Page 111 of The Grandest Game

Gigi felt the warmth of Brady’s touch. Hewantedher to feel it.

She pulled her hand back. “Was any of it real?” she asked, her voice breaking. The way he’d touched her. The way he’d looked at her. Chaos theory.

“All kinds of things can happen,” Brady said quietly, “in a closed system.”

“Nothing in, nothing out,” Gigi said.A locked room. An island.

“I wasn’t lying,” Brady said, his voice catching a little, “when I told you that my brain likes A Lot.”

Gigi tried madly to look anywhere but at his face, and her gaze fell on the sword. “If I asked you to give that to me, would you?”

His reply was gentle. “What use would you have for it now, Gigi?”

She was out of the game, and he wasn’t. “That’s what I thought.” Gigi summoned up her best and brightest smile, because thishurt. “You wanted me to feel something for you. You wanted me to trust you and like you. Maybe you thought you could use me in the next phase of the game, if our team did make it out by dawn.” Gigi was still smiling. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t let herself stop. “You played me, Brady.”

“I’m playing like her life depends on it.” Brady leaned forward, and suddenly, Gigi couldn’t see anything but his face. “Juliet? I need this game to go on.”

That was the second time he’d called herJuliet. “I never asked,” Gigi realized. “How do you know my real name?”

Brady didn’t reply.

Was any of it real?she’d asked him.

All kinds of things can happen in a closed system.

But that system wasn’t really closed, was it? And for the first time, a possibility occurred to Gigi—not just a possibility. Alikelihood.

“You know, it’s funny.” Gigi looked Brady right in the eyes. “You told me about Knox’s sponsor, but you never mentioned yours.”

Brady didn’t deny it.

Gigi thought about Knox saying that the Thorps weren’t the only game in town, saying that Orion Thorp wasn’t the only member of his family who liked to play. She thought about Brady playing the Grandest Game like Calla’s life depended on it. About Knox and his scar and the way he’d said that Calla hadleft.

The next thing Gigi knew, Brady was standing to go, and Xander was in the doorway.

“For what it’s worth,” Brady told Gigi, “in the last six years, there hasn’t been anyone who could make me forget Calla. There hasn’t been a singlemoment.” Brady almost smiled at her. “There were moments with you.”

Xander waited until Brady had left, then shut the door and turned back to Gigi with one brow raised to ridiculous heights. “I’m sensing a story.”

Gigi knew that she had to tell Xander—about the bug, the knife, Code Name Mimosas, all of it. She wasgoingto tell him. But somehow, what came out instead was: “I lost. No Viking epics for me.”

“Says who?” Xander crossed the room and sat down beside her. “I just placed an order for a very fetching Viking helmet to don during my recitation of said epics.”

“Like you don’t already have a Viking helmet?” Gigi replied.

“If you want to gettechnical, I just placed an order for a backup Viking helmet for my backup Viking helmet,” Xander admitted. “This one is quite large.”

Gigi didn’t even have totryto smile with Xander.

He bumped his shoulder into hers. “Just because you didn’t win,” Xander said, producing a scone seemingly out of nowhere and handing it to Gigi, “doesn’t mean the journey was anything less than epic, and I’ve written Viking sagas for less.”

Tell him, Gigi thought, and the words were right there on her lips:I found a bag hidden in the brush, and inside it, there was a wetsuit, an oxygen tank, a necklace that wasn’t just a necklace, and a knife.

“I once built a Rube Goldberg machine the purpose of which was smacking my own magnificent buttocks.” Xander met Gigi’s gaze. “I tell you this to say that I am a man of many talents—one of which happens to be listening. I am a very good listener.”

The only reasonable thing I could possibly do right now is tell him.

What did it matter that Brady had asked her not to?