Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

I found Jameson on a blanket that matched his eyes—a deep, emerald green. Spread out around him was what could, by some definitions, be considered a picnic, though by most, it would probably have been described as a feast. I counted six kinds of cheese, nine kinds of fruit, five spreads, eight dips, a half-dozen meats, a seemingly unlimited variety of bread and crackers, and what appeared to be the vast majority of the contents of a midsize gourmet chocolate shop.

I plopped down beside Jameson on the blanket, crossed my legs, and placed the wrought-iron box in my lap. A moment later, I held the key in my hand.

Beside me, Jameson held out an open pomegranate, brimming with jewellike seeds.

“Playing Hades?” I asked him wryly.

Jameson leaned back on his elbows, the sun turning his brown hair almost gold. “Come on, Persephone. What harm could a few bites do?”

Despite myself, I smiled. Jameson Hawthorne was temptation personified—but right now, I was more tempted by the puzzle.

The game.

Our kind of game.

I inserted the key in the wrought-iron lock and turned it. Almost immediately, the box began to unfold, a mechanical marvel of cause and effect that didn’t stop until the box had transformed into a flat black square.

Carved into the metal on what had once been the bottom of the box there was a name: JOEL .

My gaze went to the two items that sat on top of the square, just under the name. The first object was a glass vial. I picked it up, examining the cloudy white liquid inside. There was a label on the vial: HN 4 O.

I glanced up at Jameson, then back down at the second item. Setting the vial aside, I reached for it. The object was a small cardboard cube with a tiny metal crank attached to the side. I took the crank between my middle finger and my thumb and turned it.

Notes played, one after another, for a total of four. Four notes. I stopped, then started turning the delicate crank again, and the same combination of notes repeated itself. I didn’t recognize the song.

Four music notes. A vial of some kind of chemical solution. And a name.

“Sure you’re not hungry, Heiress?” Jameson asked.

Without a word to him, I grabbed some cheese. And some chocolate. And the pomegranate. The last clue had been easy enough to solve, but this one felt more like the first, and I only had eight hours until midnight. I needed fuel.

I also needed to look at the big picture.

Within minutes, I had a working space set up on the blanket. Beside the items from the box, I laid out the ones I’d been given at the beginning of the game. The knife, I had used. The key, I had used.

I thought back to Jameson’s response, when I’d questioned the fact that there were only two objects. I never said that. It took me a moment to see the catch there—the trick.

I’d been given more than just the knife and the key.

The postcard. If there was any chance that Jameson had been planning this game for more than a day, it had to be included on the list of pre-game items. I pulled it out of my back pocket and put it on the blanket beside the other objects.

A key. A knife. A postcard. And… I wracked my mind and then cursed. “The black light.” I hadn’t brought it with me.

“I’m a generous man, Heiress.” The next thing I knew, Jameson was twirling the black light between his fingers, one by one.

I reached out and nabbed it. “Four objects,” I said out loud. “A knife. A key. A postcard. A black light. I’ve already used the knife and the key.”

I turned on the black light, shining it on the liquid in the vial, raking the beam over every inch of the no-longer-a-box. When that yielded nothing, I tried it on the postcard. Still nothing. I paused.

Thinking back to our conversation on the palace rooftop above the gardens… Jameson hadn’t actually denied that there was invisible writing on the postcard. He’d used the word maybe .

Maybe he’d decided against using invisible ink because it had been done before.

And maybe not , I thought. Setting the black light aside temporarily, I uncorked the vial, then dipped the end of my T-shirt into the liquid inside. I went to brush the liquid onto the postcard, but Jameson stopped me.

“Not yet, Heiress.”

Not yet? Like the moment when he’d told me I was looking for a box, that hint felt both deliberate and insufficient to give me any insight into what I was supposed to do next.

It was a very Jameson Hawthorne kind of hint.

Still lounging on the blanket, he looked up at me, a deceptively angelic expression on his face. “I could probably be seduced into saying more,” he told me.

My lips curved, but that didn’t stop me from turning his own words back at him. “Not yet.”

Later, I would kiss that smug expression off his face.

Later, I would let him demonstrate all the many, many reasons he had to be that smug in the first place.

But for now…

“I know a distraction when I see one.” I wasn’t just talking about him . I was talking about the liquid in the vial, about Jameson’s not yet . If it wasn’t time to use the liquid or the postcard—yet—what did that leave?

The music box. The name JOEL . And the label on the vial. HN 4 O.

I thought through it all—once, twice, three times. I brought my gaze to rest on the label.

“They’re letters,” I said.

I looked back to Jameson’s face and saw the tiniest of shifts, the barest hint of his smile deepening.

I was on the right track.

Using the back of the black light, I drew a series of letters in the dirt beside me. “ Joel ,” I murmured. “ HN 4 O .” My eyes cheated up to Jameson’s. “Four N’s, instead of N 4 .”

This time, his Hawthorne poker face was impeccable, but it was too late. I knew when I was onto something.

J O E L H N N N N O

I moved, swift and sure, reordering the letters, unscrambling them and writing them anew in the dirt below the original.

J O H N… I paused, then saw the rest of it. L E N N O N.

“John Lennon,” I said out loud.

Across from me, Jameson sat up and reached for the pomegranate, claiming it back, the expression on his face telling me that he knew exactly what I felt like in that moment.

He knew exactly how good it felt to win.

I did a search on my phone for John Lennon and Prague . “Bingo.”

“Saying bingo is a very good look for you, Heiress.”

That was yet another invitation—yet more temptation—but I didn’t take him up on it. Instead, I collected my objects. The knife. The key. The postcard. The black light. I grabbed the vial, too, just in case Jameson’s not yet meant the contents would come in handy later, even though I’d already used the label.

I picked up the music box last. “One question.” I stood, looking down at Jameson, part of me wishing that I was just a little less competitive and little bit more easily distracted. “What’s the song?”

I turned the crank—slowly, gingerly—to those same four notes.

“Excellent question, Persephone.” Jameson popped an entire handful of pomegranate seeds into his mouth. “As it happens, that particular John Lennon song is called ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’”