The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(76)

“I know,” he said roughly.

I shook my head. “You’re still so convinced that you know everything.”

“I know that Jamie loves you.” Grayson looked at me the way you look at art in a glass case, like he wanted to reach out to touch me but couldn’t.

“And I’ve seen the way that you look at him, the way the two of you are together. You’re in love with my brother, Avery.” He paused. “Tell me you’re not.”

I couldn’t do that. He knew I couldn’t. “I am in love with your brother,”

I said, because it was true. Jameson was part of me now—part of who I’d spent the past year becoming. I’d changed. If I hadn’t, maybe things could have been different, but there was no going back.

I was who I was because of Jameson. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told him that I didn’t want him to be anyone else.

So why was this so hard?

“I wanted Eve to be different,” Grayson told me. “I wanted her to be you.”

“Don’t say that,” I whispered.

He looked at me one last time. “There are so many things that I will never say.”

He was getting ready to walk away, and I had to let him—but I couldn’t.

“Promise me you won’t leave again,” I told Grayson. “You can go back to Harvard. You can go wherever you want, do whatever you want—just promise me that you won’t shut us out again.” I lifted my hand to my Hawthorne pin. I knew he had one of his own. I knew that, but I took mine off and pinned it on him anyway. “Est unus ex nobis. You said that to Jameson once, do you remember? She is one of us. Well, it goes both ways, Gray.”

Grayson closed his eyes, and I was hit with the feeling that I would never forget the way he looked standing there in the light from the stained-glass windows. Without his armor. Without pretense. Raw.

“Scio,” Grayson told me. I know.

I looked down at the USB in his hand.

“I have the other one,” I told him. “It was the one object in the leather satchel that we never used, remember?”

Grayson’s eyes opened. He stepped out of the light. “Are you going to call my brothers?” he asked me. “Or shall I?”





CHAPTER 69

Xander plugged the first USB into his computer, dragged the audio file onto the desktop, then removed the USB and exchanged it for the USB

from the tomb. He dragged the second file to his desktop, too.

“Play the first one,” Jameson instructed.

Xander did. Garbled, undecipherable speech filled the air, a blast of white noise.

“And the second?” Nash prompted. For as long as I’d known him, he’d resisted dancing to the old man’s tune. But he was here. He was doing this.

The lone file on the second USB was also an audio clip. It was just as messed up as the first.

“What happens if you play them together?” I asked. Grayson had said that to make sense of one file, you needed a decoder. In isolation, the clips were nothing but noise. But if you had both USBs, both files…

Xander opened an audio editing app and dumped the files in. He lined them up, then hit a sequence of buttons that caused them to play.

Combined, the result wasn’t garbled. “Hello, Avery,” a man’s voice said, and I felt the change in the air around me, in all of them. “We’re strangers, you and I. I imagine that’s something you’ve thought about quite a bit.”

Tobias Hawthorne. The one and only time I’d met him, I was six years old. But he was omnipresent in this place. Hawthorne House bore his mark.

Every room. Every detail.

The boys bore it, too.

“All great lives should have at least one grand mystery, Avery. I won’t apologize for being yours.” Tobias Hawthorne was a man who didn’t apologize for much. “If you’ve spent late nights and early mornings asking yourself Why me? Well, my dear, you are not the only one. What is the human condition, if not Why me? ”

I could feel the shift in each of the Hawthorne brothers as they listened to Tobias Hawthorne’s words and the cadence of his speech.

“As a young man, I believed myself destined for greatness. I fought for it, I thought my way to the top, I cheated, I lied, I made the world bend to my will.” There was a pause, and then: “I got lucky. I can admit that now.

I’m dying, and not slowly, either. Why me? Why is this body giving out?

Why am I the one sitting in a palace of my own making when there are others out there with minds like mine? I got lucky. Right place, right time, right ideas, right mind.” He let out an audible breath. “If only that were it.

“If you are playing this message, then things have become as dire as I projected. Eve is there, and certain events have led you to finding the tomb that once housed this family’s greatest secret. How much, I wonder, have you put together for yourself, Avery?”

Every time he said my name, I felt like he was here in this room. Like he could see me. Like he had been watching me from the moment I’d stepped through Hawthorne House’s grand front door.

“But then,” he continued, an odd sort of smile in his voice, “you’re not alone, are you? Hello, boys.”

I felt Jameson shift, his arm brushing mine.