CHAPTER 53 ROHAN

Chapter 53

ROHAN

R ohan and Savannah met in the middle—the last shelf of games. She went high. He went low, skimming his fingers along the boxes as he registered the title of each and every game.

"Camelot," Savannah read out loud.

"Knights and a king," Rohan murmured. "Swords and a crown." Suddenly, in the place in his mind where mysteries lived to be sorted, there it was: meaning where before there had been none. "What if," he said, "we weren't given instructions for this room—this puzzle—because we'd already received them? Each team's challenge is their own… "

" A crown, a scepter, an empty throne. " Savannah got there in an instant.

Rohan backtracked and began pulling boxes off the shelves. "Kingdoms. Dominion."

Within a minute, Savannah had pulled five more games. Rohan added his own stack next to hers on the ground, then they met in the middle once more. She went high. He went low.

"Mastermind," Savannah said briskly. "Appropriate, but no. Battleship, no. Risk, no. Titan?"

"Pull it," Rohan said. He went up a row.

She went down one and pulled Candy Land. "It has a king," she said.

"I can't say that I've ever played," Rohan told her. The only games one played growing up at the Devil's Mercy were games of greatest stakes—the kind played at the tables and the kind played to survive.

Rohan moved on to the final shelf. "Medici."

"Why not just call the game dynastic power and be done with it?" Savannah retorted.

Close enough , Rohan thought. He added the game to their stack, then continued searching. He frowned. "Here's one that involves… burritos." Savannah snorted. They fell back into silence, and then…

"Rohan." Savannah didn't say his name often, but when she did, she made it count.

He moved in a flash, coming up to stand shoulder to shoulder with her as he took in the game she held in her hands. The box was black with gold lettering.

A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK.

Beneath the title, there was a symbol—a diamond. Rohan thought back to their first challenge, to the scoreboard. They were the Diamonds.

"The font matches the script from the golden tickets," Savannah murmured. "This isn't a real game. They made it."

They as in the game makers, Avery and Jameson and the rest. "Open it," Rohan said, jumping down into the recessed area that surrounded the game table. "Set it up."

Savannah landed beside him, and this time, her face didn't betray even a hint of pain, whether she felt it or not. She set the box on the table and opened it. Rohan ran his hand over the lid, then the side of the box, then flipped both lid and box over.

"Thorough," Savannah said, and something about the way she said that word made Rohan want to hear her say it again.

Dangerous, that.

He turned his attention to the contents of the box. Two stacks of white cards , he cataloged, a white playing board folded in half, and eight metal game pieces. Savannah picked up one of them: a crown—one of five, by the looks of it, each of them distinct.

"Five crowns ." Savannah's mind worked in tandem with his own. Rohan noted the piece she'd chosen. The detailing work was exquisite. Tiny pearls lined the bottom and accented each knife-sharp point of the crown.

Rohan reached for a game piece of his own. The largest of the crowns, it looked like something out of a dark fairy tale, the metal carved in a way that called to mind antlers and thorns. The remaining three crowns in the box were simpler: one bronze, one silver, one gold. That left three other game pieces. A spinning wheel. A bow and arrow. A heart.

As Rohan ruminated on that, Savannah reached into the box, withdrew the game board, and unfolded it on the table. The design was simple: square spaces around the outside, rectangular outlines in the center of the board, indicating where the cards were supposed to go.

Savannah placed the cards in their spots and her game piece on the square that said START . Now that the box was empty, Rohan could make out the rules written inside—or rather, the rule, singular.

All it said was ROLL THE DICE .

"There are no dice," Savannah observed.

"Aren't there?" Rohan replied. Beneath the table, he reached into his tuxedo jacket, then laid his fist on the table, knuckles down, and allowed his fingers to uncurl like petals on a flower.

In the center of his palm was a pair of red dice.

"I found these in my room earlier," Rohan said. "Picking them up revealed a screen, but there's little reason to think that's their only use in this game."

Savannah reached into her thick, pale braid and removed her own pair of glass dice. "Same." Her dice were white, not red, and like his, they appeared to be made of glass. "I'll go first."

Of course she would. Rohan's lips twisted as he took in her roll. "A five and a three."

"Eight." Savannah moved her pearled crown eight squares around the perimeter. The square she landed on—like almost every other square on the very simple board—was labeled HAY .

Rohan rolled his own dice. "A six and a two. Also eight."

He moved his game piece next to Savannah's. "Your turn, Savvy. My dice or yours?"

Savannah picked up her white dice and rolled them again. "Another five and another three."

Rohan didn't wait for her to move before he rolled. As hers had, his dice turned up the exact same numbers the second time. He tossed them again to be sure. "They're weighted to always land the same way."

That made the numbers a clue. To this room? Or another?

Savannah jumped her game piece forward eight spaces, then another eight, bringing her to one of two squares on the board marked HAYSTACK instead of just HAY . The stacks of cards in the middle of the board shared that label. Savannah beat Rohan to drawing one.

"Blank." Her eyes narrowing, she kept drawing. "Blank. Blank."

Rohan took a card from the stack closest to him and used it to flip the entire stack, then reached across and did the same for Savannah's cards, scattering them out in a neat line across the board.

Among all the cards, there was only one that wasn't blank. Five words had been scrawled across that card in black marker.

THIS IS NOT YOUR CLUE.