Rehabilitation took time. So did examining the chest of items Gigi’s team had liberated from a compartment built into the desk in the study in which they were now locked—they being Gigi, Brady, and the jerk formerly known as Eyebrows of Doom, who Gigi was currently mentally referring to as Grumpy Pants Tuxedo Abs, because hey, the man was built.
He was also going to rue the day he’d stolen that bag, but she was pacing herself.
Grabbing the mirrored plate off the desk, Gigi took up position dead center in the study, then slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees, angling her makeshift mirror up and down as she did, taking in the room’s reflection, drinking in every last detail.
When it came to puzzles, the minutiae mattered.
The study was rectangular, half as wide as it was deep with soaring ceilings. Built-in shelves ringed the top of the room, well out of reach. Gigi angled her mirror to pay special attention to the moldings on the shelves, hand-carved pieces that looked like they belonged in a cathedral.
The shelves themselves, to all appearances, were empty.
Gigi kept turning and angled her mirror toward the desk. Knox was seated in a throne-like chair behind it, taking apart the wood chest, board by board. With his bare hands. Gigi ignored him in favor of the recovering physicist standing over the desk, looking down at the items spread across its surface.
Brady stood so still that Gigi could make out every rise and fall of his chest beneath his tuxedo jacket. Deep breaths. Slow ones.
“Don’t just stand there, Daniels,” Knox snapped, ripping another board off the chest. “Do something.”
Just for that, Grumpy Pants, Gigi thought, I am demoting you to Grumpy Knickers.
“I am doing something,” Brady said, his tone meditative. “Have a little faith, Knox.”
The way Brady said those words made Gigi think that have faith was a criticism Knox Landry had heard before. It was tempting to chew on that, to go down the rabbit hole of thinking about everything she’d overheard. About the photograph. About Calla.
But Gigi was a Gigi on a mission. “I’m sensing some tension here.” She lowered the mirrored plate. Since they were stuck as a team until sunrise, Gigi figured it was better to poke at the elephants in the room than to ignore them. “Luckily,” she continued, “I am an expert mediator and a pleasure to have in class.”
Disarming people with cheerful goodwill was an art form, and Gigi was an artist.
“You are a liability,” Knox said.
“Hey.” Brady put a little heat behind his tone. “Knock it off. She’s just a kid.”
That stung more than Gigi wanted to admit. Just a kid. A liability.
“She’s a kid who happens to be Grayson Hawthorne’s half sister,” Knox told Brady, his tone equal parts intense and smug and just intensely smug. “Happy-go-lucky little rich girl here had her ticket to this game handed to her, just like she’s probably had everything handed to her for her entire life.”
There was a type of person—a lot of types of people, really—who took Gigi’s bubbly demeanor and determined optimism as faults, a combination of vacuousness and naivete, when really, happiness was a choice Gigi made every day.
Gigi didn’t get to fall apart. “As it so happens,” she said pertly, “I won one of the four wild card tickets all on my own. And, if it weren’t for me”— she smiled a thousand-watt smile—“you wouldn’t have even found that bag, you grumpy-knickered smirk-face.” Gigi gave a happy little shrug. “I
forgive you, by the way, and you should find that very frightening.” “What bag?” Brady said.
Knox replied with two words: “Mine, now.”
“Yours?” Brady retorted. “Or your sponsor’s? It’s not like you’re your own man anymore.”
“Sponsor?” Gigi wrinkled her forehead.
“There are a handful of wealthy families that have taken an interest in the Grandest Game,” Brady informed her. “They hire players, stack the deck where they can, bet on the outcome. Last I checked, Knox was on the Thorp family payroll.”
Well, that sounded… ominous. Stack the deck how?
“I play to win.” An utterly unapologetic Knox tore another board off the chest. “And Brady here has always had a soft spot for spoiled little girls.”
Spoiled. Little. Girls. Clearly, for the sake of Knox’s rehabilitation and the good of his soul, a little demonstration was going to be necessary. I’ll show you little girl, you misogynistic smugweasel.
Gigi smiled beatifically. “This room is eight feet two inches by sixteen feet six inches,” she began. “The painting on the back wall shows four paths converging to one, and the artist signed in the upper right corner instead of one of the lower corners, as one would more commonly expect. There are a total of nine moldings carved into the shelves ringing the top third of the room, among them carvings of a lyre, a scroll, a laurel wreath, and a compass.”
Brady turned his head slowly toward her. “Muses,” he said. “The symbology matches up, and in Greek mythology, there are nine.”
“Maybe there’s some significance to that,” Gigi replied. “Or maybe it’s just the game makers’ way of suggesting that to solve this puzzle, we’re going to have to get a little creative.”
