could just see Jameson hiding something here, among all the trinkets the shop had for sale.

An electric feeling rising inside me, I perused shelf after shelf, scanning the contents of each one, picking up speed as I went. Jameson had told me what I was looking for, but a box could be any number of things.

I stopped in front of one of the largest glass cases, drawn to what I saw inside: A porcelain model of an elaborate labyrinth, filled with arching doors. It wasn’t a box. There was no reason for me to linger on it.

But I did.

After a minute—maybe more—I felt someone approach, in part because of the way Oren shifted as they did.

“You like it?” A gift shop employee nodded toward the piece that had captured my attention.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The mirror maze.”

My expression must have made it clear that I wasn’t following, because the employee elaborated.

“In the chateau next door,” she told me.

A mirror maze. I couldn’t think of anything more Hawthorne than that, but I pushed back the urge to leap before I looked. I’d already lost hours to impulsivity on this game. Jameson’s prior clue—number two in this five-step game—had led me here , to the tower.

I wasn’t leaving until I’d made damn sure there was nothing here for me to find.

The mirror maze would have to wait.

I paced the rest of the gift shop, continuing my search. Inside the last glass case I examined, there were three items. Two were blown-glass Christmas ornaments.

The third was a wrought-iron box, six inches wide and six deep. The box’s design was intricate, but the part that captured my attention was the wrought-iron lock.

At the start of this game, I’d been given two objects: a knife and a key .