The Grandest Game

Book 1: The Grandest Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Get caught up in the puzzles, games, danger, romance, and riches of this lush new chapter in the #1 bestselling Inheritance Games saga.

Seven tickets. An island of dreams. The chance of a lifetime.

Welcome to the Grandest Game, an annual competition run by billionaire Avery Grambs and the four infamous Hawthorne brothers, whose family fortune she inherited. Designed to give anyone a shot at fame and fortune, this year’s game requires one of seven golden tickets to enter. With millions on the line, those seven players will do whatever it takes to win.

Some of the players are in it for the money. Some for power. Some for reasons all their own. Every single one of them has secrets. Amidst it all is Grayson Hawthorne, tasked with a vital role in this year’s game. But as tensions rise and the mind-bending challenges push the players to their limits—physically, mentally, and emotionally—it soon becomes clear that not everyone is playing by the rules.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes delivers a brand-new series in the world of The Inheritance Games, where fan-favorite and new characters collide in a game you’ll never forget.

Do you have what it takes to play?

Release date: July 30, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 400

Sample

The dream started the way it always did, with the flower. Seeing the calla lily in her hand filled Lyra with sickly sweet dread. She looked to her other hand—and the sad remains of a candy necklace. It held only three pieces of candy.

No.

On some level, Lyra knew she was nineteen, but in the dream, her hands were small—a child’s hands. The shadow looming over her was large.

And then came the whisper: “A Hawthorne did this.”

The shadow—her biological father—turned and walked away. Lyra couldn’t see his face. She heard footsteps going up the stairs.

He has a gun. Lyra woke with a start, a breath trapped in her chest, her body rigid, and her head… on a desk. In the time it took for her vision to clear and the real world to slide firmly back into place in front of her, Lyra remembered that she was in class.

Except the lecture hall was almost empty.

“You have ten minutes left on the test.” The only other person in the room was a fifty-year-old man wearing a blazer.

Test? Lyra’s gaze darted to a clock on the wall. As she registered the time, her panic began to ebb.

“Might as well just take the zero at this point.” The professor scowled at her. “The rest of the class is already done. I suspect they didn’t spend last night partying.”

Because the only reason a girl who looks like me could be tired enough to fall asleep in class is because she was partying. Annoyance flared inside Lyra, banishing the last remnants of the dream’s dread. She looked down at the test. Multiple choice.

“I’ll see what I can get done in ten minutes.” Lyra fished a pen out of her backpack and began to read.

Most people could see images in their minds. For Lyra, there were only words and concepts and feelings. The only time she saw anything in her mind’s eye was when she dreamed. Luckily, not getting bogged down in mental imagery made her a very fast reader. And just as luckily, whoever had written this test had fallen into a predictable pattern, a familiar one.

To find the right answer, all a person had to do was decode the relationships between the options offered. Were two of them opposites? Did one of those opposites vary from the remaining choices only by nuance? Or were there two answers that sounded the same? Or one or more answers that seemed true but probably weren’t?

That was the thing about multiple-choice tests. You didn’t need to know anything about the material if you could break the code.

Lyra answered five questions in the first minute. Four the next. The more test bubbles she filled in, the more palpable the professor’s irritation with her grew.

“You’re wasting my time,” he said. “And yours.”

The old Lyra might have taken a tone like that to heart. Instead, she read faster. Spot the pattern, spot the answer. She finished with one minute to spare and handed the test in, knowing exactly what the professor saw when he looked at her: a girl with a body that said party to some people more than it had ever said dancer.

Not that she was a dancer, anymore.

Lyra grabbed her bag and turned to leave, and the professor stopped her. “Wait,” he ordered tersely. “I’ll grade it for you.” Teach you a lesson was what he meant.

Turning slowly back to face him gave Lyra time to school her features into a neutral expression.

After grading the first ten questions, the professor had marked only one of her answers incorrect. His eyebrows drew closer together as he continued grading, and that percentage held—then improved.

“Ninety-four.” He looked up from the test. “Not bad.”

Wait for it, Lyra thought.

“Just imagine what you could do if you put in a little more effort.”

“How would you know what kind of effort I put in?” Lyra asked. Her voice was quiet, but she met his eyes head-on.

“You’re wearing pajamas, you haven’t brushed your hair, and you slept through most of the test.” He’d recast her, then, from the party girl to the sloth. “I’ve never even seen you in lecture,” the professor continued sternly.

Lyra shrugged. “That’s because I’m not in this class.”

“You—” He stopped. He stared. “You’re…”

“I’m not in this class,” Lyra repeated. “I fell asleep in the prior lecture.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned and started up the aisle toward the exit. Her stride was long. Maybe it was graceful. Maybe she was, still.

The professor called after her. “How did you get a ninety-four percent on a test for a class you’re not even taking?”

