“That stays here,” the bartender said. “And you have the Factotum’s word that no harm will come to Savannah Grayson this night. I would suggest you give the two of them a moment. You’ll not be getting ahold of that ledger twice.”
There’s something in the ledger.Jamesonfeltthat—in his bones, in his blood, in every hollow of his soul that needed to find something at the Mercy this night. The old man had left that puzzle in Tuscany for Alice for a reason.
He’d known something—and wanted her to know that he knew it.
His heart thudding like a slow and steady war drum in his chest, Jameson checked the urge to go after Savannah and went through the ledger page by page, scanning each and every bet that had been placed over the past two centuries, stopping only when he came to the one that had been placed onhislife, a year and a half earlier.
There, in the margins of the ledger, was a message written in tiny, perfect script.
Go home, dear boy.
Alice.Jameson barely stopped himself from saying the name out loud. Alice was the only person who had ever called himdear boy.
She’d known he would come here. Her words rang with warning.Which means thereissomething to be found here.
Jameson closed the ledger and made his way toward the atrium, stepping into the massive room to find it empty but for Zella and Savannah,who stood in the center of the atrium. Jameson’s gaze was drawn—eerily, magnetically drawn—to the massive lemniscate in the black-and-white granite beneath their feet.
Infinity.Jameson stared at the symbol, striding toward the duchess and Savannah.Avery’s note.Jameson had been so sure the lemniscate that Avery had left for him had been a reference to the ring he’d given her, to Prague, but here one was in the Devil’s Mercy in a grand room he and Avery had visited before.
The world around Jameson seemed to fall into slow motion as he stopped just short of Savannah and Zella and turned, taking in everything he could see: the domed ceiling, the soaring archways leading farther into the club, the Roman-style columns that encircled the lemniscate, half surging up to the domed ceiling and half no taller than Jameson’s shoulder.
Each of the smaller columns held a golden pan, and floating in the water in each and every one, there was a flower. A lily.
Acalla lily.
Jameson didn’t even remember moving, but suddenly, he was standing dead-center of the lemniscate, and Savannah and Zella were staring at him.
This is something.Jameson didn’t know what to make of those calla lilies. He could hardly feel his own body, his mind was racing so fast. On some level, he was aware of Zella pressing something into Savannah’s hand.A ring?
Jameson blinked, and suddenly Savannah was running back the way they’d come.Why? What’s happening? What is this?Jameson could barely even hear his own thoughts over the wordless roar building in his mind. Every time he blinked, he saw an electric image of a calla lily, like lightning cutting through velvety darkness.
He saw an entire sea of calla lilies washed up on Hawthorne Island in the wake of Avery’s disappearance.
“You have questions,” the duchess said beside him. “Do not ask them.”
Jameson had been warnednotto ask the duchess for a favor thatwould lead to devastating consequences for them both.Where is she? Where is Avery? What have they done with her? What do you know?
Jameson’s brain pounded. His throatburnedwith every single question he did not ask. “Calla lilies,” he said instead. It would be one thing if he’d thought the flowers were Zella’s design choice, but the lilies-in-water décor predated her tenure as Factotum.
A year and a half earlier, Jameson had stood in this room and seen the exact same thing.Fresh calla lilies, floating on water.In this year’s Grandest Game, Jameson had designed a music box puzzle and he’d put a calla lily in that music box, on a whim.Whythatflower?Why hadthatflower been floating around in his subconscious?
Because I saw them here.
Zella hooked an arm through Jameson’s and took him on a promenade of the room. “Was that a question?”
You have questions, she’d warned.Do not ask them.
“I am not calling in my favor,” Jameson murmured, trying for a casual smile, in case anyone waswatching. “I am simply commenting on the Mercy’s décor.”
“Lovely, is it not?” Zella said.
Jameson’s gaze was drawn back to the lemniscate in the sparkling floor, and he flashed back to his first time in the atrium—to the way that Rohan had named the gemstones in the design.
Onyx.Rohan had thrown his voice in a way that had made Jameson whirl.And white agate.
Agate.
Agate.
