Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

I t had been days since I’d been to my place. If I’d been a normal person, that kind of thing probably wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, but I was almost as much of a recluse as Jackson was. I stepped into my apartment assuming that no one had missed me—and then I saw the note.

My sister’s name was written in all-capital letters at the top of the page. KAYLIE. The only thing below it was a time, underlined with a heavy hand: 8 PM .

I had no way of knowing who had left this message or when, but I knew it was from my mother, and I knew better than to ignore it. Best-case scenario, that 8 PM referred to tonight. Worst-case scenario, I’d missed the summons and would have to come up with a plausible explanation about where I’d been.

As eight o’clock approached, I made my way to my car. This time, when I pulled onto the dirt road that dead-ended at the Rooney compound, the number of cars parked outside made it clear: I hadn’t missed anything, and I wasn’t the only one who had been summoned.

This was a family affair.

I let myself in. A dozen people were crowded into the kitchen, including both of my parents. There was food on the stove and the countertops, lots of it. Everyone else was wearing black. I was wearing jeans and a faded gray sweatshirt. No one gave them or me a second look until my mother turned to face me. The effect was instantaneous.

When Eden Rooney took notice of something, everyone else did, too.

“Glad to see you made it to your sister’s wake.” My mother’s tone was hard to read. “Hope the scumbag reporters didn’t bother you on the way in.”

Reporters? Old instincts kept me from betraying even a hint of surprise. “I didn’t see any.”

“Imagine that.” Her lips curled slightly, and I thought about the many and varied methods my family might have used to run off unwanted visitors.

“Where are the dogs?” I asked.

“This is private property.” My mother was a master at answering questions by not answering them. “Not my fault if someone ignores the No Trespassing signs.”

There wasn’t a single local reporter who would have taken that chance—not in this town, not anywhere close by. This isn’t just local news , I realized. I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me until then that the fire on Hawthorne Island had probably made national headlines.

Maybe even international.

A private island. A billionaire’s tragedy. Young lives cut short. I tried not to think about the kind of media circus that would happen when Toby Hawthorne reappeared alive—and focused on the other part of what my mother had said instead.

This was my sister’s wake.

Rooneys didn’t do funerals. Bodies were always burned—legally or otherwise—no evidence left behind. Kaylie had already been ashes , so that was taken care of. There would be no official burial, no gravestone, no minister or priest.

In our family, there was only ever a wake.

“She wouldn’t like so many people wearing black,” I said. It was unlike me to have said anything. That was Invisibility 101.

“Think she’d approve of gray?” my mother asked me. Her voice was flat, but there was something almost human in her expression.

“I doubt it,” I said, because the truth was that my sister would have hated my sweatshirt.

You beautiful bitch. You glorious thing, you. She’d always seen me completely differently than the way I’d seen myself.

My mother assessed me for a moment, then walked to stand right in front of me. “I know you, Hannah.” I thought for a moment that she might know something, but then she continued, “You need to hear me say it.” She held my gaze. “She’s dead.”

My mother didn’t know—not about where I’d been or what I’d been doing or who I’d been doing it for. But she did know that until I’d heard her say it, part of me had still— still, still, still —refused to fully accept that Kaylie was gone.

I knew it was true. I felt it. But I’d been hiding from it for days.

“I know.” My voice came out hoarse.

“Do you, Hannah?” She studied my face. I knew what she was looking for. Fire. Fury. Eden Rooney wanted to see some hint of violence in me, some desire for retribution.

I gave her nothing. It didn’t matter that I’d felt those things, all of them—that I still felt them every time I looked at Toby Hawthorne and forgot to recast him as Harry in my mind.

I was not my mother’s daughter.

“Eden.” My father spoke from behind her, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Let the girl eat.”

Once I left the kitchen, it was easy enough to fade into the background again. I ended up in the den, where a group of my uncles and “uncles” and cousins and “cousins” were gathered for the gnashing of teeth and the drinking of beers.

“— fixers . At least three of them, working for Hawthorne.”

I came in, mid-teeth-gnash, to a conversation I had no context for. One after another, they one-upped each other.

“Damn cops are stonewalling us, which means they got a better offer.”

“Wouldn’t be an issue if state police hadn’t taken over.”

“Even the damn feds are circling.”

I wanted no part of this conversation, but backing out of the room ran the risk of drawing attention.

“So, what?” Rory spat. “We just let them walk all over us because they’ve got money? We let them talk about our Kaylie like this ?” Rory slammed a newspaper down onto the table.

I remembered what my mother had said about reporters, and then I remembered my father’s words, days earlier: They’ll pin this on her. You just wait and see.

I stepped out of the shadows, which was probably a mistake, but almost every mistake I’d ever made, I’d made for Kaylie. I reached for the paper. It took me less than a minute to read the front-page article.

The picture it drew was clear enough. A bad girl—a drug addict with a criminal record. Three promising young men, gone too soon.

“They’re blaming Kaylie for the fire.” I said it out loud. Forget the fact that those three boys had come to Hawthorne Island looking for trouble, forget kerosene —

“It’s bullshit,” Rory growled. “Eden should have let me—”

“Rory.” His father cut him off just as my mother stepped into the den.

“Seems to me,” my mother said slowly, “that this particular problem has taken care of itself. Those boys are dead. Trash took itself out this time.”

I flashed back to tending to Toby Hawthorne’s burns, again and again. Harry. I used the name to build a wall up in my mind. His name is Harry. He’s of no interest to anyone in this room. He’s no one.

“Cat got your tongue, Hannah?” Rory asked suddenly. I heard the seething resentment buried in his tone. I’d seen him weak and punished. He wasn’t going to be forgiving that any time soon, especially when my mother had just shut him down again .

I didn’t give myself long to debate how to respond. All I had to do was pretend that I wasn’t betraying the family, every second of every day. “This is supposed to be a wake,” I said. Rooneys knew how to retaliate, but they also knew how to mourn. “Kaylie was…” How could I even begin to put my sister into words? “She loved hard,” I said quietly.

My sister had never managed to keep anyone at arm’s length. She’d loved them , and they were monsters.

“Kaylie was born hollering at the top of her lungs.” That was my mother, mourning. “Smiled for the first time when she was five weeks old and never stopped.”

Rory stared at me for another second, then lifted his beer. “To Kaylie,” he said sharply.

The toast caught on, and someone shoved a bottle into my hand. “To Kaylie,” I whispered.

Hours later, once they were all well and truly drunk, I managed to slip out. As I walked away from the house I’d grown up in, it hit me that, without Kaylie, there was nothing holding me in Rockaway Watch anymore, nothing stopping me from getting in my car and driving east and never coming back. I could transfer to a community college a thousand miles away, far enough that it wouldn’t be worth the family’s effort to come after me.

With Kaylie dead, they probably wouldn’t even be surprised. All I had to do was leave .

So why did I drive back to my apartment instead? Why did I break down in the shower instead of getting the hell out of Dodge? Why did I get out of the damn shower, get dressed, and decide to go back to the shack?

To him ?