Gigi blinked against the sudden onslaught of light, unable to stop replaying the same moment in her mind that she had been replaying, over and over and over again.
I know you’re out there. No, sunshine, you don’t.
Gigi had tried in vain to get the voice to say something else, anything else—but it hadn’t worked. Only one person had ever called her sunshine, and he was bad news. Very Bad News. The kind of bad news that Gigi liked to think about, sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window late at night.
A sentinel. A mercenary. A spy.
He worked, she’d been told, for a very dangerous person—but that had been more than a year ago, and Gigi hadn’t seen him since.
He’s here. This knife is his knife. Gigi felt it, strapped to her thigh. She thought about the claw marks carved into the leather sheath, and the memory of their one and only meeting overtook her.
“You’re Grayson Hawthorne’s half sister.” Mr. Very Bad News—Code Name: Mimosas—half glowers, half smiles at Gigi.
Should that combination of expressions even be possible? Absolutely not! Gigi approves. “And you’re a total stranger in possession of family secrets I’ve only recently discovered myself! I love that for you!” She beams at him. “I’m Gigi, and I will be the one baffling you today. Don’t worry. It’s entirely normal. I baffle everybody. Are you a friend of Grayson’s?”
Mr. Tall, Dark-Eyed, and Slightly Sinister stares at her. He has dark blond hair that hangs down over eyes so deep a brown they look nearly black. There’s a scar through one of his eyebrows, a very harsh—yet fetching—scar.
Black tattoos mark the skin of his upper arms like claw marks.
“Yes.” He speaks without emphasis or embellishment, and there is something distinctly ominous about that. “I’m a friend of Grayson’s. Why don’t you tell him I’m here?”
Gigi’s memory skipped to another track—Grayson’s reaction after she’d met Mimosas. “No. Just no, Juliet. If you see him, you get the hell out of there, and you call me.”
“Gigi?” Brady’s voice broke into the memory. “Are you okay?”
Act natural! Gigi thought. The second she heard Brady start to climb the rope, she tucked the bug back into her dress.
“Knox took it upon himself to press the hint button,” Brady said, pulling himself half up to rest his elbows on the stained glass. “He chose door number one, whatever that is. No discussion.”
“This is the finale,” Knox called up from below. “We only have an hour left, and hints in this game have to be earned. I made an executive decision. Sue me.”
“Coming?” Brady asked Gigi, and then he dropped.
Gigi wondered if Very Bad News had heard that exchange, if he’d been listening—to her and to Brady, to Knox’s big confession. And that raised another question: Who exactly did Knox think was listening, that he’d bared his soul like that? Because Gigi was going to go out on a limb and guess that it wasn’t Code Name Mimosas.
Her mind a mess and her heart attempting to burst through her rib cage, Gigi made her way back down the rope. Her gaze caught on a square- shaped section of the floorboards that had popped up.
Knox reached into the space below it and removed what appeared to be a solid wooden box. He scowled. “What the hell is this?”
“The way we earn our hint,” Brady said.
“A puzzle box.” Gigi forced herself to stop thinking about anything but the game because she realized that if she could concentrate, she might actually be able to do this—win their hint, get them out of here, ensure they all made it to the next stage of the game.
She’d come clean. She’d tell Avery or maybe Xander everything. But for now, Code Name Mimosas could wait. What was one more SECRET—to her?
“If you’ll recall,” Gigi told her teammates and the stranger who was probably listening to all three of them, “puzzle boxes are a specialty of mine.”
