Page 55 of Games Untold (The Inheritance Games #5)

Chapter 28

W e were still out of paper, so Harry drew his puzzle on a napkin.

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

I eyed the spacing between those letters. “Is that all one word?”

“Why, yes, it is.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. There had to be a catch to the fact that he’d given me unlimited guesses. There were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet. “ E ,” I said.

Harry helped himself to another napkin. I expected him to draw the typical hangman frame, but all he drew was an oval.

“A.”

A single, arcing line, in the vicinity of what I had to assume would eventually be my eye.

Someone was feeling overly confident here, and it wasn’t me. Narrowing my eyes, I went through the rest of the vowels, including Y .

That lone eye was starting to take shape, and I realized: Harry could draw . This was definitely no stick figure. It was the beginnings of a very detailed sketch, and I remembered the way he’d said that he would draw my hair one strand at a time if he had to.

“There’s no such thing as a word without vowels,” I told him.

Harry shrugged. “I never promised to spell my word with letters.”

“Then what else would you—” I cut myself off. “Numbers. We’re playing Hangman in code ?”

“As fond as my people are of wagers, I believe we’re also very fond of skewing the game.” Harry twirled the pen in his fingers like a miniature baton. “In my defense, you have as many guesses as the hairs on your head, the stars in the sky, and the number of ways you’ve imagined wiping this smug expression right off of my classically handsome face.”

“You’re not that handsome,” I said darkly.

He smiled. “Did you know that bugiarda is Italian for ‘liar’?”

After guessing the numbers one through twenty-six, it was apparent that this wasn’t going to be an easy code to break. Only four numbers had resulted in him not adding a stroke to his drawing of my face: 5 , 3 , 7 , and 2 . Each number was used only once, the remaining spaces blank.

“Hypothetically speaking…” I fixed Harry with a look. “What’s the range of numbers in your code?”

“Hypothetically? It might range from two to three hundred and ten.”

Three hundred and ten? There had to be some significance to that.

“Care to guess again?” Harry taunted, and I tried not to think about what his sketch might look like once I’d guessed all of the numbers left up to three hundred and ten.

I stared at the puzzle, ignoring the second napkin altogether.

I needed to take my time, to look at this from every angle before I gave him a chance to send me wandering off down a path of his choosing. “Put the pen down and get up,” I ordered. “We’re done for today.”