Lyra kept walking, her back to the man, as she answered. “Trying to write trick questions backfires if the person taking the test knows how to look for tricks.”

The email came in that afternoon: from the Registrar’s Office, CC-ed to the Bursar’s Office, subject line Enrollment Hold. Reading it three times didn’t change its contents.

Lyra’s phone rang halfway through her fourth read. You’re fine, she reminded herself, as much out of habit as anything. Everything is fine.

Bracing herself for impact, she answered. “Hi, Mom.”

“So you do remember me! And your phone does work! And you haven’t been kidnapped by a mathematically minded serial killer intent on adding you to his incredibly sinister equation.”

“New book?” Lyra guessed. Her mother was a writer.

“New book! She likes numbers more than people. He’s a cop who trusts his instincts more than her calculations. They hate each other.”

“In a good way?”

“A very good way. And speaking of mind-blowing chemistry and sizzling romantic tension… how are you?”

Lyra made a face. “Bad segue, Mom.”

“Answer the question, you avoider! I am going into daughter withdrawal. Your dad thinks the first week in November is too early for Christmas decorations, your brother is four and has no appreciation whatsoever for dark chocolate, and if I want anyone to watch rom-coms with me, I’m going to need zip ties.”

For the past three years, Lyra had done everything she could to seem normal, to be normal—the Lyra who loved Christmas and chocolate and rom-coms. And every day, pretending had killed her a little more.

That was how she’d ended up at a college a thousand miles from home.

“So. How are you?” Her mom really was going to just keep asking, indefinitely.

Lyra offered up three words in response. “Single. Petty. Armed.”

Her mother laughed. “You are not.”

“Not petty or not armed?” Lyra asked. She didn’t even touch on single.

“Petty,” her mom replied. “You are a kind and generous soul, Lyra Catalina Kane, and we both know that anything can be a weapon if you believe in your heart that you can maim or kill someone with it.”

The conversation felt so normal, so them, that Lyra could hardly bear it. “Mom? I got an email from the Bursar’s Office.”

Silence fell like a thousand-year-old tree.

“It’s possible my last check from my publisher was late,” her mom said finally. “And lower than I expected. But I’ll figure this out, baby. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Everything is fine. That was Lyra’s line, had been her line for three years, ever since the name Hawthorne had started dominating the news cycle and memories she’d repressed with good reason had come flooding back. One in particular.

“Forget about tuition, Mom.” Lyra needed to get off the phone. It was easier to project normal at a distance, but it still came with a cost. “I can take next semester off, get a job, apply for loans for the fall.”

“Absolutely not.” The voice that issued those words wasn’t her mom’s.

“Hi, Dad.”

Keith Kane had married her mother when she was three and adopted her when she was five. He was the only dad she’d ever known. Until the dreams had started, she hadn’t even remembered her biological father.

“Your mom and I will handle this, Lyra.” There was no arguing with her dad’s tone.

The old Lyra wouldn’t have even tried. “Handle it how?” she pressed.

“We have options.”

Lyra knew, just from the way he said the word options, what he was thinking. “Mile’s End,” she said. He couldn’t mean it. Mile’s End was more than just a house. It was the attic gables and the front porch swing and the woods and the creek and generations of Kanes carving their names into the same tree.

Lyra had grown up at Mile’s End. She’d carved her name into that tree when she was nine years old. Her baby brother deserved to do the same. I can’t be the reason they sell.

“We’ve been talking about downsizing for a while now.” Her dad was calm, matter-of-fact. “The upkeep on this old place is killing us. If I let Mile’s End go, we could get a little house in town, put you through school, start a college fund for your brother. There’s a developer—”

“There’s always a developer.” Lyra didn’t even let him finish. “And you always tell them to go to hell.”

This time, the silence on the other end of the line spoke volumes.

Running hurt. Maybe that was why she liked it. The old Lyra had hated running. Now, she could go distances. The problem was that, over time, it started hurting a little less. So every day, she pushed herself further.

And further.

And further.

Her parents and friends had been bewildered when she’d given up dancing for this. She’d held out until November of her senior year of high school, a year ago, nearly to the day. She’d faked it as long as she could. But even she wasn’t a good enough actress to fake the kind of dancer she’d been. Before.

It seemed wrong that her whole life had been derailed by a dream. A single memory. Lyra had known that her biological father was dead—but not that he’d committed suicide, not that she’d been there. She’d repressed the trauma so thoroughly, it hadn’t even existed for her. One day she’d been a normal, happy teenager, and the next—literally overnight—she wasn’t.

Wasn’t normal. Wasn’t okay, let alone happy.

Her parents knew—not what had changed but that something had. She’d fled to a faraway college, but look where that had gotten her. Scholarships only covered so much. Her parents had told her that the remainder of her out-of-state tuition wasn’t an issue, but clearly, they’d lied, which probably meant Lyra hadn’t done nearly as good a job at pretending to be normal as she’d thought.

