“Like it?”
I smirked. “I’ll like it better once I know what it does.”
“They’re communicators. As soon as I activate it, all three pieces will connect, no matter how far apart they are. You could be on the other side of the country, and I would still hear you.”
“How? That’s on your wrist,” I said. “Unless you have some weird ear anatomy going on—”
He chuckled, and after the day we’d both had, it was a welcome sound. “The cuff links are a little different. They come with a piece that slides on the inner part of the ear, right on the cartilage.” He turned to show me, tapping on the part of his ear that stuck out. “It’s in there, and it won’t fall off until I decide to remove it.”
I tried to spot whatever it was he was talking about, but to no avail. “Who has the third piece? Lila?”
He shook his head. “I’ll make one for her eventually, if she wants. But I had one smuggled out to Knox. He should be receiving it in the next couple days.”
“You—what? Knox?” My mouth dropped open. “How did you—”
“The less you know, the better,” he said. “Just trust me on this, Kitty. They’ll work. And whether you leave or Lila and I leave, we’ll all have a way to communicate.”
I threw my arms around him, my heart swelling with gratitude and that same acceptance I’d felt earlier, when he’d done nothing more than help me with my crutches. This was what family really was. “You are a genius.”
“I’m not. I just see things differently, that’s all.” He awkwardly hugged me back, and a moment passed before he said, “I’m sorry we didn’t get to know each other growing up.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I said, still holding on to him. He relaxed a little in my embrace. “We’ll make up for it when the war’s over. We’ll go on vacation somewhere, talk about stuff, figure each other out—”
“Is that what siblings do?” he joked. “My brother—our brother, I guess—he mostly ignored me.”
Jameson, Greyson’s older brother and the original heir to the title of Prime Minister, had been killed in the same bombing that had taken the lives of the real Daxton Hart and his wife. Greyson had only been spared thanks to that marvelous brain of his, when he’d skipped the outing to tinker on his inventions instead, and I couldn’t have been more grateful for it. “I won’t ignore you,” I said, as I let him go and tapped my cuff. “I won’t even ask how to turn this thing off in case you get too chatty.”
“There’s a gemstone on the side,” he said with a smile. “All you have to do is slide it down. Slide it back up to turn it on. Obviously you’ll want to keep it on as much as possible, just in case, but if you absolutely need your privacy—well, I didn’t want to give you any reason to take it off.”
“I won’t,” I promised, and I pressed my lips together. “I’ll miss you, Greyson. Stay safe, all right? Whether I’m the one who goes, or you and Lila are.”
“You too,” he said, all traces of humor evaporating. “If he lets you leave, this way you’ll be able to tell Knox where to find you. You’ll be able to rejoin them.”
A second chance with the Blackcoats. It seemed almost too good to be true. I nudged his arm. “Don’t jinx it. Daxton could decide not to let any of us go.”
“It’s possible,” he allowed, and for a moment, a shadow passed over his face. “A lot of things are possible. But you and Lila both made very good points. He might have won a few battles, but he’ll figure out soon enough that he’s losing the war. If he backs out, we’ll renegotiate in the near future. Either way, we’re all smarter than him individually, and he knows it. He’d be an idiot to keep all three of us here indefinitely and give us a chance to work together.”
“He is an idiot,” I said. “One who thinks he’s a genius. They’re the most dangerous kind.”
“No, the most dangerous kind are the ones with power,” he said.
“And Daxton now single-handedly rules over the entire country.”
Greyson covered my hand with his and squeezed. The weight of the amendment’s implications settled on my shoulders, and I took a deep, calming breath. The crazier and more desperate Daxton grew, the more enemies he would make. The situation seemed impossible right now, but he was slowly digging his own grave. We just had to be patient.