Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (68)

Was she still planning Eve’s eventual demise? Yes, most definitely. But Gigi was fully capable of prioritizing.

“This would be easier,” Eve told Slate in a deceptively pleasant voice as she tried again, “with a knife.”

“I already told you,” Slate replied, “whoever brought us here took my knife.”

Gigi couldn’t help thinking that the two of them bickered like siblings—or exes. The jury was still out on that one.

“That knife was my friend,” Gigi declared morosely.

“It definitely was not,” Slate said.

With her back to Eve, Gigi was facing Slate. With only a few feet separating them, she could make out the exact color of his eyes, so dark the pupils almost disappeared into his irises. For once, his dark blond hair wasn’t in his face, the light scar through his eyebrow fully visible.

“You don’t know the first thing about that knife.” That was from Eve, who tore another nail—and cursed.

“Creative use of expletives,” Gigi complimented. “And I do so.” She let her eyes settle on Mattias Slater’s. “Fourteen notches in the sheath,” Gigi said quietly. “Fourteen horrible things. And you’re always at your most dangerous when your intentions are good.”

Eve stopped what she was doing. For three or four seconds, she went very still. “You told her?” Eve asked Slate, and then she started in on the duct tape again—with a vengeance. “About your father?”

The duct tape tore—just a little at first, but soon, the binding had ripped far enough for Gigi to begin to wiggle her wrists out of it.

“What about your father?” Gigi asked Slate.

Mattias Slater closed his eyes. “Quiet,” he ordered.

“I’m going to try not to take that personally,” Gigi announced, but when Slate opened his eyes again and caught hers, she realized: He wasn’t avoiding the question.

He’d heard something.

Gigi listened, but she couldn’t hear anything other than the sound of gently falling water from the infinity fountains. And then one of those fountains—and the wall behind it—parted, and Gigi knew exactly what Slate had heard.

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.