If I had a tenner, Rohan thought, for every time someone pointed a gun at the back of my head…
“Hand it over.” The fool with the gun had no idea how much his voice betrayed him.
“Hand what over?” Rohan turned, displaying his empty hands. Granted, they hadn’t been empty the second before.
“The ticket.” The man shook his gun in Rohan’s face. “Give it to me!
There are only two wild cards left in the game.” “Point of fact,” Rohan said lazily, “there are none.” “You couldn’t possibly know that.”
Rohan smiled. “My mistake.” He saw the exact instant his opponent realized: Rohan didn’t make mistakes. He’d found his first wild card ticket in Las Vegas and a second one here in Atlanta, at which point, he’d moved on to the next phase of his plan.
This rooftop provided an excellent vantage point from which to observe the courtyard below.
“You have the last two tickets? Both of them?” The man lowered his gun and took a step forward—mistakes, both. “Give me one. Please.”
“I’m gratified to see your manners are improving, but as it happens, I prefer to choose my competition.” Rohan turned his back on the man—and the gun—and angled his gaze toward the courtyard below. “She’ll do.”
Four stories down, a young woman with hair the color of chocolate and
a gravity-defying bounce in her step was investigating a statue.
“It’s possible,” Rohan said, a pleasant hum in his voice, “that the ticket I found up here is now residing down there.”
After a split second, the man with the gun bolted for the stairs—for the courtyard below. For the girl.
“Hurt her, and you’ll regret it.” Rohan didn’t put any heat in those words. He didn’t have to.
Most people had enough sense to recognize the moment he’d flipped the switch.
 |
“That’s it, folks! A press release from Hawthorne heiress Avery Grambs has confirmed that, less than forty-eight hours in, all seven slots in this year’s Grandest Game have been claimed.”
Sitting on the edge of a bed that was not his, wearing nothing but a lush Turkish cotton robe, Rohan twirled a knife slowly through his fingers. There were advantages to being a ghost. In the past year, he’d slipped in and out of luxury hotels like this one with ease. He’d spent that year obtaining funds, contacts, intelligence—not enough, in and of itself, to win him the Mercy, but enough that nothing about his current plan had been left to chance.
“Last year’s game was a free-for-all,” the reporter continued on-screen, “as people from around the world raced through a series of elaborate clues that took them from Mozambique to Alaska to Dubai. This year’s affair looks to be more intimate, with the identities of the seven lucky players currently a closely guarded secret.”
Not that closely guarded. Not against someone with Rohan’s skill set. “The location of the game is also being kept tightly under wraps.”
“For some values of the word tightly,” Rohan quipped. He turned off the television. Upon claiming his ticket, he’d been given a pickup location and a time. Now that it was drawing close, he made his way to the luxury suite’s massive shower.
He lost the robe but kept the knife.
As the glass walls of the shower steamed up around him, Rohan brought
the tip of his blade to the glass. He’d always had a light hand, always known exactly how hard—or soft—to push. Lightly, he skimmed the knife through the steam, drawing six symbols in the moisture on the surface of the glass.
A bishop, a rook, a knight, two pawns, and a queen.
Already, Rohan had begun to classify his competition. Odette Morales. Brady Daniels. Knox Landry. He dragged the tip of his blade through the bishop, the rook, and the knight. That just left the three players nearest to Rohan’s own age of not quite twenty. Gigi Grayson he’d observed from the rooftop. The other two he knew only on paper.
A game such as this one would require the cultivation of certain assets.
Those three were… possibilities.
Gigi Grayson. Savannah Grayson. Lyra Kane. Only time would tell which of the three would prove of the most use to Rohan—and if any of them had the versatility of the queen.
