Games Untold: An Inheritance Games Collection

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“You hated me.” He understood now, so many things he hadn’t before, and I heard it in his voice: If it wasn’t this cliff, it would be another. “I hated you until I loved you,” I said. “And I’ll love you until the end.”

“Promise me,” I said again, “that you will live.” Promise me, you bastard. He promised.

wanted him to be mine. He kissed me—just once, lightly, a ghost of a kiss, before we fell asleep. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning and found a letter where he should been that I realized… That kiss had been good-bye.

“I hate you,” I said, but the words came out tender—a love song. Our love song. “I know.” He pushed my knees up, put two pillows beneath my head, pressed sweat-drenched hair back from my face. “For leaving,” I clarified, thinking of that damn letter. “I hate you for leaving and only for leaving, and, for the record? I love you, too.”

“One more push,” he told me, “and you can have them.” I love you. I love you. I love you. I didn’t realize I’d said a damn thing until he said it back. “I love you,” Toby Hawthorne told me. “I have loved you from the moment you dumped a half-dozen lemons on my bed. From before that, even. From the moment I saw you folding paper, from the first sugar castle, from the instant you promised me a merciful death and lied.”

“I loved you,” he whispered, “when the world was pain and the only thing that made sense was your eyes. I loved you before I knew to hate myself, and I have loved you every day since.” I love you. I love you. I love you.

The birth certificate sat on the table next to my bed. I’d filled out the last name—her biological father’s, Grambs—and the middle name. “Kylie.” Toby’s voice was quiet and low. “Like Kaylie, minus one letter.” “An homage,” I said. “I was forbidden from anything else.”

“Avery,” Toby murmured. It took me a moment to realize that he’d just suggested a name. “Avery Kylie Grambs.” Toby looked from the baby to me with a crooked little smile. “Rearrange the letters.” We wouldn’t have been us without one last challenge, one last game. “Avery Kylie Grambs,” I said slowly, “rearranged…” My eyes met his. He handed the baby—handed Avery—back to me. “A Very Risky Gamble,” I murmured.

“I believe you may have been expecting my husband.” The woman stepped around me—toward a booth. “Toby’s father will find you eventually, I’m sure.” Toby. Mine was the kind of quiet that didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. Her husband? Based on everything I’d read, Toby’s mother had died less than a year after the fire on Hawthorne Island.

But now? Standing in an enormous, sparkling marble bathroom bigger than my first apartment, waiting to see if a second pink line appears on that stick, I look from the pregnancy test to the ring on my left ring finger: a deep red stone that glows almost black in some lights. It’s a garnet, not a ruby, and he cut the stone himself. It’s perfect. I think about the man who put this ring on my finger, and for once in my life, I don’t daydream anything. I remember.

“What happened here?” His voice is a low and even murmur. No machismo. No swagger. No pity, either. But it’s clear that I have Nash’s attention. All of it.

This cowboy would very much like the name of the man who gave me a black eye, but somehow, Nash doesn’t feel angry to me. Every instinct I have says he isn’t the stormy type. Nash Hawthorne is pale blue skies. He’s grass and mud. He’s steady.

“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.”

The cowboy beside me has the audacity to wink as he lines up his next shot with the cue behind his back. “Now,” Nash drawls, “I’m showing off.” I roll my eyes, but I’m also grinning—not a good sign, but I need a friend right now. Just a friend, I tell myself sternly.

“If I win…” Nash’s smile is slow and steady, a match for the pace of his words. “You promise to start showing off.” He picks his cowboy hat up off the side of the pool table. “And I’m buyin’ you a hat.”

“I don’t know,” Nash says. “You never struck me as all that odd.” I am blue hair and black nails, skulls and sparkles—or at least, I was. “You’re just saying that because I’m playing normal now.” Nash Hawthorne’s shrugs should be considered deadly weapons. The man shrugs, and it is impossible not to imagine him shirtless. “You seemed normal enough before,” he tells me.