Gigi turned to Knox. “How many uses can you think of for this?” Gigi held up the mirrored plate. “Because off the top of my head, I’ve got at least nine. Want to hear a few? It could work as a mirror, obviously, which means that it could be particularly useful in decoding anything written or drawn backward. Mirrors are also good for redirecting light, which could help with revealing certain kinds of invisible ink. And speaking of invisible ink…” She breathed on the plate, causing the glass to fog up. “Certain oils can leave behind traces on a mirror’s surface.” Gigi turned the mirror toward
her audience. “Just smudges on this one, but it was worth a try.”
She probably could have stopped there. But alas, moderation was not one of Gigi’s strong suits; see also: caffeine. “The diameter or circumference of the plate could be a unit of measurement. Shatter it, and you could use the shards to cut something—though personally, if I needed to do a slice and dice, I would probably just use the knife strapped to my thigh.” Gigi’s most innocent voice was pretty darn innocent. “Then again, I could probably also use that knife to pick the locks on the three obvious desk drawers and the hidden one on this side, which I’m sure you’ve both already noticed, right? Alas, we were told we couldn’t lock-pick our way out of this, and I am nothing if not a rule-abiding Gigi, so maybe I’ll just keep my knife in reserve.”
The knife, Gigi tried to telegraph, that you failed to steal, Knox.
Brady stared at Gigi for a moment. “Point taken,” he said, a slight smile pulling at his lips. “Not a kid.”
“Not a kid,” Gigi agreed. She walked over to the desk and stared down at the items spread across its surface. “When most people look at those Scrabble tiles,” she told Brady, “they probably see letters. I see the number of points each tile is worth. And when I look at the poetry magnets, I start to wonder if all of the words really are magnetic, or if there might be a few very significant outliers that look like magnets but aren’t. Someone should try all of them on the metal chair Knox is sitting on. And speaking of, am I the only one who’s noticed that chair is made of swords?”
Gigi could see the effort it took Knox not to look down.
“In your defense,” she told him, “the workmanship really masks the swordiness of it all.”
Brady shook his head wryly, his dreadlocks gently swaying. “You’re a force of nature.”
“I get that a lot,” Gigi replied. “Hurricane metaphors, mostly, some tornadoes.” She shrugged. “While we’re in sharing mode, my other specialties include computers and code, breaking and entering, cutting my own hair, puzzle boxes, visual memorization, eating candy on rooftops, calligraphy, tying knots, untying knots, cat memes, rotating objects in my head, providing distractions, picking up on seemingly insignificant details, and making people like me, even when their whole personality is not liking anyone or anything.”
She turned pointedly to Knox. “And you?” she said. “What are your specialties?”
Knox scowled, but he also—grudgingly—answered. “Logic puzzles. Identifying weaknesses. Finding shortcuts. I have a high tolerance for pain. I don’t sleep much. And I always do what needs to be done.” Knox shot Brady a pointed look, heavy on the eyebrows. “Doesn’t always make me popular.”
Hello, tension. Back again so soon? “Brady?” Gigi said. “Specialties?”
“Symbols and meanings.” Brady had a way of taking his time with words. “Ancient civilizations. Material culture, especially anything involving rituals or tools.”
That’s right, Gigi thought. Talk nerdy to me.
“I speak nine languages,” Brady continued quietly, “and can read seven more. I have an eidetic memory, and I tend to be pretty good at recognizing patterns.”
“You forgot constellations,” Knox said suddenly, and it was like that one word—constellations—sucked the oxygen out of the room. “He knows every damn one.” Knox’s jaw was hard, but something in his eyes definitely wasn’t. “Musical puzzles are also a forte of his, and Brady here can hold his own in a fight.” There was a very loaded pause. “We both can.”
If Gigi hadn’t been a twin, she might have missed the way that Knox said we, but she’d spent most of her life as part of a unit. She knew what it was like to be a part of that kind of we.
And then, suddenly, not to be.
However Brady and Knox knew each other, Gigi was pretty sure it went beyond the probably missing, possibly dead girl they’d both known. But right now? Gigi’s teammates wouldn’t even look at each other.
Pace yourself, Gigi reminded herself. She took a deep breath. “I’m going to compare the Scrabble tiles to that wonky signature on the painting and see what I can come up with,” she said. “Someone should really try the poetry magnets on the sword chair.”
Brady reached for the box of magnets and threw it—a bit harder than necessary—to Knox, who caught it with one hand. Making her way to the painting, Gigi did everything in her power not to turn around as Brady said something in a voice she had to strain to hear.
“If you want to walk down memory lane so much, Knox, how about
this? Severin sends his regards.”
