“No,” Avery murmured. “This isn’t just a challenge or a game or a diversion to you.” She paused. “Is it Ian?”
The question cut into him, but beneath his touch, she was soft and warm and there. Five more letters etched onto her back, and he could barely breathe. M-A-Y-B-E.
“Maybe?” Avery asked softly.
“I know he’s using us,” Jameson told her, his voice catching in his throat. “Using me.” She’d called Tahiti. He couldn’t stop there. A deal was a deal. “Maybe, on some level, I want to prove Ian made a mistake staying away all these years. Maybe a small part of me wants to impress him. Maybe I want to make him want me, so that I can be the one who walks away.”
Avery turned then, her dress still undone in the back, her hand coming up to his face. “You,” she said, her voice as raw as he felt, “are a blazing fire.” When she said it, he could believe it. “You’re a force of nature who makes the impossible possible without batting an eye. You’re brilliant and devious and kind.”
It was the last description that he had the hardest time believing, the last one that undid him. “I’m also very handsome,” he quipped, but the words came out thick.
“You,” Avery told him, her voice reverberating through every bone in his body, “are everything.”
She was. This was. “Is that all?” he murmured, with a crooked little smile.
She matched his smile like a poker player matching a bet. “Isn’t that enough?”
Jameson leaned forward, reaching behind her to pull the zipper on her dress slowly, tortuously upward. “I’m a Hawthorne, Heiress. Nothing is ever enough.”
CHAPTER 24
JAMESON
They went to the opera. Twenty minutes in, per the instructions they’d received, Jameson and Avery ducked out of their private box and made their way to the elevator.
“This is where we leave you,” Avery told Oren. The invitation had been very clear.
“I don’t like this.” Avery’s bodyguard folded his arms over his chest and surveyed his charge. “But threats against you are at an all-time low, and if the two of you are going to do this, you need to go before anyone realizes you’ve left your box.”
Seconds later, Jameson and Avery were alone in the elevator. With his heart beating a little harder, a little faster, Jameson laid the gold key that had accompanied their invitation against the elevator’s control panel.
Every button lit up emerald green.
Beside him, Avery pressed in the code they’d been given. The elevator went pitch-black. With a whoosh, they descended, past the ground floor, farther than one would go for a parking garage or basement. Down, down, down.
When the elevator doors opened again, Jameson was overcome with a sense of overwhelming vastness as he stepped out into some kind of cavern, the sound of his footsteps echoing. Avery followed, and a torch burst to life to their left.
Not a natural cavern, Jameson realized. Man-made. A tunnel. And cutting through that tunnel was an underground river. Even with the torchlight, it looked black.
As Jameson stepped forward, muted light sparked to life at the water’s edge. A lantern. It took Jameson a moment to register the person holding the lantern. A child. Jameson put the boy’s age at eleven or twelve.
Silently, the child turned and stepped out onto the water—onto a boat. It looked a bit like a gondola, long and thin. The child attached the lantern to the top, picked up a pole, and turned to the two of them, waiting.
Jameson and Avery walked the stone path to the boat. They stepped on board. The child said nothing as he began to row, the pole digging into the bottom of the canal.
Jameson went to take it from him. “I can—”
“No.” The kid didn’t even look at him, just tightened his grip on the pole.
“Are you okay?” Avery asked, concerned. “Is someone forcing you to do this? If you need help…”
“No,” the kid said again with a tone that made Jameson wonder if he’d underestimated his age. “I’m fine. Better than fine.”
The underground river bent. The boat took the turn, and Jameson realized that this part of the tunnel wasn’t made of ordinary stone. The walls were black, but it seemed like light shined within them. Some kind of quartz? Silence descended until all Jameson could hear was the sound of the boat cutting through the water as the boy poled them onward.
“We’re the only ones out here,” Avery said quietly, her voice echoing on the water. “Down here.”
“There are many paths,” the boy said, something almost leonine in the set of his features. “Many entrances, many exits. All roads lead to the Mercy if you’re welcome there—and none do if you are not.”
Three more bends of the river, and then the boat ran up on some kind of beach. Torches burst into flame, encircling the boat, illuminating a door. Standing in front of the door was Rohan. He wore a red tuxedo with a black shirt underneath and stood like a soldier at attention, but torchlight showed the expression on his face to be utterly relaxed. Self-satisfied. The way someone is when they’ve won.
“You shouldn’t be working at your age, let alone this late at night,” Avery told the boy who’d brought them here. Her gaze darted toward Rohan. “If he made you think otherwise…”
“The Factotum didn’t make me think anything,” the boy said. His tone was fierce, his chin held high. “And someday, when he’s the Proprietor, I’m going to be Factotum for him.”
CHAPTER 25
JAMESON
Rohan didn’t work for the Factotum. Rohan was the Factotum. Not just a messenger. As Jameson strode forward, words Ian had spoken came back to him. He’d said that Jameson needed the Proprietor’s attention. Not his right-hand man’s. And he’d said that every fifty years or so, the Proprietor of the Devil’s Mercy chose a successor.
“Child labor?” Avery stood toe-to-toe with Rohan. “That can’t be legal.”
“A certain type of child knows how to keep secrets better than adults.” There wasn’t a hint of apology in Rohan’s tone. “The Mercy can’t save every child it finds in a horrific situation, but those it does save rarely regret it in the end.”
Jameson heard layers of meaning in those words. You were that child, weren’t you?
Rohan turned his back on them and placed his right hand flat on a black stone. It flared to life, reading his palm, and triggered the sound of a dozen locks being turned. Rohan stepped back, and the door opened toward them.
“Where angels fear to tread, have your fun instead.” Rohan’s voice was almost musical, but there was something dark in his tone. A promise. One that Jameson suspected that men in Rohan’s position had been making for centuries. “But be warned: The house always wins.”
With no hesitation—like a person incapable of hesitation—Jameson stepped through the door. The room beyond was round and domed, the ceiling at least two stories high, the architecture vaguely Roman. Other doors were barely visible in the walls.
Many entrances, many exits. Jameson thought briefly of Hawthorne House and its labyrinthine secret passages, and then he focused on his surroundings, on the parts of the domed room far more visible than the doors.
Five soaring marble arches marked larger openings in the curved wall at equidistant intervals around the room. Thick, rippling curtains hung down from the arches, all of them black, each made of a different fabric. Velvet, silk…
Avery came to stand beside him, and Jameson continued his assessment. The floor beneath their feet was made of golden granite. In the center of the room, there was a circle of columns. Half of them surged up to the domed ceiling; the other half were only as tall as Jameson’s shoulder. On top of each of the smaller columns, there was a shallow golden pan filled with water.
Floating in the water in each of those golden pans was a lily.
Jameson strode inward, and as he did, he noticed the design on the floor, encircled by the columns. A lemniscate. The formal term came to Jameson before the common one. The infinity symbol. The pattern had been laid into the granite in sparkling black and white.