The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(44)

That thought drew my gaze to the leather satchel on my dresser. For two days, I’d been consumed with Toby’s captor’s sick riddle and the hope, however thin, that we were getting closer to solving it. But the truth was that all the ruminating we’d done had gotten us nowhere. It had probably been designed to lead us nowhere—until the riddle was complete.

I’ll be in touch.

I hated this. I needed a win. I needed a distraction. By the time this is over, you’ll know what kind of man I was. Slowly, I walked over to my dresser, thought about Tobias Hawthorne and those files, and picked up the satchel.

Moving methodically, I laid out the objects I hadn’t yet used. The steamer. The flashlight. The beach towel. The glass circle. I said the last clue Jameson and I had uncovered out loud. “Don’t breathe.”

I cleared my mind. After a moment, my gaze locked on the towel, then on the blue-green circle. That color. A towel. Don’t breathe.

With sudden, visceral clarity, I knew what I had to do.

A person stopped breathing when they were terrified, surprised, awed, trying to be quiet, surrounded by smoke—or underwater.





CHAPTER 42

A motion-sensor light came on as I stepped onto the patio. In my mind, in the span of a single heartbeat, I saw the pool the way it looked in daytime, with light reflecting off the water, the tiles on the bottom making it look as breathtakingly blue-green as the Mediterranean.

The same shade as the piece of glass I carried in my right hand. I held the beach towel in my left. Clearly, this was going to require getting wet.

At night, the water was darker, shadowy. I heard Grayson swimming before I saw him and felt the exact moment he became aware of my presence.

Grayson Davenport Hawthorne’s hand slapped the edge of the pool. He pulled himself upright. “Avery.” His voice was quiet, but in the still of the night, it carried. “You shouldn’t be here.” With me went unsaid. “You should be asleep.”

Grayson and his ought s and should s. Hawthornes aren’t supposed to break. His voice spoke deep in my memory. Especially me.

I shook off the memory as much as I could. “Is there a light out here?” I asked. I didn’t want to have to deal with things going dark every time I stood too still—and I couldn’t bring myself to look at Grayson, look at his light, piercing eyes, the way I had that night.

“There’s a control panel under the portico.”

I managed to find it and turn the pool lights on but ended up accidentally turning a fountain on, too. Water sprayed upward in a magnificent arc as the pool light cycled through colors: pink, purple, blue, green, violet. It felt like watching fireworks. Like magic.

But I hadn’t come down here for magic. One touch turned off the fountain. Another stopped the cycle of colors in the light.

“What are you doing?” Grayson asked me, and I knew that he was asking why I was here, with him.

“Did Jameson tell you about the bag your grandfather left me?” I asked.

Grayson pushed off the wall, treading water as he measured his response. “Jamie doesn’t tell me everything.” The silences in Grayson’s sentences always spoke volumes. “In fairness, there’s quite a bit that I don’t tell him.”

That was the closest he’d ever come to mentioning that night in the wine cellar, the things he’d confessed to me.

I held up the glass circle. “This was one of several items in a bag that your grandfather instructed be delivered to me if Eve and I ever met. There was also—”

“What did you say?” Without warning, Grayson pulled himself out of the water. It was October and cool enough at night that he had to be freezing, but he did a very good impression of someone utterly incapable of feeling cold.

“When I met Eve, it triggered one of your grandfather’s games.”

“The old man knew?” Grayson was standing so still that if the pool light hadn’t been on, he would have disappeared into the darkness. “My grandfather knew about Eve? He knew that Toby had a daughter?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

Every muscle in Grayson’s body had gone tight. “He knew,” he repeated savagely. “And he left her there? He knew, and he didn’t say a damn word to any of us?” Grayson strode toward me—then past me. He braced himself against the portico wall, his palms flat, the muscles in his back so tense that it looked like his shoulder blades might split the skin.

“Grayson?” I didn’t say more than that. I wasn’t sure what else to say.

“I used to tell myself that the old man loved us,” Grayson stated with all the precision of a surgeon slicing through good flesh to get to bad. “That if he held us to impossible standards, it was for the noble purpose of forging his heirs into what we needed to be. And if the great Tobias Hawthorne was harder on me than on my brothers, I told myself that it was because I needed to be more. I believed that he taught me about honor and duty because he was honorable, because he felt the weight of his duty and wanted to prepare me for it.”

Grayson slammed his hand down onto the wall hard enough for the rough surface to tear into his palm.

“But the things he did? The dirty little secrets in those file folders?

Knowing about Eve and letting her be raised by people who treated her as less than? Pretending that our family owed Toby’s daughter nothing?