Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 36

Chapter 36

T here wasn’t much he could do inside the lighthouse, where there was no light, no heat, no blankets.

Nothing but Harry and me.

He started by wringing out my hair, then his fingers worked their way gently through it, ridding it of tangles one by one. His own soaking shirt came off next, and he pulled me back against him, the heat of his body spreading to mine as he gathered the fabric of my shirt and began wringing it out, too.

Water trailed down my neck, down my back, and his fingers traced the same path.

I wasn’t shivering anymore.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told him.

He didn’t have to speak for me to hear his response. Don’t you know, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward? I would do anything for you.

We made it back to the shack just before dawn. Jackson was there—and awake. The fisherman took one look at the two of us and grunted. Then he went to make himself scarce. “Damn kids.”

Giving Harry a warning look, I went after the man who’d pulled him from the water, all those weeks ago. “Jackson—”

“None of my business,” Jackson growled. He had to have noticed that I’d stopped leaving, had to have noticed the way Harry and I disappeared at night, but he hadn’t said a word about any of it to me.

“It is your business,” I said, and when Jackson didn’t reply, I forced myself to say something that I really didn’t want to be saying. “He’s better now. Not completely healed, but well enough to make it across the rocks.”

I wasn’t sure if Harry would ever be completely healed. He’d certainly always have the scars.

“He’s leaving.” I looked away before I elaborated. “And so am I.” That was the first time I’d spoken the words out loud. “I’m leaving Rockaway Watch, Jackson—not with him, I know I can’t go with him. But once I get him far enough away that we can make the call without it being tied back to you, once his father’s people come to get him, I’m leaving, too.”

Jackson stared at me, hard. For a moment, he seemed like the old Jackson Currie, like he might be considering shooting me, just for the hell of it.

“What are you doing, little Hannah?”

I knew somehow that he wasn’t talking about me leaving. He was talking about the rest of it. Harry and me.

I shook my head, refusing to even try to give him an answer to that question when I didn’t have one myself. I couldn’t tell him that I was dancing, living, letting go. I couldn’t begin to describe what it was like, for once in my life, to be seen, to feel .

“I don’t know.” I could admit that. I had to. “But he’s ready.”

Jackson gave me a hard look. “Are you?”

I looked away. I’d known from the beginning that each day that Toby Hawthorne was here, Jackson and I were both in danger.

Harry just hadn’t felt like Toby Hawthorne to me for a very long time.

“I need to go back to my apartment,” I said. It was paid up through the end of the month, but I was betting my landlord would start throwing my things away the very next day after that, legalities be damned. There wasn’t much I wanted.

Some clothes.

My important papers.

My emergency stash of cash.

Ideally, I would have taken my car, too, but that would have required coming back after getting Harry to safety, and I didn’t think I could risk it. Better for Hannah Rooney to have disappeared a couple of weeks before the miraculous reappearance of Toby Hawthorne than after.

Jackson grunted at me again, and I thought that was the end of the conversation, but then he proved me wrong. “You always were the damnedest Rooney.”