Page 15 of The Brothers Hawthorne

We share nothing but blood.The thought was deliberate, measured, but its purpose was entirely undone when Xander spoke next. “What’s she like, the one you met?”

Grayson kept his answer short. “In some ways, she reminds me of you.” Maybe that explained how protective he felt of the girl already.

“You’re going to have to lie to her.” The warning in Xander’s tone was clear. “Sabotage her. Gain her trust and betray her.”

Grayson ended the call before he replied. “I know.”

Without giving himself even a second for guilt or second-guessing, he picked up the hotel phone and called down to the lobby. “As it turns out,” he said, his voice like stone, “I’ll need this room for at least a week.”

ELEVEN YEARS AND TEN MONTHS AGO

There were thirteen different ways to enter the tree house—officially. Unofficially, if a person were willing to risk falling, there were many more. Grayson wasn’t surprised when he looked out and saw Jameson dangling precariously off a branch, nor was he surprised when his younger brother managed to somehow catapult himself in through the window.

“You’re late,” Grayson said. Jameson was always late. Jameson wasallowedto be late.

“Tomorrow, when we’re the same age, I’m going to tell you to loosen up.” Jameson punctuated that statement by jumping to catch one of the beams overhead, swinging back and forth, and launching himself feet-first at Grayson, who jumped out of the way.

“I’ll still be older than you tomorrow,” Grayson retorted. Had Jameson been born one day later, the two of them would have been exactly a year apart in age. Instead, hisyoungerbrother had arrived on August twenty-second, one day before Grayson’s first birthday.

That meant that for one day each year, they were technically the same age.

“Are you ready?” Grayson asked quietly. “For your birthday?”First yours, then mine.

“I’m ready,” Jameson said, his chin jutting out.

Ready to turn eight, Grayson translated.Ready to be called into the old man’s study.

Jameson swallowed. “He’s going to make me fight you, Gray.”

Grayson couldn’t argue with that conclusion. Each year on their birthdays, their grandfather greeted them with three words.Invest. Cultivate. Create.They were given ten thousand dollars to invest. They got to choose a talent to cultivate for the year—anything in the world they wanted to learn to do. And they were given a challenge to be completed by their next birthday.

For the past three years, Grayson and Jameson had chosen martial arts forms for thecultivateside of things.Of course the old man is going to make Jameson fight me.

“And then the next day,” Grayson muttered, “on my birthday, he’ll make me fight him.”

It was a horrible thing to spend ayearon something and then lose.

“You can’t go easy on me, okay?” Jameson’s expression was fierce.

The old man will know if I do.“Okay.”

Jameson’s eyes narrowed. “Promise?”

Grayson drew a line down his face with his thumb, starting at his hairline and going all the way to his chin. “Promise.”

There was no taking backthatkind of promise. It was theirs and theirs alone.

Jameson expelled a breath. “What was your challenge this year? What did you have to create?”

Grayson’s heart rate ticked up at the question. In two days, he would be expected to both demonstrate the skill he’d cultivated over the last twelve months and present his grandfather with his response to his last birthday challenge. “A haiku.”

Jameson wrinkled his forehead. “A what?”

“A poem.” Grayson looked down. “Haiku is a poetic form of Japanese provenance, wherein each poem is three lines long, a total of seventeen syllables, broken down into five syllables in the first and last lines and seven for the line in between.”

The definition was burned into his mind.

“Seventeen syllables?” Jameson was outraged. “Are you kidding me? That’s it?”