CHAPTER 50 ROHAN

Chapter 50

ROHAN

I am doing this—playing the Hawthorne heiress's game, winning it at all costs—for my father. Rohan gave himself a moment or two in the labyrinth as he stepped over the threshold into darkness.

To the best of his knowledge, Savannah's father, Sheffield Grayson, had disappeared off the face of the planet nearly three years earlier, immediately after becoming the subject of FBI and IRS investigations. Rohan had pegged the man as a coward, one who had recklessly set his gilded life on fire and left his wife and daughters to face the flames alone.

And yet… Savannah was playing this game for her father.

You don't strike me as the forgiving type, Savvy. We have that much in common. That thought pulled Rohan from the labyrinth as the metal chamber rotated closed behind them.

Three torches burst to life in the corners of a decently sized triangular room lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Savannah strode forward and ran her hand through the tip of the flame of the closest torch. Fearless. "Real fire," she reported.

Rohan eyed the contents of the shelves surrounding them. Board games. Hundreds of them. In the center of the room, there was a recessed area in the floor, three feet lower than the rest of the room. Sitting in that recessed area, there was a round, mahogany table.

"No instructions." Savannah made her own appraisal of their surroundings. "No phone to make calls. No screen on which to type in answers."

All they had was the room. Rohan accessed his mental map of the house. They'd descended two flights of stairs to get to the metal chamber, which put them on the lowest level of the house—the level that had appeared to be nothing but walls.

"One of these shelves almost certainly doubles as a door." Rohan checked for obvious hinges and found none, then tested each shelf to see if any would pull inward or push out—to no effect.

As Savannah did her own inspection, Rohan leapt silently into the recessed area cut into the floor. There was an art to moving silently and quickly, to never being where other people thought you were, to cultivating the sense in your opponent, on a raw, subconscious level, that the laws of physics and man did not apply to you.

But when Savannah turned back toward the center of the room, when she registered his new location, she didn't bat an eye. She jumped down to join him. A line of tension cut across her brow as she landed.

The knee. "ACL?" Rohan said.

Savannah flicked her gaze to his. "Childhood neglect and trauma?" she returned in the exact same tone. "Or would you prefer we keep our scars to ourselves?"

"You really don't pull your punches, do you, Savvy?"

"If I were a man, would you expect me to?" Savannah ran her hand over the mahogany surface of the game table. "There's a seam, here."

Rohan crouched to look beneath the table. "No buttons or triggers," he reported, flowing back to standing position. "There may be something hidden beneath the top of that table, but we'll have to find a way to unlock it to find out. Same for the shelves. At least one of them— that one, I suspect—will open if we can find the right trigger."

"Solve the puzzle," Savannah said evenly. "Unlock the door."

"More puzzles," Rohan murmured, "more doors, which leaves to us the problem of finding the puzzle—or at least the first clue."

"The games on the shelves." She was already moving.

"Start with the names on the boxes?" Rohan suggested. "See if anything pops out—the proverbial needle in a haystack, if you will."

"Fine," Savannah replied. "If that yields nothing, we'll open the boxes." Her aura of intensity, Rohan noticed, was not decreasing . Again, he felt the call of the labyrinth, of shifting corridors and connections still to be made.

Savannah was doing this for her father .

"I'll start with the shelves on this wall," she said, pulling herself out of the recessed area. "You take that one."

"We'll meet in the middle," Rohan replied.

Savannah tossed a look back over her shoulder the way another person might have tossed a grenade. "If you can keep up."