Games Untold: An Inheritance Games Collection

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

At this point, our roles were clearly defined. I was the teenage billionaire heiress philanthropist. She put out the fires. And Jameson Hawthorne blazed.

I’d been Hawthorne-adjacent long enough to know that billionaire Tobias Hawthorne’s real legacy hadn’t been the fortune he’d left me. It was the marks he’d left on each of his grandsons. Invisible. Enduring.

Multiple birds, one stone.

On good nights, I read until I fell asleep, wrapping myself in fantasy worlds like they were blankets.

Hospitals were an easy place to disappear. Everyone had something else to worry about.

Focus on what you can do,

She’d always seen me completely differently than the way I’d seen myself.

Her chaos had been a beautiful kind of chaos—and remarkably consistent. Her room looked like it had been tossed, but it had always looked like that, so I just had to hope that no one else had gotten there first.

If Harry was humble, I was the Queen of England.

I also didn’t want to be alone. Being alone was perhaps my greatest skill in life, and I didn’t want to be alone.

It was all a mistake, one I just couldn’t stop making.

I was the logical one. The rational one. Our dynamic, so familiar I ached with it, brought tears to my eyes. I wasn’t in the shower, and I only ever cried in the shower—but I couldn’t help it. “Less crying,” Kaylie ordered imperiously. “More wild abandon.” Let go, I told myself. Feel the music. In my heart I knew: She was the music. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be, but I danced the way she did, like I’d been born shouting my joy and my fury to the moon.

“Don’t stop,” Kaylie told me fiercely. “Living. Loving. Dancing. Don’t you dare stop

I felt the dam inside me break. I couldn’t stop dancing, couldn’t risk losing her again, so I let everything I felt—everything I’d been trying so hard not to feel—out into the dance.

“Promise me,” she said, her voice fainter, “that you’ll keep dancing.” Tears were streaming down my face. “Every day.”

“And don’t miss me too much, okay?” This felt like good-bye. No. “Absolutely no naming your children after me,” Kaylie continued, twirling, her arms held wide. “I mean, I guess a middle name would be okay—an homage, not Kaylie exactly.”

I'm crying!

Don’t stop. Living. Loving. Dancing.

I could smell rain on the wind, and some prescient part of me said that the storm was a sign. I knew in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t put it off any longer.

and for once in my life, I don’t daydream anything. I remember. And remember. And remember.

“There’s a difference,” he says in that Texas drawl of his, unhurried and smooth, “between showin’ off and deciding you’re done giving a damn about people who expect you to dim your light so they can feel more like the sun.”

I have spent my entire life wanting to be normal and special, wanting to be both of those things at the exact same time, even though they are pretty much opposites.

“Don’t you ever apologize for the things you’ve survived.”

“Mortal,” I repeat. “As opposed to… Zeus?” In front of us, a branch blocks the path. Nash lifts it for me to duck under. “He liked to think so, but if you ask me, he was closer to Daedalus, always making labyrinths, hiding monsters, pushing all of us to fly too close to the sun.”

“I always feel lucky. Reality just doesn’t always get the memo.”

Is this a mistake? Probably. But I’m starting to think that everyone deserves at least one mistake in this life that they wouldn’t take back, even if they could.

My heart feels like it’s tearing in two, but I won’t let it. “We’re going to take care of her,” I say, because that’s what we do, Nash and me. We take care of people.

For the first time pretty much ever, it occurs to me that Nash Hawthorne might actually need someone to take care of him.

I smile a cowboy kind of smile to go with the hat. “I’ve always been good at waiting.” At dreaming. At hoping. And I am done punishing myself for that.

be fair, he was two, and he was a sloth. Not much struck him as strange.

First, it meant that now Xander had all four aces—on top of all four sevens—and world domination was that much closer to his grasp.

No one ever expected a Xander Inquisition.

Xander was no stranger to bad ideas. Or unusual ideas. Or the occasional this-is-either-brilliant-or-an-offense-against-common-sense-and-gravity idea. He was, in fact, a connoisseur of ideas, swishing even the most outlandish possibilities around in his mind and taking a delicate little taste.

God bless pockets!

Nash had a bad habit of leaving—and a good habit of coming home. But something told Xander it might be a while before they saw each other again.

but when you’ve got to science, you’ve got to science.”

Simply behave as though you and only you were appropriately clothed.

“There is nothing wrong with my hair,” Grayson stated tersely. “But is anything about it really right?” Thea countered.

Over the next few days, as I strategized, it finally occurred to me to take advantage of the fact that, along with Tobias Hawthorne’s fortune, I’d also inherited his security team.

The moment that Jameson walked in to find Grayson caught in the booby traps he’d laid for me was sweet for so many reasons. Rainbow tinsel was a good look for Grayson Hawthorne. Surprise was a good look for Jameson. Victory was an incredible look for me.

“Avery?” Grayson took a step toward me, and his lips curved into one of those very Grayson Hawthorne smiles, subtle but true. “You win.”