Chapter 58
JAMESON
Jameson stared at the trio of lemniscates scrawled onto the page. Beside him, Lyra and Grayson were already going back and forth on the poem, but Jameson barely even heard them.
He thought about the infinity symbol in the atrium of the Devil’s Mercy.
He thought about the ring he’d given Avery.
He thought about Avery’s note—not agood-byenote, because it couldn’t be good-bye.
Jameson allowed his gaze to travel farther down the page. Beneath the trio of infinity symbols, there was something else: dots, arranged just so, five of them no bigger than the head of the pen, the sixth only slightly larger.
“All those games of the old man’s.” Jameson trailed a finger over the dots, vaguely aware that Lyra and Grayson had stopped talking the moment he’d spoken. “All those Saturday mornings.” He thought about his grandfather’s message to Alice in Prague. “He said she always did love puzzles.”
Alice, my Alice.
My love, my love, my one and only love.
“What if it was her?” Jamesonfeltthe words as he said them, a rumbling hum of vocal cords at the base of his throat. “What if it was Alice who taughthimhow to play?”
For as long as Jameson could remember, the great Tobias Hawthorne had been recognized as a once-in-a-generation kind of mind. The part of the old man that had always been inventing puzzles and codes, that was the same part of him that had been able to look five moves ahead and kill nine birds with one stone. His was a mind that had created a modern American dynasty—or so they’d all believed.
“What if it was always her?” Jameson stared at Alice’s poem, at the lemniscates and the dots. “Or, if notalways, at least parts of it—because that’s what this poem seems to be saying, isn’t it?The hand so subtly guiding yours…”
“Well, it’s hardly likely to be mine.”Lyra met Jameson’s gaze head-on. He hadn’t been talking to her, hadn’t been talking to either of them, really, but Lyra’s reply, in that whiskey voice of hers—nothing like Avery’s—was damn near impossible to ignore. “We’re clearly meant to read that line as implying the reverse,” Lyra continued, “that itwasAlice’s hand guiding his, even if the world—and your grandfather—would consider thathardly likely.”
Because he was the lord of the manor, and she was just the lady.
“Nash always said our grandmother loved parties.” Grayson’s eyes flicked toward Lyra’s. “And pretty dresses and—”
“Masking what she was capable of?” Lyra finished.
Listening to the two of them go back and forth, so effortlessly, in a way that Jameson recognized all too well,hurt.
Everything about being here with Grayson and Lyrahurt.
“Shut the hell up.” Jameson felt his lips curl as the words ripped their way out of his body. “Both of you.Shut the hell up.”
“I don’t think I will.” Grayson had always had a way of making hedging statements sound ominous. Hedidn’t thinkhe would, but somehow, his delivery made that sound more like a threat than a flat refusal would have. “And you shouldn’t want us to. Three minds are better than one,Jamie. You damn well know it, and Avery deserves more than you purposefully putting yourself at a disadvantage to spite me.” Grayson’s eyes refused to let Jameson’s go. “She deserves better from you thanthis, and you damn well know that, too.”
Iknow it? She deserves better fromme?Jameson was going to kill him.I am going to kill him.
“No killing Grayson!” Xander bounded into the room, Nash on his heels. Clearly, Xander had gone for reinforcements.
Probably not the worst idea.
“Tell me again”—Jameson took an ominous step toward Grayson—“what the love ofmylife deserves.”
“I’ll tell you,” a voice said from behind Xander and Nash.
Jameson’s head whipped toward the door as Libby pushed through his brothers. Her hair was a mess—a dark, rainbow mess. She wore one of Nash’s old T-shirts, which hung nearly to her knees.
“Avery deservesus, Jameson—all of us, whatever it takes.” Libby had always been the more tentative sister, a people pleaser, but there was absolutely nothing tentative about Libby Hawthorne right now. “You know what Avery would say, if she could see you like this.”
Libby might as well have punched a fist through Jameson’s rib cage and ripped out his heart. The words Toby had said in London rang in Jameson’s mind like the aftereffects of a bomb going off:It would break Avery’s heart to come back and find you covered in ashes.
And damn it, they were right—Toby, Libby, Grayson,damn it all to hell, they wereright, and Jamesondidknow it, just like he knew on some level that this wasn’t really Grayson’s fault.Or Lyra’s.Jameson hadn’t even let Grayson tell Lyra why she couldn’t go around asking questions about Alice, so why the hell wouldn’t she have done exactly that? Whywouldshe have been discreet whenJamesonhad insisted on keeping her in the dark?
