Page 56 of The Grandest Game

“If you push that button, wewilllose, Gigi.” Knox didn’t call her little girl this time.

“I can’t hold him much longer!”

Gigi was torn. Her mind racing, she thought about Brady’s mom and the cost of losing this game. She thought about the rules, the stakes, the riddle on the wall, the fact that Knoxwas not okay.

Gigi pushed the button.

Chapter 42

GIGI

What the hell did you just do?” Knox went still. Brady let loose of him.

Gigi took a deep breath. “I pushed the black button.”

“Black,” Brady repeated. “Not red.”

Emergency, not hint.

“Everything okay?” A voice—Avery’s—sounded from what had to be a hidden speaker.

Okay?Knox’s hands were bleeding profusely. Brady had taken at least one vicious blow to the jaw. They’d both broken the rules of the game. But no one had to know that.

Since Avery was awaiting a response, Gigi improvised. “Bathroom!”

Brady’s forehead knotted. Knox shot Gigi a pissed-off, incredulous,are you insanelook to which Gigi was completely immune.

“Knox really, really has to go to the bathroom,” Gigi announced. “Total urinating emergency. Very small bladder.”

There was a sound that might have been a snort on the otherend of the line. Gigi was pretty sure that Avery wasn’t the one snorting, but whichever Hawthorne she’d heard—Jameson, it was totally Jameson—didn’t say a word. Avery didn’t say anything else, either, as a section of the chamber wall whirled to reveal an opening to what looked to be a well-lit corridor containing exactly one door—presumably, to a bathroom.

“Thank you,” Gigi called to the game makers. There was no reply. They were gone.

“Say one more word about my bladder,” Knox warned Gigi, “and I will end you.”

“I love you, too,” Gigi replied sweetly. As he stalked off down the hall, she called after him. “You’re welcome!”

As soon as the bathroom door slammed shut, Gigi turned to Brady. “Will he be okay? The bathroom probably isn’t all that big, either.”

“He’s fine with bathrooms.” Brady leaned back against the wall of the chamber and closed his eyes, just for a moment. “He’ll be fine—until the next time he’s not.”

Gigi didn’t push for any more than that. “I’m sorry about your mom,” she said softly.

“Not your fault. Nothing you can do about it.”

A ball of emotion rose in Gigi’s throat.Not my fault. Nothing I can do about it.How many times in the past year and a half had she said variations of those two sentences to herself?

It wasn’t Gigi’s fault that her father was dead or that he’d died trying to kill Avery Grambs. It wasn’t her fault that she knew and Savannah didn’t or that a lifetime of being protected by her twin meant that shehadto protect her sister, just this once. None of it was Gigi’s fault, and there was nothing she could do about any of it, except keep THE SECRET and pull off the occasional, glorious act of stealthy interpersonal philanthropy.

But no matter what Gigi did, it was never enough.

“There’s alwayssomething,” Gigi told Brady. She believed that. She had to. “Brady, if I win the Grandest Game, I swear I’ll make sure your mom is taken care of. Even if I lose, I have a trust fund. My access is limited, and it might require some creative quote-unquote embezzling on my part, but—”

“You need to be careful with Knox.” That was Brady shutting her down and issuing a warning, all in one go. “He’s done well enough the last few years. Went to college. Got a job. But no matter where he goes or what he does, the dark place is always waiting, and Knox Landry doesn’t think about morality the way that you or I do. He isn’t someone you can redeem, Gigi, and when I tell you that he can be dangerous, I mean it.”

“For some values of the worddangerous,” Gigi agreed amiably.

“For all of them.” Brady studied her. “Do you know how the two of us met? I’d just turned six and had already skipped two grades. Knox was nine and a half and had been held back one. We were in the same class, but he never said a word to me until the day he beat up a kid who was beating on me.”