These Games We Play

Chapter Nineteen :Race cars and bad ideas

I told Jameson what his mother had told me. He stared at me.

“The old man chose our names.” I could see the gears in Jameson’s head turning, and then—nothing. “He picked our names,” Jameson repeated, pacing the long hall like an animal caged. “He picked them, and then he highlighted them in the Red Will.” Jameson stopped again. “He disinherited the family twenty years ago and chose our middle names—all of them but Nash’s—shortly thereafter. Grayson’s nineteen. I’m eighteen. Xan will be seventeen next month.”

I could feel him trying to make this make sense. Trying to see what we were missing.

“The old man was playing a long game,” Jameson said, every muscle in his body tightening. “Our whole lives.”

“The names have to mean something,” I stated. “He might have known who our fathers were.” Jameson considered that possibility.

“Even if Skye thought she’d kept it a secret—there were no secrets from him.” I heard an undertone in Jameson’s voice when he said those words—something deep and cutting and awful. Which of your secrets did he know? Which ones did I know?

“We can do a search,” I said, trying to focus on the riddle and not the boy. I was failing. “Or have Alisa hire a private investigator on my behalf to look for men with those last names.”

“Or,” Jameson countered, “you can give me about six hours to utterly sober up, and I’ll show you what I do when I’m working a puzzle and I hit a wall.”

☆☆☆☆

Seven hours later, Jameson snuck me out through the fireplace passageway and led me to the far wing of the house—past the kitchen, past the Great Room, into what turned out to be the largest garage I’d ever seen. It was closer to a showroom, really. There were a dozen motorcycles stacked on a mammoth shelf on the wall, and twice that many cars parked in a semicircle. Jameson paced by them, one by one. He stopped in front of a car that looked like something straight out of science fiction.

“The Aston Martin Valkyrie,” Jameson said. “A hybrid hypercar with a top speed of more than two hundred miles per hour.” He gestured down the line. “Those three are Bugattis. The Chiron’s my favorite. Nearly fifteen hundred horsepower and not bad on the track.”

“Track,” I repeated. “As in racetrack?”

“They were my grandfather’s babies,” Jameson said. “And now…” A slow smile spread across his face. “They’re yours.”

That smile was devilish. It was dangerous. “No way,” I told Jameson.

“I’m not even allowed to leave the estate without Oren. And I can’t drive a car like these!”

“I didn’t peg you as someone who follows rules,” he replied, as he moved towards a box on the wall. “And lucky for you heiress I can drive.”  He was smiling at me again and I might have melted just then and there.

I walked over to the box. There was a puzzle built into the into it , like a Rubik’s Cube, but silver, with strange shapes carved onto the squares. Jameson immediately began spinning the tiles, twisting them, arranging them just so. The box popped open. He ran his fingers over a plethora of keys, then selected one.

“There’s nothing like speed for getting out of your own head—and out of your own way.” He started walking toward the Aston Martin. “Some puzzles make more sense at two hundred miles an hour.”

“Is there even room for two people in that?” I asked.

“Why, Heiress,” Jameson murmured, “I thought you’d never ask.”