Games Untold

Book 0: The Inheritance Games

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA Contemporary Romance; YA Romance

Synopsis

Romance, luxury, and secrets abound in this thrilling new collection that take readers deeper into the world of the #1 bestselling Inheritance Games series.

There is nothing frivolous about the way a Hawthorne man loves.

An amnesiac playboy and the woman with every reason to hate him. A daredevil, his favorite heiress, and three nights in Prague. An unlikely pairing between a cowboy and a goth. Four brothers with an inescapable bond, strengthened by the family they chose, in a house of wonders that promises to always deliver one more secret. 

Discover their stories of love and loss, power, puzzles, and life-and-death secrets in this mind-blowingly romantic collection that proves that when you love the way Hawthornes love, there is no going back.

Novellas and short stories included in this Collection: 

• That Night in Prague (novella)
• The Same Backwards as Forward (novella)
• The Cowboy and the Goth
• Five Times Xander Tackled Someone (and One Time He Didn’t)
• One Hawthorne Night*
• What Happens in the Treehouse* 
• $3CR3T $@NT@
• Pain at the Right Gun

*previously available only in a Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition

Release date: November 12, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 368

Sample

I wasn’t worried about him. Worrying about Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was about as useful as trying to argue with the wind. I was smart enough to know that there was no sense in shouting at hurricanes or worrying about a Hawthorne with a love of Hail Mary passes, semi-calculated risks, and walking right up to the edge of incredible drops.

Jameson had a habit of landing on his feet.

“Avery?” Oren announced his presence, a mere courtesy considering my head of security was never far away. “It’s almost dawn. I can have my team take another sweep and—”

“No,” I said quietly. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Jameson wouldn’t want me looking for him. This wasn’t Hide and Seek. It wasn’t Catch Me If You Can.

Every single one of my instincts said that this was… something.

“It’s been fourteen hours.” Oren’s voice was a military kind of calm: brisk, matter-of-fact, always prepared for the worst. “He disappeared with no warning. He left no trace behind. It happened in an instant. We have to consider the possibility of foul play.”

Considering nefarious possibilities was Oren’s job. I was the Hawthorne heiress. Jameson was a Hawthorne. We attracted attention—and sometimes threats. But deep down, my gut was saying the same thing it had been saying from the moment Jameson had disappeared: I should have seen this coming.

Something electric had been building in Jameson for days—an unholy energy, a powerful drive. A secret. Memories flashed rapid-fire through my head, moment after moment after moment from the day I’d stepped foot in Prague.

The spire.

The knife.

The clock.

The key.

What are you up to, Hawthorne? You have a secret. What is it?

“Give it an hour,” I told Oren. “If Jameson’s not back, then you can send out a team.”

When it was clear that my bodyguard—and sometimes father figure—wasn’t going to argue with me, I made my way to the foyer of our luxury hotel suite. The Royal Suite. I took a seat in a chair made of crushed red-and-black velvet and stared at a wall that wasn’t just a wall, my mind working its way through this puzzle for the hundredth time.

A decadent gold mural stared back at me.

Where are you, Jameson? What am I missing?

My eyes found the well-masked seams in the wall. A hidden door. Its existence was a reminder to me that Jameson’s deceased grandfather, Tobias Hawthorne, had once owned this hotel, that the Royal Suite had been built to the exacting, puzzle-obsessed billionaire’s specifications.

Traps upon traps, I thought. And riddles upon riddles. That phrase had been among the first words Jameson had ever spoken to me, back when he’d been fighting grief and chasing the next puzzle, the next high, determined not to care about anyone or anything.

Back when he’d taken risks in part because he wanted to hurt.

As I stared at the wall and the hidden door, I told myself that the Jameson of those early days wasn’t the same Jameson Hawthorne who’d pushed my hair back from my face the day before, spreading it out like a halo on the mattress.

My Jameson still took risks—but he always came back.

I know better than to worry about Jameson Hawthorne. And yet…

I willed the hidden door to open. I willed Jameson to be standing on the other side of it.

And finally—finally—just before my hour was up, it did, and he was. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.

The first thing I saw, as he crossed into the light, was the blood.

Three Days Earlier…

The postcard in my hand matched the view out the jet’s window. Prague at dawn. Centuries of history was silhouetted against a hazy-gold sky, the dark, swirling clouds above the city a deep purple gray.

