Jameson waited for Grayson to look in his direction again, and through sheer force of will, Jameson managed to move his lips, parting them, bringing them soundlessly back together.
Em.
“I picked the lock on my manacles,” the viper in question was saying. “You have to hold still if you want me to do the same for you.”
“Get Jameson down first.”
“Jameson can’t help us. The Ascendants—any or all of them could return any minute. We don’t stand a chance if I don’t get you out of these.”
“Get my brother down first.”
Jameson tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t, couldn’t get his lips to so much as part again.
And then Emily was there, making a show of picking the locks on his manacles. The right one snapped open. Jameson’s right arm fell, useless, to his side. The left manacle was next, and without it to hold him up, Jameson fell to the ground.
Unable to move, he looked up at the first girl he’d ever kissed, a girl who’d loved going fast and taking risks and proving that she had absolutely no fear. Emily bent down, taking his pulse, and lowered her face toward his to whisper: “Your brother knows.”
Jameson hadn’t figured it out, hadn’t realized who she really was.Slatehad, and Emily had gotten rid of him before Grayson had woken up, but somehow, Grayson stillknew. And Emily knew that he knew, but Grayson didn’t know that.
You aren’t playing her, Gray. She’s playing you.
The next thing Jameson knew, Grayson was free—free and kneeling next to him. Jameson couldn’t even feel his brother’s fingers as Grayson took his pulse. Nearly his entire body was numb.
She knows that you know, Gray.
“What happened to him?” Grayson demanded.
“Poison?” their captorguessed.
Grayson stood and paced the perimeter of their cell. The walls were made of stone. There was no door.
“Tell me about the Crucible,” Grayson ordered. If he intended to attack, he was taking his sweet time, and for whatever reason, Emily let him.
It was never you for me, she’d told Jameson.It was always him.
“Tell me what the Gilded Blade did to you, Eve,” Grayson said, gentling his tone.
“What they did to all of us?” Emily said, her voice quiet but fiery somehow, a faraway look in her eyes. “It starts with rooms. Locked rooms—so many of them, each a puzzle, and after a while, you start to wonder if you’ll die solving them… ornotsolving them. But if you keep going, if you push yourself all the way to the brink, if you’re smart enough and able to think outside the box, eventually, you come to a room where there is a long line of champagne flutes in every color of the rainbow, each one holding a different liquid that most definitely is not champagne, all sitting on a table with the wordspick your poisoncarved into the wood.”
That matched what Emily had told Jameson before, and it occurred to him that she might not be lying. She’d been through the Crucible. She’d survived it, ascended.
“If you choose the right flute,” Emily continued, “the rightpoison, you lose consciousness but not your life. Then and only then have you proven that you deserve to be a Candidate, that you were not chosen in error. And the next thing you know, you’re waking up in a four-poster bed, on a down mattress, in a room where everything is hundreds of years old.”
“But it isn’t over.” Grayson did not phrase that as a question.
This is an interrogation, Jameson realized. Only Grayson didn’t know that Emily knew that, too.
“It’s never over,” Emily said. “The training. The trials. And if you make it far enough, you’re told to choose your gown, then to choose your name, and then, finally, to choose your weapon.”
At the wordweapon, Jameson could feel acid rising in the back of his throat, and it occurred to him that he could choke on it.
He could die, just like that.
“And after you choose your weapon?” Grayson said evenly.
“That’s when you’re introduced to one another.”
Three women, three weapons.Jameson couldn’t help thinking about what Emily had said earlier, about the fact that she’d chosen Eve only after she’d come to believe that Eve would be capable of putting Avery down.