A little breaking and entering never hurt anyone. It took Gigi three tries to find Knox’s room, but the second she saw the vest, she knew she’d hit paydirt. A systematic search of the room didn’t yield anything other than Knox’s clothes.
A less systematic search also yielded nothing.
Either Knox had hidden the bag—and its contents—somewhere on the island after she’d finally given it up or…
Actually, Gigi couldn’t come up with an or. When Knox had made good on his threat to block her path—and block it and block it and block it—Gigi had eventually responded by flinging the bag out into the ocean like she was some kind of demented Olympic discus thrower. Knox had cursed her out and gone after the bag, giving Gigi a chance to make a break for it with the duct tape and the knife.
She’d barely made it back to the house by sundown, but Mr. Five- Minute Mile definitely would have had time to hide the bag after he’d retrieved it.
That didn’t stop Gigi from searching the room and attached bathroom a third time. Through the bathroom wall, she heard someone in the next room turn on the shower.
Brady? Why would he be showering now? Gigi told herself very sternly that (1) that was none of her business, and (2) she had no real reason to break into his room. She had no basis on which to think that Brady and
Knox were in cahoots. None. But Brady had made it up to the house several minutes before Gigi had.
What if he’d beat her to going through Knox’s room? What if he was, even now, washing away his sins and the very specific sin of theft?
This is a very bad idea. Gigi’s mind-voice was chipper. But am I doing it anyway?
Yes. Yes, she was.
Soon enough, she’d ascertained that the bag wasn’t in Brady’s room, either. Gigi eyed the bathroom door, but even she had more common sense than that. Instead, she looked to the floor, where Brady’s tuxedo was strewn next to the clothes he’d worn earlier.
In for a penny, in for a bad-idea pound. Gigi checked the pockets of Brady’s clothes. All she found was a worn photograph of a teenage girl with mismatched eyes—one blue, one brown—notching an arrow in an oversized bow.
Gigi knew immediately with incredible certainty that this picture wasn’t part of the Grandest Game. It wasn’t an Object.
From what I gather, she’s dead.
The shower turned off. Gigi put the photograph back and fled as silently and stealthily as she’d come, and she didn’t stop when she hit the hallway or the spiral staircase or even the ground floor. She kept going, down another story to the second.
Pausing to take what might have been her first breath since the shower had turned off, Gigi blinked when she registered what she saw. The second floor. To her right, there was a long, flat wall—no doors at all and barely any space between the wall and the staircase. Moving counterclockwise, she found another blank wall, then another.
The fourth and final wall boasted two doors, both closed. The first door was covered—entirely covered—in gears. Gigi had never seen anything like it. She reached out to lightly touch a golden gear, and then a bronze one. No doorknob, Gigi thought. She latched her hand around the biggest gear. It wouldn’t turn, so she pulled, then pushed.
The door didn’t move. She tried the rest of the gears one by one with the same result.
The second door didn’t have a knob, either. It was made of marble— swirling, golden marble. In the middle of the door, there was a complicated,
multitiered dial, like something you would expect to see on a bank vault.
Nothing Gigi tried opened either door, which made it pretty obvious: They were part of the game to come.
Turning her attention back to the three blank walls, Gigi remembered the way the house had looked from the shore. There had been five stories, and the bottom two had been the largest. Hidden rooms?
Gigi suddenly needed to see what the final floor—the lowest floor, the biggest—held. She took to the spiral staircase and made her way down. On the landing, where there should have been doors, where there should have been something, all Gigi saw was four white walls.
“Will you at least look at me?” That question, demanding and sharp, floated down from the staircase above. Knox.
“You never give up, do you?” Brady. “This is me looking at you and knowing exactly what I am looking at.”
From where Gigi was standing, she couldn’t see anything but their feet
—which meant that they couldn’t see her.
“You want to blame me for the way last year’s game went down, Daniels? Fine.”
Last year’s game? Gigi’s mind raced. It had never occurred to her that any of her competitors might be return players in the Grandest Game.
“I do blame you for last year, Knox. Just like I blame you for Calla.”
Something about the way Brady said Calla made it clear that it was a name.
“Calla left,” Knox bit out.
“Calla didn’t just leave, and you damn well know it. She disappeared.
Someone took her.”
Neither one of them was talking like Calla was dead. They were talking like she was missing. 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 with me. 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 a kid to 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 storming up the 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 had absolutely no idea she’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?”