As she ran—no matter how far she ran—Lyra’s brain kept cycling back to the same conclusion: I have to drop out. That would buy some time at least, take one bill off her parents’ plate. The prospect of quitting college shouldn’t have hurt. It wasn’t like Lyra had made friends this semester or even tried to. She’d coasted through her classes like an academically inclined zombie. She was just treading water.

But that was better than drowning.

Gritting her teeth, Lyra picked up her speed. This far into a run, that shouldn’t have been feasible. But sometimes, all you could do was push.

By the time she stopped, she could barely breathe. The track blurring in front of her, Lyra bent over, her hands on her knees, sucking in oxygen. And some asshole chose that moment to catcall her. Like she’d bent over just for him.

A moment later, a soccer ball rolled to a stop by her side.

Lyra glanced up, spotted a group of guys waiting to see how she would react, and spent a few seconds wondering what the collective noun for asshole was.

A bevy?

A clutch?

No, Lyra thought, picking up the ball. A circus. The circus of assholes probably wasn’t expecting her to punt the ball over their heads toward the goal, but her dad was a high school soccer coach, and once her body knew how to do something, it never forgot.

“Missed!” one of the guys yelled, cackling. The ball hit the crossbar at an angle, ricocheted off, and smacked the jerk who’d catcalled her in the back of his head.

“No,” Lyra called out. “I didn’t.”

Dropping out was the right move. The only move. But when Lyra tried to walk up the steps to the Registrar’s Office, she ended up a block away at the campus post office instead.

I’m going to do it. I just need a minute. Lyra walked mechanically to her PO box. She wasn’t expecting mail. This was pure procrastination, but that didn’t stop her from turning the key and opening the box.

Inside, there was an envelope made of thick linen paper. No return address. She reached for it. The envelope was heavier than it looked. No postage. Lyra froze. This envelope—whatever it was—hadn’t been mailed.

Looking back over her shoulder, feeling suddenly like she was being watched, Lyra ripped the envelope open. There were two items inside.

The first was a thin sheet of paper with a message scrawled across it in dark-blue ink. YOU DESERVE THIS. As she read the words, the paper began crumbling in her hands. Seconds later, there was nothing left but dust.

Acutely aware of the way her heart was beating in her chest—pounding against the inside of her rib cage with brutal, repetitive force—Lyra reached for the second item in the envelope. It was the size of a folded letter, but the instant her fingers brushed its golden edge, she realized that it was made of metal—very thin metal.

Removing it from the envelope, Lyra saw that the metal was engraved: three words, plus a symbol. Not a symbol, she realized. A QR code, just waiting to be scanned. Reading the words told Lyra exactly what she held in her hand.

This was a ticket, an invitation, a summons. The words engraved above the code were instantly recognizable—to her, to anyone on the planet with access to media of any kind.

The Grandest Game.

Gigi Grayson was not obsessed! She was not over-caffeinated! She certainly wasn’t about to fall off the roof! But try telling a Hawthorne that.

A steady hand caught her elbow. A suit-clad arm encircled her waist.

The next thing Gigi knew, she was safe in her bedroom. That was the way it was with her Hawthorne half brother: He made things happen in an instant. Grayson Hawthorne bled power. He won arguments with a single arch of his sharply angled blond brows!

And there was a teeny, tiny chance that Gigi had been about to fall off the roof.

“Grayson! I’ve missed your face! Here, have a cat!” Gigi swooped up Katara—her large Bengal cat, practically a leopard, really—and dumped the cat in Grayson’s arms.

Cats were an excellent way of disarming people.

Grayson, however, was impossible to take off guard. He stroked a hand firmly over Katara’s head. “Explain.” As the second-eldest of the four grandsons of deceased billionaire Tobias Hawthorne, Grayson was prone to issuing orders.

He also had a bad habit of forgetting that he was three and a half years older than she was, not thirty.

“Why I was on the roof, why I haven’t been returning your calls, or why I just handed you a cat?” Gigi asked cheerfully.

Grayson’s pale gray eyes roved over her room, taking in the hundreds of pieces of scratch paper that littered every surface: her mattress, her floor, even the walls. Then his gaze returned to Gigi. Without a word, Grayson gently pushed up her left sleeve. Notes danced across her skin, freshly inked in Gigi’s loopy, haphazard scrawl.

“I ran out of paper. But I think I’m getting close!” Gigi grinned. “I just needed a little change in perspective.”

Grayson gave her a look. “Hence, the roof.”

“Hence, the roof.”

Grayson set Katara gently down. “I thought you were going to use your gap year to travel.”

And that was why she’d been avoiding his calls. “I’ll have plenty of time to go all Gigi Without Borders later,” she promised.

