The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(40)

CHAPTER 37

We need to find Nan,” Jameson said immediately, once Grayson and I had reported back. “She’s probably the only person alive who could tell us if the old man had family that Zara doesn’t know about.”

“Finding Nan,” Xander explained to Eve, in what appeared to be an attempt to cheer her up, “is a bit like a game of Where’s Waldo, except Waldo likes to jab people with her cane.”

“She has favorite places in the House,” I said. The piano room. The card room.

“It’s Tuesday morning,” Nash commented wryly.

“The chapel.” Jameson looked at each of his brothers. “I’ll go.” He turned to me. “Feel like a walk?”

The Hawthorne chapel—located beyond the hedge maze and due west of the tennis courts—wasn’t large, but it was breathtaking. The stone arches, hand-carved pews, and elaborate stained-glass windows looked like they’d been the work of dozens of artisans.

We found Nan resting in a pew. “Don’t let in a draft,” she barked without so much as turning around to see who she was barking at.

Jameson shut the chapel door, and we joined her in the pew. Nan’s head was bowed, her eyes closed, but somehow, she seemed to know exactly who had joined her. “Shameless boy,” she scolded Jameson. “And you, girl!

Forget about our weekly poker game yesterday, did you?”

I winced. “Sorry. I’ve been distracted.” That was an understatement.

Nan opened her eyes for the sole purpose of narrowing them at me. “But now that you want to talk, it doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of something?”

“We can wait until you’re finished praying,” I said, properly chastened —or at least trying to look that way.

“Praying?” Nan grumbled. “More like giving our Maker a piece of my mind.”

“My grandfather built this chapel so Nan would have someplace to yell at God,” Jameson informed me.

Nan harrumphed. “The old coot threatened to build me a mausoleum instead. Tobias never thought I’d outlive him.”

That was probably as close to an opening as we were going to get. “Did your son-in-law have any family of his own?” I asked. “Parents?”

“As opposed to what, girl? Springing forth fully formed from the head of Zeus?” Nan snorted. “Tobias always did have a God complex.”

“You loved him,” Jameson said gently.

A breath caught in Nan’s throat. “Like my own child.” She closed her eyes for a second or two, then opened them and continued. “He had parents, I suppose. From what I remember, Tobias said they had him older and didn’t much know what to do with a boy like him.” Nan gave Jameson a look. “Hawthorne children can be trying.”

“So he was a late-in-life baby,” I summarized. “Did they have any other children?”

“After having Tobias, I doubt they would have dared.”

“What about older siblings?” Jameson asked.

One father, two sons…

“None of those, either. By the time Tobias met my Alice, he was well and truly alone. Father died of a heart attack when Tobias was a teenager.

Mother only outlasted the father by about a year.”

“What about mentors?” Jameson asked. I could practically see him playing out a dozen different scenarios in his mind. “Father figures?

Friends?”

“Tobias Hawthorne was never in the business of making friends. He was in the business of making money. He was a single-minded bastard, wily and brutal.” Nan’s voice shook. “But he was good to my Alice. To me.”

“Family first,” Jameson said softly beside me.

“No man has ever built an empire without doing a thing or two they aren’t proud of, but Tobias didn’t let that follow him home. His hands weren’t always clean, but he never once raised them—not to Alice or their children or you boys.”

“You would have killed him if he had,” Jameson said affectionately.

“The mouth on you,” Nan chided.

His hands weren’t always clean. That single phrase sent me back to the first message we’d received from Toby’s kidnapper. At the time, it had seemed likely that the target of revenge was either Toby or me. But what if it was Tobias Hawthorne himself?

What if this—all of it—had always been about the old man? What if I’m just the one he chose? What if Toby is just his lost son? The possibility took hold of my mind, gripped it like fingernails digging into flesh.

“What did your son-in-law do?” I asked. “Why weren’t his hands clean?”

Nan offered no reply to that question.

Jameson reached out and took her hand. “If I told you that someone wanted revenge against the Hawthorne family—”

Nan patted the side of his face. “I’d tell that person to get in line.”





CHAPTER 38

Identify your assumptions. Question them. Negate them. As I stepped out of the chapel, I felt like a shell over my brain had been cracked wide open, and now possibilities were streaming in from every side.

What would I have done from the very beginning if I’d assumed that Toby had been taken as revenge for something that his father had done? I thought about Eve talking about Hawthorne secrets— dark secrets, maybe even dangerous ones—and then about Nan and her talk of empires and dirty hands.