Page 177 of The Most Dangerous Games

Ward smiles. “Or what?”

Wyatt doesn’t blink.

“Or I put you in a room,” Wyatt says, “and let you learn what it feels like to have no exit from your own nightmares.”

Jimmy starts addressing the people watching him stone-faced from the table.

“He asked if I would be his advocate after he was gone,” he continues.

“Why not Wyatt?” Alek asks.

“Because at the time, he was worried that Ward might still try to have Wyatt killed,” Jimmy says, getting revved all over again.

“Oh please, even I wouldn’t go so far as to harm my own son,” Ward says.

“Of course you would,” Wyatt says. “With me out of the way, you would become the only heir.”

“Something else your father wanted me to know?” Jimmy says to Ward. “He was about to fire everybody on this board—including you. He said he should have cleaned house a long time ago and the other board members were never going to come around to his way of thinking. The next day, he was dead.”

“How?” Alek asks.

“A great heart finally stopped beating,” Wyatt says.

“I was gutted,” Jimmy says. “But I knew it was time for me to step up, like he asked.”

123.

Jimmy and Wyatt remain standing next to each other at the front of the boardroom. Huge floor-to-ceiling windows tower behind them. They look like partners, or maybe conspirators, but definitely friends.

Alek finds herself thinking back to Ohio, when Wyatt turned into a starstruck kid upon first meeting his hero.

Wyatt: Not his father’s son. Gavin Hillshire’s grandson, in all the best ways.

Jimmy exhales like he’s been holding in anger for days.

“I want to say something else,” he tells Wyatt. “A bunch of things.”

“The floor is all yours,” Wyatt says.

“I didn’t ask for any of this,” Jimmy says. “But I’m not walking out the way I walked in.”

Jimmy takes a deep breath and goes on, almost like he’s caught a second wind. He faces the board and looks around the table, stopping at one face after another.

“Here’s what Gavin would’ve said if he were standing where I’m standing: You wanted to fix the ending. You wanted a winner you could control. You wanted Tipton because he was obedient. Because he’d do what you told him to do. Because he’d keep the machine running.”

Alek cuts in. “So he was supposed to win instead of me?”

“Tipton,” Wyatt says. “Yes. That was the plan.”

Ward opens his mouth.

Wyatt points at him. “Don’t.”

Thomas Waldrip, red-faced, stands before anyone else can speak. “You all keep calling it cruelty. I call it selection. The world doesn’t need kinder leaders. It needs effective ones.”

Jimmy doesn’t raise his voice. He sharpens it.

“Sit down,” Jimmy says.