The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(36)

CHAPTER 32

I texted Alisa first. Handling scandals like this was part of her job.

Breaking the news to the boys and Eve was harder. Forcing my mouth to say the words felt like breaking my ankle. A moment of wrongness. A sick crunch . The shock. Then the shock wore off.

“This is bullshit,” Nash bit out. He took a breath, then turned discerning eyes on his brothers. “Jamie? Gray?”

“I’m fine.” Grayson’s face was like stone.

“And in keeping with my general superiority in our sibling relationship,”

Jameson added with a sardonic smile that was just a little too sharp, “I am better than fine.”

This was Luke’s doing. It had to be.

Eve pulled the gossip site up on her phone. She stared at it. Her own picture. Emily’s.

I flashed back to that moment in Toby’s wing when she’d told me that she didn’t look like anyone in her family.

“Why does it say you killed her?” Eve asked, her voice reedy. She didn’t look up from her phone, but I knew who she was addressing that question to.

“Because,” Grayson replied, his voice blade-edged, “we did.”

“Like hell you did,” Nash swore. He looked around at the rest of us.

“What’s the rule about fightin’ dirty?” he asked. No one answered. “Gray?

Jamie?” He swiveled his gaze to me.

“There’s no such thing as fighting dirty,” I said lowly, “if you win.” I wanted to win. I wanted to get Toby back. I wanted to take the bastard who had kidnapped him—the bastard who had just done this to Jameson and Grayson and Eve— down.

“Fighting dirty?” Eve asked, finally looking up from the website. “Is that what you call this? My face is going to be everywhere.”

This was exactly what Toby hadn’t wanted.

“Glitter cannon,” Xander said.

I shot him a look. This really wasn’t the time for levity—or sparkles.

“This right here is a glitter cannon,” Xander reiterated. “Detonate one in the middle of a game, and it makes a huge mess. The kind that gets everywhere, sticks to everything.”

Grayson’s expression hardened. “And runs down the clock while you clean it up.”

“While you try to clean it up,” Libby said gently. She’d been quiet in all of this, but my sister had empathy in spades, and she didn’t have to know Grayson or Jameson or even Eve as well as I did to know how hard they’d been hit.

“Some things don’t clean easy,” Nash agreed in a slow, steady drawl, his eyes finding Libby’s like it was the most natural thing in the world. “You’ll think you’ve finally got it all. Everything’s fine. And then five years later…”

“There’s still glitter in Grayson’s bathroom,” Xander finished. I got the feeling that wasn’t a metaphor.

“Luke did this,” I said. “He set this up. He detonated the blast. He wants us distracted.” He wants to run down the clock. He wants us to lose.

Tick tock.

Eve turned her phone off and tossed it roughly onto the desk. “Screw the glitter,” she said. “I don’t want to figure out what happens to Toby if that timer hits zero.”

None of us did.

Xander played the conversation with Luke back again, and we got to work.





CHAPTER 33

6 HOURS, 17 MIN, 9 SEC…

It was getting to the point where I didn’t even need to look at the time. I just knew. We weren’t getting anywhere. I tried to clear my head, but fresh air didn’t help. Giving money anonymously to people who needed it didn’t help.

When I went back inside, I arrived in the circular library just in time to hear Xander’s phone go off. He was the only person I knew who used the first twelve digits of pi as a ringtone. After an uncharacteristically muted conversation, he brought the phone to me.

“Max,” he mouthed.

I took the phone. “Let me guess,” I said, holding it to my ear. “You’ve seen the news?”

“What makes you think that?” Max responded. “I was just calling to catch you up on my bodyguard situation. Piotr stubbornly refuses to choose a theme song, but otherwise, our bodyguard-and-bodyguard-ee relationship is working out quite well.”

Leave it to Max to make light of needing security. Because of me. I couldn’t help feeling responsible, any more than I could help feeling like Eve had been outed to the world only because she’d made the poor choice of coming to me for help.

My name was the one on the envelopes, the one on the box. I was the one in Luke’s sights, but anyone close to me could end up in the crosshairs.

“I’m sorry,” I told Max.

“I know,” my best friend replied. “But don’t worry. I’ll choose a theme song for him.” She paused. “Xander said something about… a cannon?”

The whole story burst out, like water demolishing a broken dam: the package delivery, the box, the phone, the call with “Luke”—and his ultimatum.

“You sound like a person who needs to think out loud,” Max opined.

“Proceed.”

I did. I just kept talking and talking, hoping my brain would find something different to say this time. I got to the event in the calendar and said, “We thought Niv might be a reference to an SEC form, N-four. We’ve spent hours trying to track down Tobias Hawthorne’s filings. I guess Niv could be a name, or initials, but—”