“I guess no matter what,” I say softly, “I’m still me.” “Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing, darlin’.” Nash leans across the aisle, catching my gaze and holding

“Sorry,” I say. “I guess going back home got to me more than I thought.” Nash moves across the aisle to sit next to me. He puts his hand under my chin and raises my eyes to meet his. “Don’t you ever apologize for the things you’ve survived.”

“What do you think, Lib? Do we look for the hidden path or borrow a machete and make our own?” I give him a look. “Who’s going to loan you a machete?” Nash executes one of those shrugs of his, as if to say Who wouldn’t loan me a machete? And honestly? He’s probably right. Nash Hawthorne has a way with people.

“Let’s try…” I take a deep breath, then point. “This way!” “Lead on, darlin’. I trust your instincts.” “Oh, my instincts should definitely not be trusted,” I say. “Pretty much ever.”

“It’s funny,” he says. “What is?” “The old man had a way of planning for everything.” Nash starts walking in the direction I indicated. “But I’m bettin’ he didn’t plan on you.”

“I’m saying”—Nash doesn’t drop the g this time—“that I trust your instincts, and I’m almost positive the old man never planned on that. He didn’t realize that you would be… you.”

“How’s your endurance?” Nash asks. “Relentlessly optimistic and also stubborn.” I grin. “How’s yours?” Brown eyes linger on mine. “I was built for the long haul.”

For the longest time, the two of us just climb. I’ve never been this comfortable with silence before. But eventually, my brain starts to play a little game called What If He Takes Off His Shirt?

“You feelin’ lucky, Lib?” I take the key from him. “I always feel lucky. Reality just doesn’t always get the memo.”

Suddenly, his body is right in front of mine. “There’s food cooking on the stove.” Nash’s voice is low. There’s not a single hint of tension in his muscles, but that doesn’t mean there’s no danger here. Overhead, a floorboard creaks. Nash shifts, his movement liquid, his body a shield for mine.

“We’re not intruders,” he calls out. “We’re Hawthornes.” “I’m not,” I whisper behind him, keeping my voice too low for anyone but Nash to hear. “You’re one of ours,” he murmurs back, his eyes staying locked on the stairs. “Close enough.”

“I’m Libby, and this is—” The man across from us gives a little nod. “Nash.” I look from the man to Nash. “You two know each other?” “He wasn’t saying my name.” Nash never takes his eyes off the man. “He was introducing himself.” And suddenly, I realize: This man’s last name is Nash. He doesn’t seem overly fussed with our sudden appearance here, doesn’t so much as bat an eye. Like father, like son.

I reach for him, my fingers curling around his. Nash is used to being the protector. He’s not used to being protected, but right now, that’s too damn bad. I give his hand a squeeze.

“Hypothetically,” I say cheerfully, “what are your thoughts on laying a curse on the bones of a man who is already dead? Because I know people.” “Of course you do.” Nash grins and then he picks up his empty shot glass.

Nash is, as ever, undaunted. “Am I ever gonna get to see you with blue hair again?” I push down the urge to touch the tips of my hair. I dyed it for Avery. To be respectable. To stop being me. “You don’t like the brown?” The question slips out. Nash turns on his barstool to face me. “I like that you like the blue.”

He chews on that for a moment, and then he moves on. “Will I ever get to see you in a cowboy hat?” I narrow my eyes at him. “Don’t count on it.” “That sounds like a challenge.

“What are your thoughts on going ax throwing?” Nash smiles what I think of as his cowboy smile, understated and slow. “With me.” This is definitely a mistake. We are. But I can’t help myself. “Outlook good.”

“What about Avery?” I barely get the words out. “I need you to breathe for me.” Nash closes what little space remains between us in a single breath. His arms wrap around me. He’s got me. “I am breathing,” I lie. “Breathe, Lib.” He pulls me against him. My head on his chest, I breathe in Nash Hawthorne.

