The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(19)

On some level, I knew the answer. Daddy never really considered me a player in the grand game. I thought back further, to a poem that Toby had written in code. The tree is poison, don’t you see? It poisoned S and Z and me.

“Skye loved being pregnant.” Nash broke the silence in the SUV, glancing back at me from the front seat. “I ever tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“The old man doted on her. She stayed at Hawthorne House for the entirety of each pregnancy, nested even. And when she had a new baby, it was like magic, those first few days. I remember standing in the doorway, watching her feeding Gray right after they got home from the hospital. All she did was stare at him, softly crooning. Baby Gray was a real quiet little guy, solemn. Jamie was a screamer. Xander wiggled.” Nash shook his head.

“And every time, those first few days, I thought, Maybe she’ll stay. ”

I swallowed. “But she never did.”

“The way Skye tells it, the old man stole us away. Truth is, she’s the one who put my brothers in his arms. She gave them to him. Problem was never that she didn’t love us—she just wanted the rest of it more.”

Her father’s approval. The Hawthorne fortune. I wondered how many babies Nash had seen his mother give away before he’d decided he didn’t want a part of any of it.

“If you had a baby…,” I said.

“When I have a baby,” came the deep, heart-shattering reply, “she’ll be my whole world.”

“She?” I repeated.

Nash settled back into his seat. “I can picture Lib with a little girl.”

Before I could respond to that, Oren got a call. “What have you got?” he asked the moment he answered. “Where?” Oren brought the SUV to a stop outside the gates. “There’s been a breach,” he told the rest of us. “A sensor was tripped in the tunnels.”

Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream. I reached for the knife in my boot —not to draw it, just to remind myself: I wasn’t defenseless. Eventually, my brain calmed enough for me to remember the circumstances in which we’d left Hawthorne House.

“I want teams coming in from both sides,” Oren was saying.

“Stop.” I cut him off. “It’s not a security breach.” I took a deep breath.

“It’s Rebecca.”





CHAPTER 17

The tunnels that ran beneath the Hawthorne estate had fewer entrances than the secret passageways. Years ago, Tobias Hawthorne had shown those entrances to a young Rebecca Laughlin. The old man had seen a girl living in the shadows of her sick older sister. He’d told Rebecca that she deserved something of her own.

I found her in the tunnel beneath the tennis courts. Guided only by the light on my phone, I made my way toward the place where she stood. The tunnel dead-ended into a concrete wall. Rebecca stood facing it, her red hair wild, her lithe body held stiff.

“Go away, Xander,” she said.

I stopped a few feet shy of her. “It’s me.”

I heard Rebecca take in a shaky breath. “Go away, Avery.”

“No.”

Rebecca was good at wielding silence as a weapon—or a shield. After Emily’s death, she’d isolated herself, wrapped in that silence.

“I have all day,” I said.

Rebecca finally turned to look at me. For a beautiful girl, she cried ugly.

“I met Eve. We told her the truth about Toby’s adoption.” She sucked in a gulp of air. “She wants to meet my mom.”

Of course she did. Rebecca’s mother was Eve’s grandmother. “Can your mom handle that?” I asked.

I’d only met Mallory Laughlin a few times, but stable wasn’t a word I would have used to describe her. As a teenager, she’d given baby Toby up for adoption, unaware that the Hawthornes were the ones who had adopted him. Her baby had been so close, for years, and she hadn’t known—not back then. When she’d finally had another child two decades later, Emily had been born with a heart condition.

And now Emily was dead. As far as Mallory knew, Toby was, too.

“I’m not handling this,” Rebecca told me. “She looks so much like her, Avery.” Rebecca sounded beyond angry, beyond gutted, her voice a mosaic of far too many emotions to be contained in one body. “She even sounds like Emily.”

Rebecca’s entire life growing up had been about her sister. She’d been raised to make herself small.

“Do you need me to tell you that Eve isn’t Emily?” I asked.

Rebecca swallowed. “Well, she doesn’t seem to hate me, so…”

“Hate you?” I asked.

Rebecca sat and pulled her knees tight to her chest. “The last thing Em and I ever did was fight. Do you know how hard she would have made me work to be forgiven for that? For being right?” They’d fought about Emily’s plans for that night—the plans that had gotten her killed. “Hell,” Rebecca said, fingering the ends of her choppy red hair, “she’d hate me for this, too.”

I sat down beside her. “Your hair?”

Some of the tightness in Rebecca’s muscles gave way, and her entire body shuddered. “Emily liked our hair long.”

Our hair. The fact that Rebecca could say that without realizing how screwed up it was, even now, made me want to hit someone on her behalf.