Jameson made it to the top. The final box—silver, antique, elaborately made—was attached to the chain with wire. Shifting his weight to his left hand, Jameson began pulling at the wires with his right. Eventually, the muscles in his arm began to burn. The wire bit into his fingertips, but Jameson pulled harder.
Even when his grip on the chain started to slip, even when the wire cut at his fingers and his right hand became slick with blood, he still kept at it. And finally, he ripped the box loose. “Heiress.” He looked back down over his shoulder, at the ground below. “Catch.”
He dropped the silver chest, and she caught it.
With slick hands and aching muscles, Jameson began to climb back down. He made it halfway—maybe a little more than that—and then just dropped. He landed in a crouch, his legs absorbing the shock, his entire body screaming.
And then, he turned to Avery and reclaimed the chest. She held out the key, but before he could take it, Zella spoke.
“I’m going to need that,” the duchess said, not specifying whether she was talking about the box or the key. Both. That was what Jameson’s gut said as Zella strolled across the room to stand toe-to-toe with Avery.
“The viscount here might not have been able to, in good conscience, make a deal for the final key,” Zella said. “But I am not so burdened.” There wasn’t any audible triumph in her tone—but there was something else, something deeper. “Branford doesn’t have your secret, Jameson. I do.” She tugged a flattened, folded piece of parchment out of the top of her dress. “My apologies,” she told Branford. “I made a little switch on our way here.”
Branford stared at her. Hard. “That’s not possible.”
The duchess gave a little shrug. “I happen to specialize in impossible.”
She was the only person who’d ever successfully broken into the Devil’s Mercy, and she’d talked her way into membership thereafter. Jameson had known from their second meeting: The duchess was a woman who saw things, one who played the long game.
She chose her competition. Jameson looked at Zella, really looked at her. “Have you read my secret?”
“I’m about to,” she replied. “Out loud. If you want to spare your heiress from hearing it, you’ll tell her to give me the last key. Otherwise, any danger that comes from this little bit of forbidden knowledge… well, I can only assume you’d like to protect Avery here from that.”
Jameson looked to Avery. He saw nothing in the room but Avery. “Give the key to Zella,” he said softly.
There were some things he wouldn’t risk, not even to win.
“You have three seconds,” Zella warned. She began unfolding the parchment. “Three…”
“Do it,” Jameson commanded. “The Game—it doesn’t even matter anymore.” Lie.
“Two…”
“Just do it, Heiress.”
Avery mouthed two words: I can’t. And the next thing Jameson knew, she’d leapt toward Zella, her hand latching around the parchment. Zella fought. Jameson watched as his Heiress took the duchess to the ground.
“Enough!” Rohan’s voice boomed through the air.
Zella froze, but Avery didn’t. She pulled herself to her feet, the parchment in her hand, and held it to the flame of the closest candle.
“I said enough!” The Factotum told her.
Avery didn’t back down. She never backed down. And by the time Rohan had made it to her, the parchment was ashes. Jameson’s secret was ashes. You didn’t look at it, Heiress. You didn’t read it. You could have, but you didn’t.
Zella stood, grace incarnate, and smiled. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she told Rohan, “but wasn’t there a rule about violence of any kind leading to immediate expulsion from the Game?” Her eyes lit on the key still in Avery’s possession. “And wouldn’t expulsion from the Game mean that any key held by that player is surrendered?”
There was a flash of something in Rohan’s eyes—not anger, not exactly—but a moment later, it was gone. He turned toward Avery with the rogue’s smile firmly in place. “Indeed,” he said in reply to Zella’s question, “it would.”
CHAPTER 78
GRAYSON
Decoding Sheffield Grayson’s journal took all night. The longer Grayson worked, the faster he went, transcribing the translation in his own notebook—leather, just like his father’s. Grayson ignored the similarity. He ignored everything but the shifting code and the words it gave him.
In the beginning, Sheffield Grayson appeared to have used this journal as an off-the-books ledger, recording where the money he embezzled from his company went. There were no account numbers, but with the dates and the locations of the accounts, there was a trail to follow.
The kind the FBI would definitely be capable of following.
But as Grayson got further and further through his translation and the dates at the top of the entries showed months and years passing, the tone and content of Sheffield Grayson’s writing changed. The journal entries went from focusing almost entirely on documenting illegal transactions to something more… confessional.
That was the word that Grayson kept coming back to as he decoded and transcribed what his father had written—except that wasn’t quite right. The word confession implied something like guilt or the need to unburden oneself. Sheffield Grayson hadn’t been burdened.
He’d been angry.
Cora’s funeral was today. It should have been a time of mourning. I should have been Acacia’s rock. Without her mother there to interfere, to hold her threats over my head, it should have been the two of us, husband and wife, against the world. Not so. Trowbridge made sure of that. He got Acacia alone at the wake. He told my wife things he had no business knowing, let alone saying.
She had so many questions.
Grayson didn’t let himself pause in decoding, didn’t linger on any one entry, no matter what it said. But even as he kept his focus on turning numbers to letters and letters to words, on finding the exact location on each page in which meaningful content was embedded, his brain still processed every word he wrote.
The overall picture was becoming clearer and clearer in his mind.
Cora left everything to Acacia and the girls. No surprise there. It’s all tied up in trusts. No surprise there, either. Acacia is her own trustee, thank God, but Cora named Trowbridge trustee for the girls. The bastard is already asking to see financial records. I’ll force a sale of the company before I let that pathetic excuse for a man question me.
The next few pages detailed the sale of the company and Sheffield Grayson’s efforts to ensure the buyer took the financial records they were given at face value. But after that, the tenor of his words shifted again.
Acacia keeps asking about “my son.” As if he’s any business of hers—or mine, for that matter. As if the Hawthorne family hasn’t already taken enough from me. Acacia is too soft-hearted to understand. She won’t listen to reason—not about the boy and not about her trust.
And then, two pages later, there was another entry, a brief one: Tobias Hawthorne is dead at last.
It took another few weeks, but then, right after Avery had been named heir, the entries started up again.
That conniving bastard left his money to a girl not that much older than the twins. A stranger, they say, but there are whispers that she’s Hawthorne’s child.
Grayson could feel the seething anger building in these pages. The entries became more frequent. Some were about Colin, the fire, the evidence that Sheffield Grayson had put together that it was the result of arson—evidence that the police ignored. Other entries focused on Avery and Sheffield Grayson’s obsessive theories about who she was to the old man, to the Hawthorne family.
Theories about Grayson’s supposedly dead uncle, Toby Hawthorne.
Grayson was able to pinpoint the exact moment that Sheffield Grayson had decided to have Avery tracked, to spy on her. The man was convinced she’d lead him to Toby.
And since he’s already a dead man, well… they can hardly charge me with his murder, now can they?