I lovs them

I see Nash’s chest rise and fall, and I realize that the only reason I am breathing is because my chest is rising and falling in unison with his.

“Tell me Avery made a movie that did really bad at the box office.” I’m practically begging now. His hands come to the side of my face, his thumbs cupping my jaw, his fingers curving back around my neck.

“Her plane exploded.” His chest rises and falls. Mine rises and falls. I’m still breathing. I’m still just barely breathing. “The jet was on the ground at the time,” Nash continues quietly. “Avery wasn’t in it, but she was close enough to get caught in the blast.” “No.” I will not let this be true. “Libby—” “Absolutely, positive...

“Ask me if she’s going to be okay.” My mouth is so dry, it feels like my tongue might crack. “Is she going to be okay?” “She’s trouble.” Nash leans his forehead down to touch mine. “We’re gonna have to keep an eye on that one, Lib. You and me.” 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.

Ughhh nash my heart

“Far be it from me to issue threats here, kid, but if you think for even a second that you’re gonna stop fightin’? You’ve got another thing coming.” Nash is using the same tone I’ve heard him use to pull rank on his brothers. “You don’t get to give up, Avery Grambs.”

“That’s the thing about being loved, kid. It ties you to people.” Nash sees me then, but he doesn’t let go of Avery’s hand. “And once you’re tied to one of us, you’re tied to all of us. And the thing about Hawthornes is…” I sit down next to him, take her hand with him. “Hawthornes never,” Nash Hawthorne tells my comatose sister, “let go.”

“Avery,” Alisa says, the slightest catch in her voice, “is going to thank me.” “If it were up to me…” Nash never raises his voice. “You’d never step foot near the kid again.”

“You don’t mean that,” Alisa continues, every inch the lawyer laying out her conditions and terms. “You don’t get to tell me what I mean, Lee-Lee.” Nash turns away from her then. “You never did.” Before he can say a single thing to me, I flee.

My sister is going to wake up. She is going to be fine. She is going to kiss Jameson Hawthorne, who comes to see her every day. I am going to have to keep an eye on those two when she wakes up,

I lean down to inspect the contents, and my heart jumps into my throat. “What’s this?” I’m not asking what it actually is, because I have eyes, and I can see that’s he bought me a veritable rainbow of hair dyes. Bright colors, all of them. “Your sister needs you,” Nash tells me, and then his hands find their way to my face—again. I can’t help remembering the other times, can’t help remembering Cartago. “She needs you, Lib.” The real me. That’s what he’s saying.

“I can’t,” I tell him again. I don’t know if I’m talking about the hair dye or him or us or the fact that I can’t keep doing nothing when my sister is in a medically induced coma, when she might never wake up. Nash takes the bag of dyes from my hand. “I can,” he says. “If you let me.”

I take a step forward. Nash casually kicks his bedroom door closed behind me. He’s smiling like a Cheshire cat now, and I don’t know why—not until I look at the back of his bedroom door. Hanging there is a cowboy hat, just my size.

There is a cowboy hat in the oven. There is a black ribbon around the base of the hat. There are hot pink skulls on the ribbon. “Nash!” I holler. It’s been months, and I don’t know how many hats. At first, he was subtle about it, but for a full two months now, every single person in Hawthorne House has cued into his game. The man is, in a word, persistent. “Behind you, Lib.”

He has to know this is never going to work. Look at him looking at me. Nash Hawthorne and I are not dating. In fact, we have not-date night weekly. My ax-throwing skills are rapidly improving. He’s teaching me to play guitar. But I’m still not wearing his hats.

“Do you ever think,” Nash says, helping himself to one of my cupcakes with a slow, sly smile, “about Cartago?”

I’m not worried. Nash Hawthorne is not the type of person you worry about. He’s the type who comes home bleeding at two in the morning with a puppy in his shirt.