Jameson had sent me the postcard, a callback to the way his uncle had once sent postcards to my mother. The parallel made me think about what my mom would say if she could see me now: the private plane, the inches-thick stack of documents I’d gone through on the flight, the way I still caught myself holding my breath when the reality of moments like this once hit me with the force of a tidal wave.

Prague at dawn. My mom and I had always talked about traveling the world. It was the one dream I’d allowed myself to hold on to after she’d died, but at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, I had never let myself daydream for more than a few minutes at a time. I had never let myself want this—or anything—too much.

But now? I ran my thumb over the edge of the postcard. Now I wanted the world. I wanted everything. And there was nothing standing in my way.

“One of these days, you’ll get used to it,” the person sitting across from me on my private jet said, then she laid three magazines down on the table between us. My face was on the cover of every single one.

“No,” I told Alisa simply. “I won’t.” I couldn’t read any of the words on the covers. I wasn’t even sure what language two of the three were in.

“They’re calling you Saint Avery.” Alisa arched a brow at me. “Care to guess what they’re calling Jameson?”

Alisa Ortega was my lawyer—and the foundation’s—but her expertise went well beyond legal advice. If something needed fixing, she fixed it. At this point, our roles were clearly defined. I was the teenage billionaire heiress philanthropist. She put out the fires.

And Jameson Hawthorne blazed.

“Guess,” Alisa reiterated, as the jet touched down, “what they’re calling him.”

I knew exactly where this was going, but I wasn’t a saint, and Jameson wasn’t a liability. We were two sides of the same coin.

“Are they calling him Don’t Stop?” I asked Alisa seriously.

Her perfectly sculpted brows pulled together.

“Sorry,” I said in a completely deadpan. “I forgot. That’s what I call him.”

Alisa snorted. “It is not.”

A borderline Hawthorne grin pulled at the edges of my lips, and I looked out the window again. In the distance, I could still see the spires disappearing into the gold-purple-gray sky.

Alisa was wrong. I would never get used to this. This was everything—and so was Jameson Hawthorne.

“I’m not Saint Avery,” I told Alisa. “You know that.”

I’d kept enough of my inheritance that I would literally never be able to spend even a noticeable fraction of it, but all most people saw was the amount I’d given away. By popular opinion, I was either a paragon of virtue or about as intelligent as a sack of rocks.

“You may not be a saint,” Alisa told me. “But you are discreet.”

“And Jameson is… not,” I said. If Alisa noticed the way my lips ticked upward just saying his name, she chose to ignore it.

“He’s a Hawthorne. Discreet is not in their vocabulary.” Alisa had her own history with the Hawthorne family. “The foundation’s work is gaining steam. We don’t need a scandal right now. When you see Jameson, you tell him: No puppies this time. No breaking and entering. No rooftops. No dares. Don’t let him drink anything that glows. Call me if he so much as mentions leather pants. And remember—”

“I’m not Cinderella anymore,” I finished. “I’m writing my own story now.”

At seventeen, when my life had changed forever, I’d been the lucky girl from the wrong side of the tracks, plucked from obscurity and given the world at the whim of an eccentric billionaire. But now? I was the eccentric billionaire.

I’d come into my own. And the world was watching.

Saint Avery. I shook my head at the thought. Whoever had come up with that moniker clearly didn’t realize that the biggest difference between Jameson and me, when it came to dares and games and the thrill of the moment, was that I was better at not getting caught.

Within minutes, the plane was ready for us to deboard—security first, then Alisa, then me. The instant I had both feet on the ground, I got a text from Jameson. I doubted the timing was a coincidence.

Very few things with Jameson were.

I read his text, and a surge of energy and awe, reminiscent of what I’d felt when I’d looked out the window at the ancient city below, came rushing back. A slow smile spread over my face.

Two sentences. That was all it took for Jameson Hawthorne to make my heart start beating a little harder, a little faster.

Welcome to the City of a Hundred Spires, Heiress. Feel like a game of Hide and Seek?

Our version of Hide and Seek had three rules:

The person hiding couldn’t ditch their phone.

GPS tracking had to be enabled.

The person seeking had an hour.

In the past six months, Jameson and I had played in Bali, Kyoto, and Marseille; on the Almafi Coast; and in the labyrinthine markets of Morocco. Following the GPS coordinates was never the hard part, and that held true today. No matter how many times I checked Jameson’s location, the pulsing blue marker stayed in the same half-block radius, just outside of Prague Castle.

