Page 18 of Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 13

L ike the sun and the moon

I loved her.

Saint Avery.

Until death and beyond.

I stared at Jameson, keenly aware of the ring on my right hand. Infinity. Until death and beyond.

“This is not a proposal,” Jameson said quietly. “But it is a promise.”

“I’m eighteen,” I told him. “You’re nineteen.”

“You’re practical,” Jameson replied. “I’m not.”

Infinity. Until death and beyond. This is not a proposal.

“The old man liked to say that I was a work in progress,” Jameson told me. “That we all were. He acted like someday, Nash, Grayson, Xander, and I would be done . That, in his eyes, we would finally be enough. But we never were.”

“You are more than—” I started to say, but Jameson pressed two fingers lightly to my lips, and I felt that brush of contact in every inch of my body.

“I’m not done, Heiress,” Jameson said intently. “I’m not the person I’m going to be. I know that. But someday, I will be.” He took my hand in his. “I’ll be that person, and you’ll be you, and this is what we’re going to have.”

He looked down at the ring on my right ring finger.

“Infinity,” I said. Until death and beyond. Someday.

“Now you have a secret, too.” Jameson pushed a strand of hair away from my face, then pressed me gently back until I hit a wall of ice. “And incidentally, you also don’t have very long until midnight.”

“Traps upon traps,” I murmured. “And riddles upon riddles.”

Jameson meant everything he’d just said. The ring wasn’t just a distraction. The promise he’d just made me was real. But this—the note, the ring, all of it—was also a part of the game he’d laid out for me.

Our kind of game.

I looked down at the ring. “This isn’t your I Have A Secret secret,” I said. Earlier, I’d guessed that he’d found something, and he’d responded that he’d found multiple somethings. I doubted he’d “found” the ring. He definitely hadn’t found the note.

But together, those two items were clue number five.

I unzipped my parka and let it drop to the floor, heedless of the cold. An instant later, I’d fished out the black light. It was the only object I hadn’t yet used in today’s game. I turned the light on, then I aimed it at Jameson’s note—his love note.

In the purple-blue light of the ice chamber, four words lit up.

Like the sun and the moon

I loved her.

Saint Avery.

Until death and beyond.

“True words,” I said, acknowledging that between us. “But they have a second, hidden meaning.”

“Very good, Heiress.”

I stared at the words. Sun. Moon. Saint. Death. And just like that, I knew.