We share nothing but blood. The thought was deliberate, measured, but its purpose was entirely undone when Xander spoke next. “What’s she like, the one you met?”
Grayson kept his answer short. “In some ways, she reminds me of you.” Maybe that explained how protective he felt of the girl already.
“You’re going to have to lie to her.” The warning in Xander’s tone was clear. “Sabotage her. Gain her trust and betray her.”
Grayson ended the call before he replied. “I know.”
Without giving himself even a second for guilt or second-guessing, he picked up the hotel phone and called down to the lobby. “As it turns out,” he said, his voice like stone, “I’ll need this room for at least a week.”
ELEVEN YEARS AND TEN MONTHS AGO
There were thirteen different ways to enter the tree house—officially. Unofficially, if a person were willing to risk falling, there were many more. Grayson wasn’t surprised when he looked out and saw Jameson dangling precariously off a branch, nor was he surprised when his younger brother managed to somehow catapult himself in through the window.
“You’re late,” Grayson said. Jameson was always late. Jameson was allowed to be late.
“Tomorrow, when we’re the same age, I’m going to tell you to loosen up.” Jameson punctuated that statement by jumping to catch one of the beams overhead, swinging back and forth, and launching himself feet-first at Grayson, who jumped out of the way.
“I’ll still be older than you tomorrow,” Grayson retorted. Had Jameson been born one day later, the two of them would have been exactly a year apart in age. Instead, his younger brother had arrived on August twenty-second, one day before Grayson’s first birthday.
That meant that for one day each year, they were technically the same age.
“Are you ready?” Grayson asked quietly. “For your birthday?” First yours, then mine.
“I’m ready,” Jameson said, his chin jutting out.
Ready to turn eight, Grayson translated. Ready to be called into the old man’s study.
Jameson swallowed. “He’s going to make me fight you, Gray.”
Grayson couldn’t argue with that conclusion. Each year on their birthdays, their grandfather greeted them with three words. Invest. Cultivate. Create. They were given ten thousand dollars to invest. They got to choose a talent to cultivate for the year—anything in the world they wanted to learn to do. And they were given a challenge to be completed by their next birthday.
For the past three years, Grayson and Jameson had chosen martial arts forms for the cultivate side of things. Of course the old man is going to make Jameson fight me.
“And then the next day,” Grayson muttered, “on my birthday, he’ll make me fight him.”
It was a horrible thing to spend a year on something and then lose.
“You can’t go easy on me, okay?” Jameson’s expression was fierce.
The old man will know if I do. “Okay.”
Jameson’s eyes narrowed. “Promise?”
Grayson drew a line down his face with his thumb, starting at his hairline and going all the way to his chin. “Promise.”
There was no taking back that kind of promise. It was theirs and theirs alone.
Jameson expelled a breath. “What was your challenge this year? What did you have to create?”
Grayson’s heart rate ticked up at the question. In two days, he would be expected to both demonstrate the skill he’d cultivated over the last twelve months and present his grandfather with his response to his last birthday challenge. “A haiku.”
Jameson wrinkled his forehead. “A what?”
“A poem.” Grayson looked down. “Haiku is a poetic form of Japanese provenance, wherein each poem is three lines long, a total of seventeen syllables, broken down into five syllables in the first and last lines and seven for the line in between.”
The definition was burned into his mind.
“Seventeen syllables?” Jameson was outraged. “Are you kidding me? That’s it?”
“They have to be perfect.” Grayson forced his eyes up to meet his brother’s. “That’s what the old man said. No room for error. When you only get three lines, every word has to be the right word.” He swallowed. “It has to be beautiful. It has to mean something. It has to hurt.”
Jameson frowned. “Hurt?”
Grayson’s hand found its way to his pocket, to the medallion inside. “When words are real enough, when they’re the exact right words, when what you’re saying matters, when it’s beautiful and perfect and true—it hurts.”
Grayson slipped the medallion out of his pocket and handed it over.
Jameson examined it. “Did you have to engrave the words on the metal yourself?”
Grayson shook his head and swallowed. “I just had to be sure that they were perfect first.” He took the medallion back from Jameson. “What about you? What was your challenge?”
“A card castle.” Jameson’s expression was murderous. “I had to use five hundred cards. No glue. No adhesives at all. Nothing but cards.” Jameson disappeared out the tree house window again. Grayson heard him moving around up in one of the towers, and when he came back, he was a holding a fancy camera in his hand. “I had to take a photograph every time it was going well and every time I failed.”
Seven years old. Five hundred cards. Grayson was willing to bet Jameson had failed a lot. He held out his hand for the camera, and to his surprise, his brother handed it over. Grayson scrolled through picture after picture. Jameson had started trying to build tall towers, then switched to wide.
Every time something beautiful emerged on the camera, the next shot showed the ground littered with cards. So many times. There were hundreds of pictures on this camera.
Grayson skipped to the last shot. Jameson had built his castle in the shape of an L, five stories tall, flush against the walls of one of his rooms.
“When did you finish?” Grayson asked, still staring at that last picture.
“Last night,” Jameson said. “I cut slits in the floor.”
No adhesives. Nothing but cards. But using the room? Grayson could see how that would be more of a gray area—but still! “You carved slits in the wood floors?” he asked, half-horrified, half-awed.
The old man loved Hawthorne House. Every floorboard, every light fixture, every detail.
“And the walls,” Jameson added, completely unrepentant. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Did you decide what you’re going to do with your ten thousand dollars this year?”
Invest. “Yes,” Grayson told his brother. “You?”
Jameson nodded. By the rules of the game, their choices on that front were not to be discussed. “I guess that just leaves deciding what talent we’re going to choose to cultivate next year. I was thinking…” Jameson assumed a ready position and slashed his hands through the air. “Knife fighting!”
Grayson’s eyes were drawn back to the camera. He thought about some of the shots Jameson had taken—the successes and the failures—and something in him itched to reframe them or, better yet, to catch the cards while they fell.
“Photography.”
“No way!” Jameson retorted immediately. “I never want to take a picture again.”
Grayson didn’t put the camera down. “Do what you want, Jamie. No one ever said we had to pick the same thing.”
“Fine,” Jameson declared. “Then I’m picking rock climbing.” He jumped back up on the windowsill. “Because unlike certain other people in this tree house, I’m not afraid to fall.”
CHAPTER 12
JAMESON
This time, Jameson was the one who set the place for the meeting. Beside him, Avery took in the location he’d chosen: a medieval crypt the size of a ballroom, an eerie, elegant underground chamber hidden away from the world.
“You rented it for Nash’s bachelor party?” Avery guessed—correctly.
Before Jameson could reply, Ian stepped through the doorway and made a show of raking his gaze across the cavernous space: dark stone columns stretching up into an arcing stone ceiling, stained glass letting in the only hints of natural light from the world above.
“Interesting meeting place.”