And that was the challenge.

My Achilles’ heel in Hide and Seek was always how hard it was for me not to lose myself in my surroundings, in the moment—or in this case, in the view. The castle. I’d known before coming to Prague that it was among the largest castles in the world, but knowing was different from seeing was different from feeling.

There was a certain magic in standing in the shadows of an ancient, massive structure that made you feel small, something that made the earth and its possibilities feel enormous. I gave myself a full minute to take it all in—not just the sights but the feel of the morning air on my skin, the people already on the streets all around me.

And then I got to work.

Per the GPS, Jameson’s location had varied between several points, all of which seemed to be located in the palace gardens—or sometimes, just outside the garden’s walls. I walked those walls, looking for the entry. It didn’t take me long to realize that the garden in question was actually multiple gardens, interconnected, all of which were closed—or at least, they were closed to the public.

When I approached the entry, the iron gate swung inward for me.

Like magic. I’d meant what I’d said to Alisa on the plane. I would never get used to this. I stepped through the gate. Oren followed at a reasonable distance. Once we were both inside, the iron gate swung closed behind us.

I made eye contact with the docent who’d closed it. He smiled.

I had no idea how Jameson had managed this. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know. My body buzzing with the thrill of the game, I made my way inward until I reached a set of stairs, narrow and steep—the kind of stairs that made you feel as if climbing them might take you back in time.

I made it to the top, looked down at my phone, and then looked back up at the surrounding terrace gardens—and up and up and up. My brain automatically started trying to calculate the number of stairs, the number of terraces.

I looked down at my phone again and took a turn off the beaten path, jogging forward, then turning again. The instant my GPS location brushed up against Jameson’s, his blinking blue cursor disappeared from the map.

Technically, that made four rules for our version of Hide and Seek.

The hunt was on.

“Found you,” I said. Once upon a time, I’d been a more gracious winner, but now I relished my victories like a Hawthorne.

“Cutting it close this time, Heiress?” Jameson spoke from behind the tree that stood between us. No part of his body was visible to me, but I could feel his presence, the outline of his long, lean form. “Fifty-eight minutes, nineteen seconds,” Jameson reported.

“One minute and forty-one seconds to spare,” I countered, circling the tree and stopping when my body was directly in front of his. “How did you get them to open this place early?”

Jameson’s lips curved. He turned ninety degrees and took three slow steps back toward the garden path. “How didn’t I get them to open early?”

Three more steps, and he was on the path. He knelt, picking something up off the stone. I knew before he stood back up and brandished his bounty that it was a coin.

Jameson twirled the coin from one finger to the next. “Heads or tails, Heiress?”

My eyes narrowed slightly, but I deeply suspected my pupils were dilating, drinking it all in. This was us. Jameson. Me. Our language. Our game.

Head or tails?

“You planted that.” I nodded toward the coin. I had a collection of them, at least one from every place we’d visited. And every single one of those coins had a memory attached.

“Now why,” Jameson murmured, “would I ever do a thing like that?”

Heads I kiss you, he’d told me once, tails you kiss me, and either way, it means something.

I reached out to pluck the coin from his hand, and he let me—not that I wouldn’t have prevailed either way. I looked down at the coin: The outer ring was bronze, the inner circle gold, bearing the image of a castle. On the reverse side, there was a golden creature that looked like a lion.

I twirled the coin through my fingers the way Jameson had through his—one by one by one. I caught it between my thumb and the side of my index finger, and then I flipped it into the air.

I caught it in my palm. I spread my fingers and looked from the coin to him. “Heads.”

Forty minutes later, we were on a rooftop. Sorry, Alisa. I still had the coin.

“You could make a wish,” I told Jameson, twirling the coin between my fingers again, my lips swollen and aching in all the right ways. I cast a glance back over our shoulders at the gardens below. “There’s no shortage of fountains down there.”

Jameson did not turn to look at the fountains. He leaned into me, the two of us perfectly balanced—on the roof and with each other. “What fun is wishing?” Jameson countered. “No game to play, no challenge to best, just… poof, here’s your heart’s desire.”

That was a very Hawthorne perspective on wishes, on life. Jameson had grown up in a glittering, elite world where nothing was out of reach. He hadn’t spent his childhood birthdays blowing out candles. Every year, he’d been given ten thousand dollars to invest, a challenge to fulfill, and the opportunity to pick any talent or skill in the world to cultivate, no expenses spared—and no excuses accepted.

