CHAPTER 42 GIGI

Chapter 42

GIGI

W hat the hell did you just do?" Knox went still. Brady let loose of him.

Gigi took a deep breath. "I pushed the black button."

"Black," Brady repeated. "Not red."

Emergency, not hint.

"Everything okay?" A voice—Avery's—sounded from what had to be a hidden speaker.

Okay? Knox's hands were bleeding profusely. Brady had taken at least one vicious blow to the jaw. They'd both broken the rules of the game. But no one had to know that.

Since Avery was awaiting a response, Gigi improvised. "Bathroom!"

Brady's forehead knotted. Knox shot Gigi a pissed-off, incredulous, are you insane look to which Gigi was completely immune.

"Knox really, really has to go to the bathroom," Gigi announced. "Total urinating emergency. Very small bladder."

There was a sound that might have been a snort on the other end of the line. Gigi was pretty sure that Avery wasn't the one snorting, but whichever Hawthorne she'd heard— Jameson , it was totally Jameson—didn't say a word. Avery didn't say anything else, either, as a section of the chamber wall whirled to reveal an opening to what looked to be a well-lit corridor containing exactly one door—presumably, to a bathroom.

"Thank you," Gigi called to the game makers. There was no reply. They were gone.

"Say one more word about my bladder," Knox warned Gigi, "and I will end you."

"I love you, too," Gigi replied sweetly. As he stalked off down the hall, she called after him. "You're welcome!"

As soon as the bathroom door slammed shut, Gigi turned to Brady. "Will he be okay? The bathroom probably isn't all that big, either."

"He's fine with bathrooms." Brady leaned back against the wall of the chamber and closed his eyes, just for a moment. "He'll be fine—until the next time he's not."

Gigi didn't push for any more than that. "I'm sorry about your mom," she said softly.

"Not your fault. Nothing you can do about it."

A ball of emotion rose in Gigi's throat. Not my fault. Nothing I can do about it. How many times in the past year and a half had she said variations of those two sentences to herself?

It wasn't Gigi's fault that her father was dead or that he'd died trying to kill Avery Grambs. It wasn't her fault that she knew and Savannah didn't or that a lifetime of being protected by her twin meant that she had to protect her sister, just this once. None of it was Gigi's fault, and there was nothing she could do about any of it, except keep THE SECRET and pull off the occasional, glorious act of stealthy interpersonal philanthropy.

But no matter what Gigi did, it was never enough.

"There's always something ," Gigi told Brady. She believed that. She had to. "Brady, if I win the Grandest Game, I swear I'll make sure your mom is taken care of. Even if I lose, I have a trust fund. My access is limited, and it might require some creative quote-unquote embezzling on my part, but—"

"You need to be careful with Knox." That was Brady shutting her down and issuing a warning, all in one go. "He's done well enough the last few years. Went to college. Got a job. But no matter where he goes or what he does, the dark place is always waiting, and Knox Landry doesn't think about morality the way that you or I do. He isn't someone you can redeem, Gigi, and when I tell you that he can be dangerous, I mean it."

"For some values of the word dangerous ," Gigi agreed amiably.

"For all of them." Brady studied her. "Do you know how the two of us met? I'd just turned six and had already skipped two grades. Knox was nine and a half and had been held back one. We were in the same class, but he never said a word to me until the day he beat up a kid who was beating on me."

"You're not really selling me on Knox's villain origin story here," Gigi warned.

"The bully was twelve, huge for his age, pretty much a playground psychopath. Knox was half his size, three times as vicious, and completely out of control. Like a scrawny, pissed-off little berserker. To this day, I have never seen anyone fight like that." Brady gave a subtle shake of his head. "Afterward, when I tried to thank my utterly unhinged, semi-feral defender, Knox told me to piss off."

Gigi wondered: If she threw herself into good listener mode with everything she had, would Brady tell her the rest of it? How he and Knox had become like brothers? What kind of training they'd done? Who Severin was? Who Calla was?

Gigi knew better than to push for any of the answers she really wanted. "What did you do after scrawny, berserker Knox told six-year-old-kid-genius Brady to piss off?"

"Little punk decided we were going to be friends." Knox stepped back into the chamber. His hair was sopping wet, like he'd doused it—and his face—repeatedly. "Nerdy little pain in my ass just wouldn't give up. He started bringing two lunches to school each day, and it wasn't like I was going to turn down food." Knox looked away. "Eventually, I started eating dinner at his house, too. Every night."

"My mama's a good cook," Brady said, and the fact that he'd mentioned his mama at all reminded Gigi of the way the fight had gone out of Knox the moment he'd heard about Brady's mother's cancer.

Dinner at Brady's house, cooked by Brady's mama, every night. They really had been like brothers, and Gigi knew to the depths of her soul that they needed a moment. Alone. Maybe they would actually talk to each other. Maybe they'd just focus back on the riddle.

But either way, Gigi had to at least give them the chance.

Decision made, she jack-rabbited through the opening in the chamber wall. "Bathroom," she called back in explanation. "Though for the record, my bladder is actually quite large!"