Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

I bought him the damn lemons and dumped them on his bed. That didn’t stop my patient from hitting me up for more pills. It didn’t stop him from pushing every button he thought he could get away with pushing.

His burns were improving, day by day—all of them, now.

“What are your thoughts,” he asked me loftily, “on scarred men?”

“Men?” I gave him a look. “If I see any, I’ll let you know.”

Time was measured in paper sculptures—cubes and pyramids, boxes and throwing stars, and little origami birds. He kept folding them, and despite my best efforts to resist, I kept picking up the gauntlet and unfolding them. Part of me was expecting another message. Everything hurts. But every sheet of notebook paper that I unfolded was blank.

I kept them in his stolen wallet. In his previous life, my patient hadn’t carried much cash. Besides a single hundred-dollar bill, all I’d found in the larger pockets of his wallet was a small metal token, round and flat, roughly the size and shape of a quarter, with a series of concentric circles etched into the metal.

There was no logical reason for me to start carrying that token with me in the pocket of my scrubs, but I did. Days at the hospital, nights at the shack, I carried it with me, and every time my fingers brushed the metal, every single time, I thought, How long until we can move him?

How long until I could forget any of this ever happened? Forget him?

And then, one night, in my apartment, as I defeated yet another one of his folded paper cubes, I smelled something. The barest hint of lemon.

I brought the paper closer to my face to sniff it, then crawled across my bed to hold it closer to the light—closer to my bedside lamp. At first, I saw nothing, but as the page took on heat from the bulb, words appeared.

MINIM.

MURDRUM.

AIBOHPHOBIA.

“Invisible ink,” I said, the way another person might have said an obscenity. “And palindromes.”

“Took you long enough.” Harry somehow knew I’d figured it out before I ever said a word.

“Very funny,” I told him.

“Lemon juice,” he replied. I thought of his grocery lists, his incessant requests for lemons .

“Stand up,” I bit out. It was something we were working on every day. He hadn’t managed it without my support yet.

He never stayed up for long.

“ Minim ,” Harry said, relishing the word and showing no inclination whatsoever to rise, “a single drop of liquid—such as bourbon. Murdrum , the murder of an unknown person. Apropos, is it not?”

I glared at him. “It’s about to be.”

“And aibohphobia .” He was getting way too much pleasure out of this. “A fear of palindromes.”

“You made that up,” I said.

“Did not.” He had a good enough poker face that I couldn’t tell whether he was bluffing, so I repeated my order for him to stand up.

This time, he humored me. My hands knew exactly where to lend their support. His body knew how to take it.

“Try taking a step,” I ordered, all business. I prepared myself for a snappy comeback, but the palindrome lover in front of me made a surprisingly drama-free attempt to shift his weight to one foot and lift the other from the floor.

It dragged.

“Grace and beauty was he,” Harry drawled. His was a subtle sarcasm, betrayed more by the words than his tone.

“It’s the head injury.” I didn’t know what kind of damage his brain might have taken from the fall, but that was the conclusion that made the most sense. His legs weren’t burned, and there was no evidence of spinal trauma.

I tried to lower him back down, but Harry resisted. The pale ring around the outside of his deep green iris was more visible some days than others.

“You can take a break,” I told him.

I saw his pupils expand, black overtaking deepest green like a midnight wave devouring the edges of a white sand beach.

“Show me what’s in your pocket,” he proposed, “and I’ll humble myself by trying again.”

If Harry was humble , I was the Queen of England. “I’m not showing you what’s in my pocket unless you sit .”

He sat. After only a single moment of hesitation, I pulled out the token I’d taken from his wallet.

He stared at it. “Where did you get that?” I hadn’t heard a tone like that out of him since I’d gotten him through the worst of the pain. Brutal. Raw.

“You recognize it,” I said, looking down at the token.

“Where?” That was the kind of demand that cut through the air like a sword made of solid ice.

“Your wallet.” I wasn’t sure why I even told him that, or why I didn’t fight it when he plucked that coin-like disk from my fingers and hurled it, full force, against the wall.

For once in my life, I flinched.

The door to the shack flew inward, and Jackson looked from me to Harry and back again.

Not Harry , a voice in my mind whispered. I couldn’t shake the bone-deep awareness that this was Toby . “You recognized that disk,” I said. “What is it? What do you remember?”

“Nothing.” He wasn’t lying. I knew that, the same way he always seemed to know when I was. “I don’t remember a damn thing, but somehow, I know : You shouldn’t have that.”

For the longest moment, I stared at him, trying to stare into him, trying to tell if any subconscious part of him was starting to remember who he’d been before.

“You can have it,” I said quietly, going to retrieve the token.

“No.” There was that tone again— brutal , raw , desperate , even. “Hide it somewhere. Whatever you do, don’t let anyone else see it.”

That night and into the next morning, when I hid the token beneath a loose floorboard in the shack, I found myself wondering why Toby Hawthorne had come to Rockaway Watch, drunk and high and looking for trouble. For the first time, I wondered if the billionaire’s son had been running from something.

I wondered if he’d had a reason to burn that mansion down.