The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(87)

Eve stood on that porch, her amber hair blowing in the wind.

Blake’s security followed me as I walked toward her. When I stepped up onto the porch, Eve turned, a strategic move designed to force me into following.

“This all would have been so much easier,” she said, “if you’d just given me what I asked for.”





CHAPTER 78

Eve didn’t lead me into the house. She led me around back. A man stood there. He had suntanned skin and silver hair shorn to the scalp. I knew he had to be in his eighties, but he looked closer to sixty-five—and like he could run a marathon.

He was holding a shotgun.

As I watched, he took aim at the sky. The sound of the shot was earsplitting and echoed through the countryside as a bird plummeted to the ground. Vincent Blake said something—I couldn’t hear what—and the largest bloodhound I’d ever seen took off after the kill.

Blake lowered his weapon. Slowly, he turned to face me. “Around here,”

he called, in that smooth, borderline-aristocratic voice I recognized all too well from the phone, “we cook what we shoot.”

He held out the gun, and someone rushed to take it from him. Then Blake strode toward us. He settled down on a cement wall near a massive firepit, and Eve led me right up to it—and him.

“Where are Grayson and Toby?” That was the only greeting this man was going to get out of me.

“Enjoying my hospitality.” Blake eyed the large box I carried in my hands. Wordlessly, I opened it. I’d stopped in the vault to retrieve the royal chess set. Once I’d been granted admission to Blake’s lands, I’d had Oren surreptitiously hand it to me.

Now I set it in front of Blake, an offering of sorts.

He picked up one of the pieces, examining the multitude of shining black diamonds, the artistry of the design, then snorted and tossed the piece back down. “Tobias always was the showy type.” Blake held out his right hand, and someone placed a bowie knife in it.

My heart leapt into my throat, but all the king of this kingdom did was withdraw a small piece of wood from his pocket.

“A set you carve yourself,” he told me, “plays just the same.”

That’s not a carving knife. I didn’t let him intimidate me into saying that out loud. Instead, I leaned forward to place the seal I’d flashed to gain entrance beside him on the wall. “I believe this is yours,” I told him. Then I nodded to the chess set I’d brought. “And we’ll call that a gift.”

“I didn’t ask you to bring me a gift, Avery Kylie Grambs.”

I met his iron-hard gaze. “You didn’t ask for anything. You told me to bring you your son, and you’ll get him.” By now, Blake doubtlessly would have heard the reports that Landon had leaked. There was a good chance that he’d watched my press conference. “Once the investigation is complete,” I continued, “the authorities will release his remains to you. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I don’t lose, Avery Kylie Grambs.” Blake’s knife flashed in the sun as he scraped it along the wood. “My son, on the other hand, appears to have lost quite a bit.”

“Your son,” I said, “impregnated an underage girl, then got physical with her when she had the audacity to be devastated at the realization that he’d just been using her to get close enough to make a move against Tobias Hawthorne.”

“Hmmmm.” Blake made a humming sound that felt far more threatening than it should have. “Will was fifteen when Tobias and I parted ways. The boy was irate that we’d been double-crossed. I had to disabuse him of the notion that we had been anything. What happened was between young Tobias and me.”

“Tobias bested you.” That was my first thrust in this little verbal sword match of ours.

Blake didn’t even feel it. “And look how well that turned out for him.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a reference to the fact that the only person who had ever bested Vincent Blake had turned out to be one of the most formidable minds in a generation—or a self-satisfied prediction that all of Tobias Hawthorne’s achievements would be nothing in the end.

The billionaire was dead, his fortune ripe for the taking.

“Your son hated him.” I tried again, with a different type of attack. “And he was desperate to prove himself to you.”

Blake didn’t deny it. Instead, he brought the bowie knife away from the wood and tested its sharpness against the pad of his thumb. “Tobias should have let me handle Will. He knew the kind of hell there would be to pay for bringing harm to my son. Choices, young lady, have consequences.”

“And how would you have handled what your son did to Mallory Laughlin?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“And boys will be boys,” I shot back. “Right?”

Blake studied me for a moment, then laid the knife on his leg. “I understand you have some friends at the gate.”

“The entire world knows I’m here,” I said. “They know what happened to your son.”

“Do they?” Eve said, a challenge in her tone. The story I was telling— she must have heard enough from Mallory to question it.

“That’s enough, Eve.” Blake’s voice was clipped, and Eve swallowed as her great-grandfather looked between the two of us. “I shouldn’t have sent a little girl to do a man’s job.”