I considered leaving the topic alone, but ultimately decided to push back a bit. In my experience, Jameson Hawthorne liked being pushed.

“You don’t know what you would wish for,” I said, my tone making it clear that the words were a challenge, not a question.

“Maybe not.” Jameson shot me a look that was nothing but trouble. “But I can certainly think of some fascinating games I’d like to win.”

That statement was every bit as much of an invitation as heads or tails. Holding back—just a bit, just for a moment longer—I pulled the postcard Jameson had sent me out of my back pocket. It was starting to look a little wrinkled, a little worn.

Real, the way most people’s dreams never were.

“I got your postcard,” I said. “No message on the back.”

“How long did you spend trying to determine if I’d written something in invisible ink?” Jameson asked. Nothing but trouble.

I countered his question with my own: “What kind of invisible ink did you use?”

Just because I hadn’t been able to reveal it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Beside me, Jameson leaned back on his elbows and looked up at Prague Castle again. “Maybe I just considered writing something, then decided not to.” He gave a careless little shrug, a very Jameson Hawthorne shrug. “After all, it’s been done.”

For decades, another Hawthorne had sent postcards just like this one to my mother. Theirs had been a star-crossed kind of love—but real.

Like the creases in my postcard.

Like Jameson and me.

“Everything’s been done by someone,” I pointed out quietly.

Jameson’s gap year was three-quarters done. Day by day, I could feel him growing more restless in his own skin. 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.

This was Jameson’s: Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was hungry. He wanted everything and needed something, and because he was a Hawthorne, that elusive something could never be ordinary.

He couldn’t be ordinary.

“You should know by now, Heiress, that the words everything’s been done by someone sound a lot like a challenge to me.” Jameson smiled, one of those uneven, edged, wicked Jameson smiles. “Or a dare.”

“No dares,” I told Jameson, grinning right back.

“You’ve been talking to Alisa,” he said, then he cocked an eyebrow. “Saint Avery.”

Jameson could read at least nine languages that I was aware of. He almost certainly knew exactly what the world was saying about him.

“Don’t call me that,” I ordered. “I’m no saint.”

Jameson straightened and pushed my hair back from my face, the tips of his fingers banishing tension in every muscle they crossed. My temple. My scalp.

“You act like what you did with your inheritance is nothing,” he said. “Like anyone would have done it. But I wouldn’t have. Grayson wouldn’t have. None of us would. You act like what you’re doing with your foundation isn’t extraordinary—or like, if it is, it’s because the work is so much bigger than you. But, Avery? What you’re doing… it’s something.”

A Hawthorne kind of something. Everything.

“It’s not just me,” I told Jameson fiercely. “It’s all of us.” He and his brothers were working with me on the foundation. There were causes Jameson had been championing, people he’d brought in to sit on the board.

“And yet…” Jameson dragged the words out. “You’re the one with meetings today.”

Giving away billions—strategically, equitably, and with an eye to outcomes—was a lot of work. I wasn’t naive enough to try to do it all myself, but I also wasn’t about to coast on the blood, sweat, and tears of others.

This was my story. I was writing it. This was my chance to change the world.

But for another few minutes… I brought my hand to Jameson’s jaw. It’s just you and me. On this rooftop, at the top of the world and the base of a castle, it felt like the two of us were the only people in the universe.

Like Oren wasn’t standing guard down below. Like Alisa wasn’t waiting outside the gates. Like I was just Avery, and he was just Jameson, and that was enough.

“I don’t have meetings for another hour,” I pointed out.

Jameson’s adrenaline-kissed smile was, in a word, dangerous. “In that case,” he murmured, “could I interest you in some shapely hedges, a statue of Hercules, and a white peacock?”

I didn’t have to look back at the palace gardens below to know that they were still closed. Jameson and I still had this magical, lifted-from-time place to ourselves.

I smiled an adrenaline-kissed smile of my own. “Alisa said to tell you no puppies.”

“A peacock is not a puppy,” Jameson said innocently, and then he brought his lips to just almost graze mine—an invitation, a gauntlet thrown, an ask.

Yes. With Jameson, my answer was almost always yes.

Kissing him set my entire body on fire. Losing myself to it, to him, I felt like standing at the base of something much more monumental than a castle.

