The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(68)

If he got that girl pregnant…

And if Will really hadn’t been seen for more than forty years… plus or minus…

Questions piled up in my head. Did Toby know or suspect that Will Blake was his biological father? Did Vincent Blake know that Toby was his grandson? Is that why he took him? And if the seal that Toby had stolen from his father really did belong to Vincent Blake’s son—how had it come to be in Tobias Hawthorne’s possession in the first place?

What happened to Will Blake?

If we’d been barreling toward the edge of the cliff before, I was in the free fall now.

The moment we arrived back at Hawthorne House and I burst out of the SUV, Jameson was there. He stopped, inches from me, intensity radiating off his body. Everything we’d learned was about to come pouring out of my mouth when he spoke.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Heiress?”

I stared at him, disbelief giving way to anger that bubbled up in me and exploded out. “What’s wrong with me? You’re the one who locked me in the world’s most bejeweled escape room!”

“To keep you safe,” Jameson emphasized. “Vincent Blake is powerful, and he’s connected, and he’s going to keep coming for you, Avery, because you’re the one holding the keys to this kingdom. And I don’t know if he wants what you have, or if he wants to burn it down, but either way, how am I supposed to keep you safe if you won’t let me?”

I knew that Jameson loved me—and that pissed me off because our love wasn’t supposed to be like this. “You’re not supposed to keep me anything!” I burst out. He tried to look away, but I wouldn’t let him. “Ask me what we found.”

He didn’t.

“Just ask me, Jameson.”

I could see him wanting to, warring with himself. “Promise me first.”

“Promise you what?” I asked.

“That you’ll be more careful. That I won’t come home to find you gone again.”

I wasn’t sure how to say this to make him believe it, so I put both my hands flat on his chest and stared into green eyes that I knew better than anyone else’s. “I’m not going to stay locked up here, and it is not your place to lock me up. I don’t need your protection.”

“This is what you want!” Jameson sounded like the words had been ripped out of him. Breathing heavily, he curled his fingers around mine.

“It’s what you’ve always wanted. An arrogant, duty-bound asshole who tries to be honorable and would die to protect the girl he loves.”

I froze. Logically, I knew that my heart was still beating. I was still breathing. But it didn’t feel like it. I could see the others in my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t ask Jameson to lower his voice, couldn’t focus on anything but the green of his eyes, the lines of his face.

“I’m not Grayson,” he told me, ravaged by the words.

“I don’t want you to be,” I said, pleading—for what, I wasn’t even sure.

“Yes, you do,” Jameson insisted quietly. “And it doesn’t even matter because I’m not putting on a show here, Heiress. I’m not playing at being overprotective or pretending that, for once in my life, I want to do the right thing.” He brought his hands to the side of my face, then the back of my neck, and I felt his touch through every square inch of my body. “I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery—some things are too precious to gamble.”

Jameson Winchester Hawthorne loved me. He loved me, and I loved him. But I didn’t know how to make him believe that when I said I didn’t want him to be Grayson, I meant it.

“This is who I want to be,” Jameson said, his voice hoarse, “for you.”

I wished suddenly that neither one of us was standing on the lawn of Hawthorne House. That it was my birthday again or that the year mark had passed and we were halfway around the world, seeing everything, doing everything, having it all. I wished that Toby had never been taken, that Vincent Blake didn’t exist, that Eve had never come here— Eve, I thought suddenly, and then I realized something that I should have realized much sooner. If Vincent Blake’s son was Toby’s father, that made Eve the man’s great-granddaughter.

Eve and Vincent Blake are family. The words exploded in my mind like shrapnel. I thought about Eve telling me about doing a mail-in DNA test, about the way that she’d first earned my trust because I’d thought I understood what Toby meant to her, how it must have felt for her to finally be wanted, to finally have family who wanted her.

But what if that family wasn’t Toby?

What if someone else had found her first?

I thought back to showing her Toby’s wing, to the moment when I’d mentioned “A Poison Tree” and said the poet’s name: William Blake. Eve had dropped to her knees, reading the poem over and over again. She recognized the name.

“Heiress.” Jameson was still looking at me, and I knew, just from the way he let his thumbs skim lightly over my cheekbones, that he knew my mind had taken flight. He didn’t blame me for it. He didn’t ask me for anything else. All he said was “Tell me.”

So I did.

And then he told me that Eve was at Wayback Cottage—with Grayson.