“But not you.” The words were just as sweet, just as painful. “Never you.”
Something gave inside me. “Grayson.”
“I know,” he said roughly.
I shook my head. “You’re still so convinced that you know everything.”
“I know that Jamie loves you.” Grayson looked at me the way you look at art in a glass case, like he wanted to reach out to touch me but couldn’t.
“And I’ve seen the way that you look at him, the way the two of you are together. You’re in love with my brother, Avery.” He paused. “Tell me you’re not.”
I couldn’t do that. He knew I couldn’t. “I am in love with your brother,”
I said, because it was true. Jameson was part of me now—part of who I’d spent the past year becoming. I’d changed. If I hadn’t, maybe things could have been different, but there was no going back.
I was who I was because of Jameson. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told him that I didn’t want him to be anyone else.
So why was this so hard?
“I wanted Eve to be different,” Grayson told me. “I wanted her to be you.”
“Don’t say that,” I whispered.
He looked at me one last time. “There are so many things that I will never say.”
He was getting ready to walk away, and I had to let him—but I couldn’t.
“Promise me you won’t leave again,” I told Grayson. “You can go back to Harvard. You can go wherever you want, do whatever you want—just promise me that you won’t shut us out again.” I lifted my hand to my Hawthorne pin. I knew he had one of his own. I knew that, but I took mine off and pinned it on him anyway. “Est unus ex nobis. You said that to Jameson once, do you remember? She is one of us. Well, it goes both ways, Gray.”
Grayson closed his eyes, and I was hit with the feeling that I would never forget the way he looked standing there in the light from the stained-glass windows. Without his armor. Without pretense. Raw.
“Scio,” Grayson told me. I know.
I looked down at the USB in his hand.
“I have the other one,” I told him. “It was the one object in the leather satchel that we never used, remember?”
Grayson’s eyes opened. He stepped out of the light. “Are you going to call my brothers?” he asked me. “Or shall I?”
CHAPTER 69
Xander plugged the first USB into his computer, dragged the audio file onto the desktop, then removed the USB and exchanged it for the USB
from the tomb. He dragged the second file to his desktop, too.
“Play the first one,” Jameson instructed.
Xander did. Garbled, undecipherable speech filled the air, a blast of white noise.
“And the second?” Nash prompted. For as long as I’d known him, he’d resisted dancing to the old man’s tune. But he was here. He was doing this.
The lone file on the second USB was also an audio clip. It was just as messed up as the first.
“What happens if you play them together?” I asked. Grayson had said that to make sense of one file, you needed a decoder. In isolation, the clips were nothing but noise. But if you had both USBs, both files…
Xander opened an audio editing app and dumped the files in. He lined them up, then hit a sequence of buttons that caused them to play.
Combined, the result wasn’t garbled. “Hello, Avery,” a man’s voice said, and I felt the change in the air around me, in all of them. “We’re strangers, you and I. I imagine that’s something you’ve thought about quite a bit.”