The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(16)

“That a legal term?” Oren asked dryly.

I ripped open the envelope and found that the Hawthorne family had indeed provided me with keys—somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred of them.

“Any idea which one of these goes to the front door?” I asked. They weren’t normal keys. They were oversized and ornately made. They all looked like antiques, and each key was distinct—different designs, different metals, different lengths and sizes.

“You’ll figure it out,” someone said.

My gaze jerked upward, and I found myself staring at an intercom.

“Cut the games, Jameson,” Alisa ordered. “This isn’t nearly as cute as you all think it is.”

No reply.

“Jameson?” Alisa tried again.

Silence, and then: “I have faith in you, M.G.”

The intercom cut off, and Alisa blew out a long, frustrated breath. “God save me from Hawthornes.”

“M.G.?” Libby asked, bewildered.

“Mystery Girl,” I clarified. “From what I’ve gathered, that’s Jameson Hawthorne’s idea of a nickname.” I turned my attention to the ring of keys in my hand. The obvious solution was to try them all. Assuming one of these keys opened the front door, I’d get lucky eventually. But luck didn’t feel like enough. I was already the luckiest girl in the world.

Some part of me wanted to deserve it.

I flipped through the keys, inspecting the designs on the handles. An apple. A snake. A pattern of swirls reminiscent of water. There were keys for each letter of the alphabet, in fancy, old-fashioned script. There were keys with numbers and keys with shapes, one with a mermaid and four different keys featuring eyes.

“Well?” Alisa said abruptly. “Do you want me to make a phone call?”

“No.” I turned my attention from the keys to the door. The design was simple, geometric—not a match for anything on any of the keys I’d looked at so far. That would be too easy, I thought. Too simple. A second later, a parallel thought followed. Not simple enough.

I’d learned this much playing chess: The more complicated a person’s strategy seemed, the less likely an opponent was to look for simple answers. If you could keep someone looking at your knight, you could take them with a pawn. Look past the details. Past the complications. I shifted my focus from the handles of the keys to the part that actually went into the lock. Though the keys differed in size overall, the lock end was sized similarly from key to key.

Not just sized similarly, I realized, looking at two of the keys side by side. The pattern—the mechanism that actually turned the lock—was identical between the two. I moved on to a third key. The same. I began working my way through the ring, comparing each key to the next, one by one. Same. Same. Same.

There weren’t a hundred keys on this ring. The faster I flipped through them, the surer I was. There were two—dozens of copies of the wrong key, dressed up to look different from each other, and then…

“This one.” I finally hit a key with a different pattern from the others. The intercom crackled, but if Jameson was still on the other side, he didn’t say a word. I moved to put the key in the lock, and adrenaline jolted through my veins when it turned.

Eureka.

“How did you know which key to use?” Libby asked me.

The answer came from the intercom. “Sometimes,” Jameson Hawthorne said, sounding strangely contemplative, “things that appear very different on the surface are actually exactly the same at their core.”





CHAPTER 15


Welcome home, Avery.” Alisa stepped into the foyer and spun to face me. I stopped breathing, just for an instant, as I crossed the threshold. It was like stepping into Buckingham Palace or Hogwarts and being told that it was yours.

“Down that corridor,” Alisa said, “we have the theater, the music room, conservatory, solarium.…” I didn’t even know what half of those rooms were. “You’ve seen the Great Room, of course,” Alisa continued. “The formal dining is farther down, then the kitchen, the chef’s kitchen.…”

“There’s a chef?” I blurted out.

“There are sushi, Italian, Taiwanese, vegetarian, and pastry chefs on retainer.” The voice that said those words was male. I turned to see the older couple from the will’s reading standing by the entry to the Great Room. The Laughlins, I remembered. “But my wife handles the cooking day-to-day,” Mr. Laughlin continued gruffly.

“Mr. Hawthorne was a very private man.” Mrs. Laughlin eyed me. “He made do with my cooking most days because he didn’t like having any more outsiders poking around in the House than necessary.”

There was no doubt in my mind that she was saying House with a capital H—and even less that she considered me an outsider.

“There are dozens of staff on retainer,” Alisa explained. “They all receive a full-time wage but work on call.”

“If something needs doing, there’s someone to do it,” Mr. Laughlin said plainly, “and I see that it’s done in the most discreet fashion possible. More often than not, you won’t even know they’re here.”

“But I will,” Oren stated. “Movement on and off the estate is strictly tracked, and no one makes it past the gates without a deep background check. Construction crews, the housekeeping and gardening staff, every masseuse, chef, stylist, or sommelier—they are all cleared through my team.”