“After the Grandest Game.” Grayson did not phrase that as a question.

Gigi didn’t deny it. What was the point? “Seven players,” she said, her eyes alight. “Seven golden tickets—three to players of Avery’s choosing and four wild cards.”

Those wild card tickets had been hidden in secret locations across the United States. A single clue had been released to the public less than twenty-four hours earlier. Gigi Grayson, puzzle solver, was on the case!

“Gigi,” Grayson said calmly.

“Don’t say anything!” Gigi blurted out. “It’s already going to look iffy enough that I’m your sister, when everyone knows the Grandest Game is a group effort.”

A group effort between the Hawthorne brothers and the Hawthorne heiress, between Tobias Hawthorne’s four grandsons and the seemingly random teenager who’d inherited the eccentric billionaire’s entire fortune.

“As it happens,” Grayson said, “I’ve had no involvement whatsoever in designing this year’s game. Avery and Jamie requested I be boots on the ground. I’ll be running things; thus, to protect the integrity of the puzzles, I’m going in with no foreknowledge whatsoever.”

Can’t tip your hand if you don’t know the cards, Gigi thought. “I love that for you,” she told Grayson. “But still! Shush.” She gave him her firmest look. “I have to do this on my own.”

Grayson responded to Gigi’s attempt at firmness with exactly two seconds of silence, followed by a single question: “Where is your bed?”

Gigi hadn’t been expecting the subject change. Very tricky, Grayson. Offering him her sunniest grin, Gigi gestured to the mattress on her floor. “Voilà!”

“That,” Grayson told her, “is a mattress. Where is your bed?”

The bed in question had been mahogany, an antique. Before Gigi could summon up a suitably chaotic distraction to deflect the question, Grayson strode toward her closet and opened it.

“You’re probably wondering where the rest of my clothes are,” Gigi said brightly. “And I would be happy to tell you—after the game.”

“In five words or less, Juliet.”

The use of her given name was probably a sign that he wasn’t going to let this go. In the year and a half since she’d met her brother, Gigi had gathered—through her powers of inference and also snooping—that Grayson was the grandson that billionaire Tobias Hawthorne had molded from childhood to be the perfect heir: formidable, commanding, always in control.

With a roll of her eyes, Gigi gave in to his demand, ticking the words off on her fingers as she went: “Reverse heist.” She grinned. “I did it in two!”

Grayson responded to that with another dreaded arch of his brow.

“Reverse heist,” Gigi clarified helpfully, “all the breaking, all the entering—but you leave something behind instead of stealing.”

“Am I to take it that your mahogany bedframe is now residing in someone else’s home?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Gigi said. “I sold it for cash and reverse-heisted that.” Making an executive decision, Gigi squatted and called Katara toward her.

Anticipating—correctly—that he was about to have a very large cat placed on his head, Grayson knelt and laid a light hand on Gigi’s shoulder. “Is this about our father?”

Gigi kept right on breathing. She kept right on smiling. The trick to pretending that THE SECRET was just a secret and that she excelled at keeping them was never to even think about Sheffield Grayson.

Besides, smiling made you happier. That was just science.

“This is about me,” Gigi said. She gave Katara some neck scritchies and used one of the cat’s paws to gesture to the door. “Vamoose.”

Grayson did not vamoose. “I have something for you.” He reached inside the jacket of his Armani suit and produced a black gift box: an inch tall and maybe twice the length of a Pop-Tart. “From Avery.”

Gigi stared at the box. As Grayson removed the lid, all she could think, over the sound of the roaring beat of her own heart, was: Seven golden tickets—three to players of Avery’s choosing.

“It’s yours if you want it.” Grayson’s voice was softer now. He wasn’t a soft person, and that told Gigi that this gift wasn’t just a lark. This was Avery trying to make up for—

Don’t think about it. Just keep smiling.

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Gigi said, a traitorous lump rising in her throat. “Avery knows that, right?”

Grayson brought his eyes to hers. “She knows.”

Gigi took a deep breath and a step back. “Tell Avery thank you—but no.” Gigi didn’t want anyone’s guilt. She didn’t want their pity. She didn’t want Grayson to think for even a second that she wasn’t strong enough. That she was worth pitying.

“If you don’t take it,” Grayson said, “I have instructions to give this ticket to Savannah.”

“Savannah’s busy,” Gigi replied immediately. “With college. And basketball. And world domination.” Gigi’s twin didn’t know THE SECRET. Savannah was the smart twin, the pretty twin, the strong one. She was focused, determined, thriving in college.

And Gigi was… here.

She looked back to the writing on her arm, banishing Grayson’s presence from her mind. She could do this—all of it.

Keep THE SECRET.

Protect Savannah.

Break the code and obtain a ticket of her own.

And prove, for once in her life, that she had what it took to win.

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 . . .