The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(86)

I’m going to use this to get past the gates. And I’m going in alone.”

“I have a professional obligation to tell you that I don’t like this plan.”

I gave Oren a sympathetic look. “Would you like it more if I told you that I’ll be doing a press conference right outside his gates so that the whole world knows I’m inside?”

Vincent Blake couldn’t touch me with the paparazzi watching.

“You going to put a stop to this, Oren?” Nash ambled toward us, clearly having overheard our exchange. “Because if you don’t, I will.”

As if drawn by the chaos, Xander chose that moment to pop in, too.

“This doesn’t concern you,” I told Nash.

“Nice try, kid.” Nash’s tone never advertised the fact that he was pulling rank, but no matter how casual the delivery, it was always one hundred percent clear when that was what he was doing. “This ain’t happening.”

Nash didn’t care that I was eighteen, that I owned the House, that I wasn’t actually his sister, or that I would put up one hell of a fight if he tried to stop me.

“You can’t protect the four of us forever,” I told him.

“I can damn well try. You don’t want to test me on this one, darlin’.”

I glanced at Jameson, who was well-acquainted with the pitfalls of testing Nash. Jameson met my gaze, then glanced at Xander.

“Flying leopard?” Jameson murmured.

“Hidden mongoose!” Xander replied, and an instant later, they were crashing into Nash in a truly impressive synchronized flying tackle.

In a one-on-one fight, Nash could take either one of them. But it was hard to get the upper hand when you had one brother on your torso and another pinning your legs and feet.

“We should go,” I told Oren. Nash was cursing up a storm behind us.

Xander began serenading him with a brotherly limerick.

“Oren!” Nash hollered.

My head of security didn’t so much as hint at any amusement he might have felt. “Sorry, Nash. I know better than to get in the middle of a Hawthorne brawl.”

“Alisa—” Nash started to say, but I interjected.

“I want you with me,” I told my lawyer. “You’ll wait with Oren, right outside.”

Nash must have smelled defeat because he stopped trying to dislodge Xander from his feet. “Kid?” he called. “You sure as hell better play dirty.”





CHAPTER 77

Vincent Blake’s ranch was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive north, stretching for miles along the Texas/Oklahoma border. Taking the helicopter cut our travel time down to forty-five minutes, plus transit on the ground.

Landon had done her part, so the press arrived shortly after I did.

“Earlier today,” I told them in a speech that I had rehearsed, “the remains of a man that we believe to be William Blake were found on the grounds of the Hawthorne estate.”

I stuck to my script. Landon had timed the leak about the body perfectly —the story she’d planted was already up, but it was the footage of what I was saying now that would define it. I sold the story: Will Blake had physically assaulted an underage female, and Tobias Hawthorne had intervened to protect her. Law enforcement was investigating, but based on what we’d been able to piece together ourselves, we expected the autopsy to reveal that Blake had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

Tobias Hawthorne had dealt those blows.

That last bit might not have been true, but it was sensational. It was a story. And I was here now to pay my respects to the deceased’s family, on behalf of myself and the remaining Hawthornes.

I didn’t take questions. Instead, I turned and walked toward the boundary of Vincent Blake’s property. I knew from my research that Legacy Ranch was more than a quarter of a million acres—nearly four hundred square miles.

I stopped under an enormous brick arch, part of an equally enormous wall. The archway was big enough for a bus to fit underneath. As I approached, a black truck barreled toward me from inside the compound, down a long dirt road.

Beyond this wall, there were more than eighty thousand acres of active farmland, more than a thousand productive oil wells, the world’s largest



privately owned collection of quarter horses, and a truly substantial number of cattle.

And somewhere, beyond this wall, on these acres, there was a house.

“You’re about to trespass on private property.” The men who exited the black truck were dressed like ranch hands, but they moved like soldiers.

Hoping I hadn’t miscalculated—because if I had, the entire world was witnessing that miscalculation—I replied to the man who had spoken.

“Even if I have one of these?”

I opened my fingers just far enough for them to see the seal.

Less than a minute later, I was in the cab of the truck, barreling toward the unknown.

It was a full ten minutes before the house came into view. The driver, who was definitely armed, hadn’t said a word to me.

I looked down at the seal resting in my palm. “You haven’t asked where I got it.”

He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “When someone has one of those, you don’t ask.”

If Hawthorne House looked like a castle, Vincent Blake’s home called to mind a fortress. It was made of dark stone, its square lines interrupted only by two giant round columns rising into turrets. A wrought-iron balcony lined the front perimeter on the second floor. I half expected a drawbridge, but instead there was a wraparound porch.