Alice laid her palm on the stone wall and triggered a new passageway to open. “This tunnel will lead you out. All the way out.”
“I’m not going anywhere without her.” Jameson would have died for Avery Grambs. In a heartbeat. In an instant.Like the sun and the moon, I loved her.
“There is a path forward,” Alice said calmly. “But only one. Your Heiress will not find it with you there. You will be nothing but a distraction, so you must ask yourself a question, dear boy: When I chosemyheir, when I sent Avery to you, did I choose well?”
Jameson was a fighter. He wanted—with every cell in his body, with all he was and all he ever would be—tofight. For Avery.
For you, Heiress. Always you.
“Do you remember the mural in Prague?” Alice said intently. “Orpheus and Eurydice. Surely you recall how that story ends. Tell me, dear boy, will you look back over your shoulder in doubt, or will you trust her to be capable of following you out? Is Avery Kylie Grambs all I believe her to be? Do youseeher, Jameson? Truly see her?”
In that poem of Alice’s, she’d said thatat timesher husband had seen her—but only at times.
“Avery’s never the damsel.” Grayson’s voice hitched. “It’s always us.”
“There’s a path forward for her,” Alice told Jameson. “She can survive. She can change the world. All you have to do is let her.”
“I can’t.” Jameson shook his head. “I can’t leave her here. You can’t ask me to—”
“I can,” Alice said. “And you must.”
A nudge here. A nudge there.
“It goes both ways.” Grayson gripped Jameson’s shoulder. “Familygoes both ways, Jamie.”
“There’s a path forward,” Alice said again. “But only one, and the two of you must go.Now.And whatever you do, dear boys, don’t look back.”
Chapter 91
ROHAN
Rohan had never believed himself to be either a hero or a villain.But I played the hero well enough. More fool, I.A grand sacrifice, a romantic gesture, and all of it had been for naught. Twisting the metal quill between his fingers, Rohan tried his best to focus on what mattered now: the remaining players and the board. That seemed a better use of whatever time he had left than focusing on the undeniable fact that if he made it out of here alive, he would have nothing,benothing.
“The whole damn sky.” Toby spoke for the first time in a small eternity. He locked his eyes on to Rohan’s. As green as Toby’s irises were, they might as well have been pools of darkness.
Rohan waited for Toby to explain what he’d just said, but Rohan tired of waiting before Toby tired of saying nothing. “Care to elaborate?”
Toby closed the space between them a bit, and Rohan reconsidered his appraisal of the other man’s eyes. They weren’t depthless pools. They were live-wire eyes, electric and charged and on the verge.
“The whole damn sky.” There was something raw in Toby’s words, something uncomfortably sure. “That’s what you give her. If you make itout, if you get the chance, you give her your everything, on bended knee if you have to—the world and the whole damn sky.”
“I already gave up everything,” Rohan replied.More fool, I.
“I didn’t say everything. I saidyoureverything, and I didn’t say to give it up. I said to give it to her. There’s a difference.”
“I’m not in the mood for a lecture, Mr. Hawthorne.” Rohan offered up a hard-edged smile. “Or is this closer to last rites?”
There was a flicker in those very Hawthorne eyes then, the slightest of tells, and Rohan realized…
“It is, isn’t it?” Rohan considered that, considered the man before him. “Last rites—but not for me. When these doors open, you don’t intend to run to safety, do you?”
“I have spent my life running.” There was a low hum of energy in Toby’s voice now. “But wherever you go in this life, you can’t outrun yourself.”
Rohan should have had an automatic, appropriately sardonic reply to that, but nothing came.
Nothing.
Nihil.
