There was no telling how many things Alice had nudged, how long this cascade had been building, what all the moving parts here were, but two things were clear enough: Avery was exactly where Jameson’s grandmother wanted her—and so are we.
Why? Why bring us here after willingly sacrificing your own life for ours?Jameson sorted through possible answers to that question before arriving at one in particular. “It wasn’tusyou wanted here, was it?”
A north wind blows, the duchess had said, when she’d sent Jameson back to Hawthorne House.
“Where’s Nora?” Grayson asked, his thoughts operating in tandem with Jameson’s.
Nora, who wants to tear it all down, Jameson thought.Nora, who was promised a place in the Crucible only to have that place given to Avery instead.
And yes, Nora had seemed to believe that Alice had been cornered into that by Emily—but what if Alicehadn’tbeen played? What if she’d been executingherplan, all along?
“I think it’s time,” Grayson told their grandmother, his voice more commanding than Jameson had ever heard it, “that you deal us in on this plan of yours.”
“Is that right?” Alice murmured.
“You believed in the Gilded Blade once,” Jameson replied, thinking back to her poem.
“Parts of me still do,” Alice replied. “But love…” She trailed off.
Jameson’s throat tightened. “Love is a powerful thing.”
“I loved your grandfather,” Alice said. “So much that I chosehimover everything else. In nineteen sixty-seven, I could have ascended, but I chose to return to Tobias. I was given a certain amount of time to prove that he could be great, that I needed no other placement.”
“Youmadehim,” Jameson said.
“It wasn’t all me. Tobias wasremarkable.” It couldn’t have been clearer that Alice didn’t use that word lightly. “And I see so much of him in the four of you.” She reached out to touch Grayson’s shoulder. “An unparalleled force of will, the ability tomakethings happen, to wield the type of unspoken power that is so impossible to deny.”
Alice’s eyes locked on to Jameson’s next.
“Fearlessness. Hunger. Passion. Drive. That uncanny ability to take the most outlandish risks and walk away unscathed from things that ordinary men would not walk away from at all.” Alice smiled. “Your brother Xander has your grandfather’s unabashed sense of self, his mechanical genius, not to mention the ability to think so far out of the box that there might as well not evenbea box. And then there’s Nash.” Alice shook her head in a rueful sort of way that reminded Jameson that she’dknownNash. “Even as a child, Nash had the ability to tune out all the noise. He was steady and sure and willing to fail fifty times over if that was what it took to prove the fifty-first time was the charm. Always so independent. He’s grown into the kind of man who is gentle but never weak. He has that way about him, that very rare way that says to anyone who needs to hear it,You are safe with me.”
“The old man wasn’t like that.” Grayson’s voice came out tight. “At all.”
“Perhaps not with you,” Alice replied.
“We’re better men than Tobias Hawthorne ever was,” Jameson said. It had never been difficult for him to believe that when it came to Grayson or Xander or Nash. But saying the words to Alice, Jameson believed it of himself, too.
He was a better man. Agoodman.
“That’s always the hope for anyone seeking to truly leave their mark on this world, isn’t it?” Alice said. “To create a legacy where your strength lives on in someone or somethingbetterthan you ever were?”
Jameson could hear the old man saying, in his final message to Alice, that she had her legacy and that Jameson and his brothers were the old man’s.I leave them as works in progress and ask only that you save your judgment for when they are done.
And here was Alice, rendering that judgment at long last.
But Jameson heard more in what she’d just said than that. “We aren’t your legacy,” Jameson said. She’d said someone orsomething. “However this grand plan of yours is meant to end—thatis.”
Love was a powerful thing, but for Alice, it clearly was not theonlything.My story is that of a mother and a wife, she’d written all those years ago.What more could any woman want from life?
But Alicedidwant. She wanted, and she planned, and she made things happen, and for the first time, it occurred to Jameson that it might not have been an accident that he’d seen her in Prague, that she might have meant for him to, that it was fully possible she’d started the ball rolling on purpose.
A nudge here. A nudge there. To what end?
“Why is Avery here?” Jameson searched Alice’s eyes for some sort of answer. “Why is Eve? And Nora.” They’d led Nora here. “Whatexactlyis your plan? What’s the endgame here?”
In response to that question, Alice raised the hood on her cloak. “Sometimes,” she said, “a phoenix needs to burn.”
Jameson stopped breathing.The explosives.“Take me to Avery,” he said, the words coming out halfway between an ultimatum and a plea.
