“What would you do,” Jameson asked Zella, his mind sorting through an array of possibilities, “if you wanted to get the Proprietor’s attention?”
It wasn’t just his attention Jameson needed.
“Surprise him.” Zella turned and ran one hand lightly through the waterfall on the wall. “Or make him think that you have something he wants. Or if you have as little sense as it appears…” The duchess turned from the wall, her brown eyes settling on his. “Make him see you as a threat.”
“You know about the Game,” Avery said, and there was no question in her voice as she took a step toward the duchess. “You want in—if you’re not in already. Why would you help us?”
Help me, Jameson thought.
“Because I can.” Zella looked from Avery to Jameson. “And because the advantage to choosing one’s competition is knowing one’s competition.”
Any help she gave him served her own ends. “And you know me?” Jameson challenged.
“I know risk-takers,” Zella said. “I know privilege.” The duchess let that word hang in the air, and then she looked from Jameson to Avery. “I know love.”
You know a hell of a lot more than that, Jameson thought.
Zella smiled slightly then, almost as if she’d heard him clear as day. “I know,” she said, “that there’s more than one way to shatter glass.”
And with that, the duchess made her exit.
“What did Ian say to you?” Avery asked him as soon as they were alone. “When you went to see him—what the hell did he say?”
Jameson didn’t make her call Tahiti. “He offered to leave me Vantage when he dies, if I win it back for him now.”
Avery stared at—and into—him. “You could win it for yourself.”
That was true. It had always been true. But Jameson couldn’t help thinking about Ian saying that he didn’t care for whist. About the laugh he’d managed to surprise out of the man, so much like his own.
“I can’t win anything for anyone,” Jameson bit out, a ball rising in his throat, “if I don’t get an invitation to the Game.”
Every bruise on his body was a live wire, but the only thing that mattered was what was next. Surprise the Proprietor. Tempt him. Threaten him. “Time to get back out there.”
To Avery’s credit, she didn’t try to talk him out of it—just handed him a quartet of over-the-counter pain pills and a bottle of water. “I’m coming with you.”
Game on.
CHAPTER 43
JAMESON
The food smelled delicious—or so Jameson was informed, since he couldn’t smell anything at the moment. Eating was also out the question.
“Could I get you some soup, sir?” The bartender looked more like a bouncer. Like the dealers in the gaming room, he wore clothes lifted straight out of another era. No jewels around his neck, but Jameson caught a thick ring on his middle finger.
A triangle embedded inside a circle inside a square.
“Or something a little stronger?” The bartender lifted a crystal goblet onto the bar. The liquid inside was a dark shade of amber, almost gold.
“Soup and spirits,” Avery murmured into the back of Jameson’s head. “Think they offer that to everyone who survives the ring?”
Jameson’s body drank in the closeness of hers, allowing it to fuel his resolve, and then he cut to the chase with the bartender. “I’m after the book.”
The bartender looked Jameson up and down. The man appeared to be in his forties, but Jameson thought suddenly of the boy in the boat that first night and wondered exactly how long this gentleman had worked at the Devil’s Mercy.
Exactly how loyal to the Proprietor he was.
“Ah.” The bartender reached below again, and this time, he withdrew a leather-bound tome that looked like it weighed too much to be so easily maneuvered with one hand. One very large hand, Jameson noted.
“Are the two of you looking to place any bet in particular?” the bartender asked.
Avery stepped back. “Not me,” she said. “Just him.”
Jameson knew how hard it was for her to sit this one out, just like she knew that he was the one who needed to impress. Ignoring the pang of the distance Avery had just put between them, Jameson flipped open the book. “May I?”
The bartender laid his massive hands flat on the bar, just behind the book, but said nothing as Jameson began to flip through it. The pages were yellowed with age, the dates beside the earliest bets written in script so formal it was difficult to read.