Glorious Rivals(84)
Rohan let him have that—for a time. He let himself be beat bloody, and then…
Push him back. Rohan did exactly that, without leaving a single mark, without drawing a single drop of blood. It hadn’t taken him long to pinpoint the mix of styles Brady fought with. Unfortunately for Rohan’s opponent, Rohan’s strength as a fighter had always been that he had no style. Every move he made was calculated based solely on what his opponent was about to do. There were no restraints to the way Rohan fought. He was whatever he needed to be.
There was clarity in pain, and clarity—in a fight of this kind or any other—was always a matter of understanding one’s opponent.
You’re fighting like her life depends on it. Your sponsor made you believe that it does. In the labyrinth of his mind, Rohan could hear Nash Hawthorne telling him that he wasn’t going to win the Grandest Game. Our games have heart. It ain’t gonna be you, kid. But Rohan didn’t need heart to win this fight. All he needed to do was take advantage of Brady’s, to give the scholar an opening, one small enough that the intrepid and desperate Mr. Daniels would believe it authentic.
Rohan purposefully overswung. Brady ducked and charged—but Rohan was not as off-balanced as he seemed. He’d cut his teeth fighting in alleyways and palaces and everything in between. The best assaults were always masked with defeat.
He gave Brady a moment—just one—to believe that he’d gained the upper hand, and a fraction of a second later, Rohan was behind the scholar, his arm wrapped around his neck.
A choke hold. An arterial reflex. A sudden drop in blood pressure. A less-experienced fighter—or a more principled one—would have let go when Brady Daniels went limp. Rohan held on just a while longer. Not long enough to do permanent damage—not this time.
He hadn’t even left a mark.
Beaten and bloody himself, Rohan lowered his fallen prey to the ground, and then unzipped the man’s jacket, confiscating every object he had—including two golden darts. Brady hadn’t even bothered to hide them.
“Some people never learn,” Rohan told the scholar, and then, belatedly, he checked the man’s pulse. Steady. Strong. It was just as well. Death was messy. This was a moment for precision.
Rohan lowered Brady’s wrist, and his gaze caught on the tattoo he’d seen earlier, a spiral lined with letters on the inside of the man’s arm. Dozens and dozens of letters, spelling nothing, a seemingly random assortment, and then Rohan realized…
Not random at all.
A potential meaning of the third message that Brady had received from his sponsor hit Rohan as solidly as any blow. One out of three. Every third letter.
Rohan started at the outside, spiraling in, but halfway through, he stopped and reversed course, starting at the center—with the R—and spiraling out.
R, skip two letters, O, skip two letters, H…
And there it was in black and white, a directive literally tattooed onto Brady’s skin: R-O-H-A-N-M-U-S-T-L-O-S-E.
Rohan must lose.
This was not a temporary tattoo. Based on the look and depth of the ink, it wasn’t of the semipermanent variety, either. No, this tattoo was real, and it was fully healed. Brady Daniels had been one of the Hawthorne heiress’s picks for the game. He would have had all of three days’ notice of that, and yet, the man had clearly had this tattoo for at least a month or two.
You had a sponsor long before you received that invitation, didn’t you, scholar? Long before the nature of this year’s game was even announced. And that sponsor had not given Brady his most important directive directly. That sponsor had not sent Brady into this game knowing that his mission, above all, was to make sure that Rohan lost.
No, Brady’s sponsor had only triggered that order much more recently—sometime after the bonfire but before the yacht. Once it was clear that Savannah and I were still working as a team. Once it was clear just how formidable the two of us were.
Rohan could only conclude that it would have been cleaner for Brady’s sponsor if Brady never knew who his target really was, cleaner if Brady had simply been in position to win the Grandest Game himself. But said sponsor had built in a fail-safe—one that, unlike a message written in invisible ink, could not be intercepted or stolen.
Was the scholar supposed to memorize this sequence? Did he have this inked into his own skin—or did you? Rohan silently addressed those questions to Brady’s sponsor—the same sponsor who had equipped the man with information about the death of Savannah Grayson’s father. Gigi’s, too.
Had Brady been given leverage on any of the other players? It hardly mattered. What mattered most was the fact that this one message—this one directive—had merited different treatment. Weeks before Brady was chosen as a player, he was given this code. Weeks before I became a player, someone knew I would.
Someone had been playing the long game here, and that, as much as the way he’d been targeted, told Rohan exactly who Brady’s sponsor was.
The Devil’s Mercy was many things. A luxurious gambling club. A place where deals were struck and fortunes set. A historic legacy. A shadow force—like an invisible hand, guiding outcomes just so, one long game after another.
And there were only two individuals at the Devil’s Mercy who would dare target Rohan like this. One was the Proprietor himself, and the other was the only person on this planet who needed Rohan to lose the Grandest Game. The person who stood to gain the Devil’s Mercy if he did.