Page 173 of The Most Dangerous Games

Alek freezes. It’s like seeing a ghost walk into sunlight.

“How?” Alek finally blurts. “What are you doing here?”

Hannah looks tired. Alive. Real. She takes one step forward.

She doesn’t run. She doesn’t do melodrama. She just says, “I’m sorry.”

Alek’s throat locks. “For what?”

“For leaving you with him,” Hannah says.

Alek is already moving. She grabs Hannah—hard. Not gentle. The type of hug that’s half relief, half anger.

Hannah’s voice is in her ear. “We’re alive. That’s the first miracle.”

Alek pulls back, eyes wet. “Why didn’t you say goodbye?”

Hannah swallows. “Because if I said it out loud, it would’ve been real.”

“After this . . . you and me. No more disappearing. Deal?”

Hannah nods once. “Deal.”

Wyatt lifts both hands, palms out, like he’s trying not to get hit.

“I know it’s a lot, Alek,” Wyatt says. “We’re gonna need a minute.”

“More than a minute,” Jimmy says, jumping back in. “Everybody just hang in, because the story you’re about to hear is worth it. And you know I love a good story.”

He pauses and says, “There have been times over the past few days when I wasn’t sure. But now here we are, we’re still together, and it’s finally going to end the way it should’ve ended a long time ago.”

The air in this spacious, sunny room is crackling with excitement and Jimmy’s energy. Alek thinks it might be enough in the moment to power this skyscraper.

But she continues to feel dumbstruck by the presence of Hannah. In Dubai. In this room. Back with Wyatt, back with all these people who mean so much to her.

Alek doesn’t know whether to cry or scream. For the first time in a long time, she feels something close to hope.

And it scares the hell out of her.

120.

Jimmy points at Wyatt like he’s calling the first speaker at a meeting.

“You start,” Jimmy says to Wyatt. “How you got here is just as wild as how I got here.”

“Never a doubt, right?” Wyatt says, bumping fists with him. “I heard a guy say people think you’re crazy until you’re a genius.”

Jimmy smiles. “Some nerd must have said that.”

Wyatt looks at Alek, then Jack, then Zhi—meeting their eyes like he owes them something he can’t dodge anymore.

“It started in Hamburg,” Wyatt tells them. “I left the villa in Tuscany, spur of the moment, running hot on impulse, because I couldn’t live with what I’d helped set in motion. And because there was one person I needed to see before the end.”

He nods toward Hannah.

Wyatt tells them he went to find her—not for strategy, not for optics, not for the game—just to talk. To say what he didn’t say when she walked away.

Hannah’s mouth tightens with emotion, but she doesn’t look away. “I didn’t say goodbye,” she says quietly. “Neither of us did.”