The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(75)

“I heard.”

Eve was unabashed. “Whatever you heard, you know that I am not the villain here, Grayson. Your grandfather—he owed me better. He owed you better, and you and your family owe Avery nothing.”

Grayson’s eyes met mine. “I owe her more than she realizes.”

A dam broke inside me, and all of the hurt I hadn’t let myself feel came flooding out, and with it, everything else I felt—and had ever felt—for Grayson Hawthorne.

“You’re as bad as your grandfather was,” Eve tried. “Look at me, Grayson. Look at me. ”

He did.

“If you let Oren kick me out of here or call the police, if you try to force me to go back to Vincent Blake empty-handed, I swear to you, I will find a cliff to jump off of.” There was something fierce and mad and savage in Eve’s voice—something that sold that threat completely. “Emily’s blood is on your hands. Do you really want mine there, too?”

Grayson stared at her. I could see him reliving the moment he’d found Emily. I could see the effect that Eve’s specific threat—a cliff—had on him.

I could see Grayson Davenport Hawthorne drowning, fighting the undertow in vain. And then I saw him stop fighting and let the memories and the grief and the truth wash over him.

And then Grayson took a breath. “You’re a big girl,” he told Eve. “You make your own choices. Whatever you do after Oren sends you packing— that’s on you.”

I wondered if he really meant that. If he believed it.

“This is your chance,” Eve said, fighting Oren’s grip. “This is redemption, Grayson. I’m yours, and you could be mine. It’s your fault Emily’s dead. You could have stopped her—”

Grayson took a single step toward her. “I shouldn’t have had to.” He looked down at the USB in his hand. “And this would be useless to you.”

“You can’t know that.” Eve was a wild thing now, fighting Oren with everything she had.

“Assuming this USB is my grandfather’s handiwork,” Grayson told her, “you would need a decoder to make sense of any of the files. A Hawthorne never leaves any knowledge of value unprotected.”

“So I’ll break the encryption,” Eve said dismissively.

Grayson arched an eyebrow at her. “Not without a second drive.”

A second drive.

“You can’t do this to me, Grayson. We’re the same, you and I.” There was something in the way Eve said that, something in her voice that made me think she believed it.

Grayson didn’t blink. “Not anymore.”

An instant later, Oren’s men came crashing through the door.

Oren turned to me. “How do you want to handle this, Avery?”

Eve had pointed a gun at me. That, at least, was a crime. Lying to us wasn’t. Manipulating us wasn’t. I couldn’t prove anything else. And she wasn’t the real enemy here.

The real threat.

“Have your men escort Eve off the estate,” I told Oren. “We’ll deal directly with Vincent Blake from now on.”

Eve didn’t make them drag her. “You haven’t won,” she told me. “He’ll keep coming—and sooner or later, all of you will wish to God that this had ended with me.”





CHAPTER 68

Oren left Grayson and me alone in the chapel.

“I owe you an apology.”

I met Grayson Hawthorne’s eyes, as light and piercing as they’d been the first time I saw him. “You don’t owe me anything,” I said—not out of compassion but because it hurt to let myself think about how much I’d expected from him.

“Yes. I do.” After a long moment, Grayson looked away. “I,” he said, like that one word cost him everything, “have been punishing myself for so long. Not just for Emily’s death—for every weakness, every miscalculation, every—” He cut off, like his windpipe had closed suddenly around the words. I watched as he forced a jagged breath into his lungs. “No matter what I was or what I did—it was never enough. The old man was always there, pushing for better, for more.”

I’d thought once that he had bulletproof confidence. That he was arrogant and incapable of second-guessing himself and utterly sure of his own power.

“And then,” Grayson said, “the old man was gone. And then… there was you.”

“Grayson.” His name caught in my throat.

Grayson just looked at me, his light eyes shadowed. “Sometimes, you have an idea of a person—about who they are, about what you’d be like together. But sometimes that’s all it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved the idea of Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.”

That was a confession and self-condemnation and a curse. “That’s not true, Grayson.”

He looked at me like the act of doing so was painful and sweet. “It was never just the idea of you, Avery.”

I tried not to feel like the ground was suddenly moving underneath my feet. “You hated the idea of me.”

“But not you.” The words were just as sweet, just as painful. “Never you.”

Something gave inside me. “Grayson.”