Page 29 of The Grandest Game
Something about the way Brady saidCallamade it clear that it was a name.
“Callaleft,” Knox bit out.
“Calla didn’t just leave, and you damn well know it. She disappeared. Someonetookher.”
Neither one of them was talking like Calla was dead. They were talking like she wasmissing. Gigi wondered: Had Odette been mistaken or had she lied?Or maybe Calla is missing… and dead.
“How the hell would you know what Calla would or wouldn’t do, Brady? She was withme. You were just a kid.”
A kid?Gigi mentally scrambled to keep up. It didn’t sound like they were still talking about the previous year’s game, and in the picture, Calla had clearly been a teenager.Sixteen? Seventeen?And if she’d been with Knox… He had to have been at least twenty-four or twenty-five now.
“I was never just akidto Calla.” Brady’s voice went even deeper. “And at least I haven’t forgotten her. Like a coward. Like she was nothing.”
“Screw you, Daniels. You won’t make it two seconds in this game without me on your side. You’re soft. Weak. You don’t have the stomach for doing what it takes to win.”
The next sound Gigi heard was Knox stormingupthe stairs. Before she could breathe a sigh of relief about the direction of those footsteps, there was a second set. Quieter.Coming down.
All Gigi could do as Brady stepped out onto the landing was desperately hope that he hadabsolutely no ideashe’d broken into his room—and that he was particularly forgiving of semi-accidental eavesdropping.
Brady, once again clad in the tux she’d last seen on the floor, stared at her. Gigi prepared herself to be yelled at. But instead, Brady Daniels studied her for a moment, then nodded to the drawings on her bare arms. “Is that a map?”
Chapter 23
ROHAN
Leave no stone unturned.It had not escaped Rohan’s attention that Jameson Hawthorne had borrowed that line from him, from a game of Rohan’s design, one that Jameson had won.Cheeky bastard.
As Rohan searched the rocks, he kept tabs on his competition while they did the same. He knew the instant Odette Morales found something. By the time the old woman had pried it—whateveritwas—loose, Rohan was already halfway to her. Automatically, he reviewed the positions of the other players. Gigi, Brady, and Knox had already gone back to the house—and wasn’tthatinteresting?—leaving only Lyra and Savannah, the latter of whom…
Had just spotted Rohan moving toward Odette.
“I don’t like your chances with that one, young man,” Odette called as Rohan approached. “But if I were sixty years younger, you might have stood a chance with me.”
The old woman wanted Rohan to know: He wasn’t the only one who could read people.
“You flatter me, Ms. Mora.” Rohan closed the last of the space between them.
Odette registered Rohan’s use ofMorainstead ofMoralesand snorted. “If I was flattering you, you’d know it.”
Rohan looked to her gloved hands. In one, Odette held the opera glasses he’d clocked the moment he’d first seen her tonight. In the other, there was what appeared to be a glass box with a luminescent button inside.
Odette flipped open the box and pressed the button.
For a second, maybe two, it seemed like nothing had happened, and then Rohan realized:the house.An enormous shade was descending, covering the massive Great Room windows on the third floor. Beams of concentrated light from the ground illuminated the shade.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough for Rohan to read the words written on it:IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.
The shade began rising once more. The beams went dark. Beside Rohan, Odette hurled the glass box to the ground. It shattered, shards raining down into the crevices of the rocks. In an instant, Savannah was there, on the ground next to Odette, sorting through the carnage.
Rohan made no move to join them.Break glass.If he’d been the one to design this game, that wouldn’t have been a reference to the glass box—too obvious.And what is glass, he thought intently,but melted sand?
Gigi had already spent a good chunk of time searching the black sand beach. Lyra was headed that way now. Rohan replayedthe moment Jameson had issued their clue.We won’t steal too much of your time…
And there it was.
Rohan made for the house. He slipped away unnoticed—for a time. He knew the exact instant Savannah realized where he was heading. She burst after him. Rohan picked up his own pace, shedding stealth for speed. He only allowed himself to look back over his shoulder once, as he began to scale the cliff. There was something almost Amazonian about the way the thick metal links of that chain hugged Savannah’s hipbones, a sharp contrast with the ice-blue silk over which she wore it.
