Glorious Rivals(68)

Footsteps. Heels on hard wood floor. Red boots. Gigi stared at those boots, then lifted her gaze. She was the only one of the three of them positioned to be able to see the hooded figure that walked toward them, clothed in a long red cloak. The hood of the cloak cast the woman’s face—and Gigi was sure, somehow, that it was a woman—in shadow, but even if it hadn’t…

There’s a red cloth over her face. Presumably, their captor could see out, but that did nothing to tell Gigi who she was dealing with. Red gloves on her hands.

The exact shade of red was deep, the red of dried blood. Blood-red gloves. Blood-red cloak. Blood-red hood. Blood-red boots.

The cloaked figure walked past Slate to Gigi, who frantically tore her wrists the rest of the way out of the duct tape just in time to see the glint of a knife.

That knife is not my friend. Gigi threw her hands up in front of her face, but an attack never came. Without a word, the woman in red cut through the tape around Gigi’s torso, freeing her from the metal chair.

Gigi jumped to her feet, then looked at Slate and Eve, still bound—arms, legs, and stomach—to their chairs. “Seriously. Should I be insulted?”

“Juliet Grayson.” For a moment that was all the woman in red said, just Gigi’s given name, and then she continued. “Evelyn Blake. Mattias Slater.”

Gigi shifted her weight to the balls of her feet. She might have a knife, she told herself, but I have the element of surprise. Nobody expected a Tasmanian devil pounce—pretty much ever.

“Sunshine? Don’t.” Slate bit out the words.

“I’d recommend listening to Mr. Slater,” the cloaked woman said. “On this matter, at least.” There was the slightest hint of an accent to their captor’s carefully paced words. “I mean the three of you no harm.”

“Skeptical,” Gigi said. “Me. Very.”

“Skepticism is a double-edged sword,” the woman in red replied, her long cloak billowing around her ankles as she moved to cut Eve free as well. “Anything worth doing requires belief—in oneself at the very least.”

“I believe in myself,” Gigi said. I believe that I was taught to tackle by the great Xander Hawthorne himself and—

“Don’t,” Slate and Eve spoke in unison this time. The moment Eve was free, she stood and placed herself in front of Gigi.

“For the record, Ms. Blake,” the woman in red told Eve, “you are the one who made all of this necessary. I prefer to work through more subtle means, but you? Bull in a china shop. You lead with emotion, and you lack control. I need for the Grandest Game to go on. Overt interference with the players puts that at risk. You left me little choice about removing you from the board.”

The Grandest Game. Hearing that out of their shrouded captor’s mouth somehow unlocked a realization in Gigi’s mind, as detail after detail started adding up. “You’re Brady’s sponsor.”

Brady was the one who’d asked Gigi not to tell the game makers about the bug she’d found in phase one. He’d told her that he needed the game to go on.

He’d been playing like Calla’s life depended on it.

And once, back in the game, he’d called Gigi Juliet.

The woman in red issued no denials. “I am many things. For now, I am the person who came here to verify that the three of you were suffering no ill effects from being knocked out, and having verified that, I am the person who will be leaving you here in this room, where you will remain safely contained until the end of the game. Believe me when I say that this is in your best interest as well as mine.”

“Bullshit.”

Tell us how you really feel, Slate, Gigi thought. Out loud, she couldn’t help herself. “So what you’re saying is that all you’re doing is keeping us safely out of the way until you’ve gotten what you want out of the Grandest Game?” Gigi shot a look at Slate. “My, my, my, how the tables have turned.”

“You’re still kidnapped,” Slate informed her. “They haven’t completely turned.”

“You’re taped to a chair,” Gigi pointed out. “And I’m not. Everything else is just semantics.” She turned back to their mysterious captor. “But speaking of, why am I kidnapped? Are we just talking wrong place, wrong time here? Unfortunate association with unsavory characters?”

Slate was the one who answered. “You were headed for the island.”

“That,” the woman in red agreed. “And I had a need for bait.”

Bait. That word, said so calmly, sent a chill down Gigi’s back. What kind of bait?

Their captor walked back toward the wall she’d entered through. “Lest you get any grand ideas, this door must be triggered by a remote. No amount of brute force will cause it to open. For his sake, I’d leave the boy bound. You don’t want him loose when my target takes the bait. She does not react well at all to those she finds threatening.”

She? Before Gigi could so much as speak that question aloud, the woman in red was gone.

Chapter 58

LYRA

When Lyra thought about the forest on Hawthorne Island, she thought of soaring evergreen trees, some living, some charred from that long-ago fire, but she couldn’t picture them, and the other trees in the forest, the ones with leaves instead of dark green needles—Lyra didn’t remember much about those at all. Maybe that was why the massive trees on the north edge of the forest, each with dozens of limbs sticking out from thick trunks like bicycle spokes, light shining through their branches, had an almost physical effect on her, as she and Grayson crossed into the woods.