The world was big, and we were small, and this was everything.

“And, Heiress?” Jameson’s lips moved down to my jaw, then my neck. “For the record…”

I felt him everywhere. My fingernails dug lightly into the skin of his neck.

“I would never,” he whispered roughly, “confuse you for a saint.”

Three Days Earlier…

After working nonstop all day, I had only one thing on my mind. One person. From the moment I saw our hotel, surrounded by centuries-old buildings on all sides, anticipation began to build inside me with every step.

Into the lobby.

Into the elevator.

Out of it.

The Royal Suite was on its own floor. I noted two of Oren’s men stationed in the hall. There had been a third in the lobby. As far as I knew, that was the entire team he’d brought to Prague.

Threats against me were at an all-time low.

That didn’t stop Oren from putting his body squarely in front of mine as we walked down the hall. He opened the door to the suite and cleared the foyer and adjacent rooms before I was allowed to enter. The moment I did, I realized something: From the hallway, the door I’d just walked through had appeared as just a door, but on this side, as it closed behind us, it disappeared into an ornate, golden mural on the wall, creating the impression that the foyer had no entry and no exit—that the Royal Suite was a world unto itself.

The floor was made of white marble, but just ahead, there was a deep red carpet that looked so soft and lush that I gave in to the urge to kick my shoes off and step on it with bare feet. Nearby, two chairs sat facing the mural. The marble table between them was a work of art—literally. The front of the marble had been chiseled into a sculpture. It took me a moment to recognize its shape from the coin. The lion. A coat of arms.

“We’re clear,” Oren told me—in other words, he’d checked the rest of the suite, which raised a question…

“Where’s Jameson?” I asked.

“I could answer that question,” Oren replied. “But something tells me you would prefer if I did not.” He raised a hand to his ear, a signal that someone was talking on his earpiece. “Alisa is on her way up,” he reported.

Alisa would want to debrief about my last meeting of the day, which she had been unable to attend. For that matter, Jameson’s brother Grayson would want a report on all of my meetings—but I suppressed the urge to take out my phone.

I could answer that question, Oren had said. But something tells me you would prefer that I did not. Interpreted one way, that sounded ominous. But I knew what it looked like when Oren was coming close to thinking about possibly almost smiling.

I walked from the foyer into a dining room complete with crystal chandelier overhead and gold-rimmed china on the table. At each of the twelve place settings, there was a champagne flute. Inside the champagne flutes, there were crystals.

Thousands of them, diamond-like and small. I made my way around the table and stopped when I saw a flash of color inside one of the flutes—green, like Jameson’s eyes.

Moving carefully but swiftly, I dumped out the crystals. Among them, I found a larger gem. An emerald? It was the width of my thumbnail, and as I picked it up and turned it back and forth in the light, I realized there was something on its surface.

An arrow.

I turned the gem in my hand, and the arrow moved. Not a gem, I realized. I was holding a very small, very delicate compass.

It took me less than three seconds to realize that the “compass” wasn’t pointing north.

Jameson. I felt my lips curve. I’d never smiled like this before I’d met him—the kind of smile that tore across my face and sent a ripple of energy surging through my body.

I followed the arrow.

Coming into a living room—complete with another crystal chandelier, another lush red carpet, and windows that offered a breathtaking view of the river—I scanned my surroundings and saw another work-of-art-level marble coffee table.

On that table, there was a vase.

I let my gaze linger on the flowers. Roses. Five black. Seven red. I turned back toward the room, looking for that combination of colors, for something to count, and then I realized that I was falling into a Hawthorne trap.

I was complicating things.

Bending down, I reached into the bouquet. Victory. My fingers latched around something cylindrical and metal.

“Do I want to know?” I heard Alisa ask Oren in the room behind me.

“Do you really have to ask?” he replied.

Flashlight. I registered what I held in my hand, gave it a twist, and then corrected myself out loud. “Black light.”

Jameson wasn’t making this particularly hard, which made me think that the challenge wasn’t the point. The anticipation was.

“Can one of you turn off the lights?” I called back to Oren and Alisa. I didn’t look back to see which one of them fulfilled that request.

I was too busy having my way with the black light.

Arrows appeared on the floor. It was just like Jameson to not even bat an eye at the idea of invisibly defacing the single nicest hotel suite I’d ever seen.

“Key word invisibly,” I murmured under my breath, as I followed the arrows out of . . .