The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(29)

I texted Alisa. The reply came immediately: Legal name change, years ago. We’re good.

Xander had said that his grandfather was born Tobias Hawthorne, no middle name. Why tell me that at all? Deeply doubting that I would ever understand anyone with the last name Hawthorne, I reached for the magnifying glass attached to the table. It was the size of my hand. I placed the two letters side by side beneath it and turned on the lights built into the table.

Chalk one up for private schools.

The paper was thick enough that the light didn’t shine through, but the magnifying glass made quick work of blowing the writing up ten times its normal size. I adjusted the glass, bringing the signature on Jameson’s letter into focus. I could see details now in Tobias Hawthorne’s handwriting that I hadn’t been able to see before. A slight hook on his r’s. Asymmetry on his capital T’s. And there, in his middle name, was a noticeable space, twice that between any two other letters. Magnified, that space made the name appear as two words.

Tatters all. Tatters, all. “As in, he left them all in tatters?” I wondered out loud. It was a leap, but it didn’t feel like much of one, not when Jameson had been so sure that there was more to this letter than met the eyes. Not when Xander had made it a point to tell me about his grandfather’s lack of a middle name. If Tobias Hawthorne had legally changed his name to add in Tattersall, that strongly suggested he’d chosen the name himself. To what end?

I looked up, suddenly remembering that I wasn’t alone in this room, but the girl with the dark red hair was gone. I shot off another text to Alisa: When did TH change his name?

Did the name change correspond to the moment he’d decided to leave his family in the billionaire version of tatters, to leave everything to me?

A text came through a moment later, but it wasn’t from Alisa. It was from Jameson. I had no idea how he’d even gotten the number—for this new phone or my last.

I see it now, Mystery Girl. Do you?

I looked around, feeling like he might be watching me from the wings, but by all indications, I was alone.

The middle name? I typed back.

No. I waited, and a second text came through a full minute later. The sign-off.

My gaze went to the end of Jameson’s letter. Right before the signature, there were two words: Don’t judge.

Don’t judge the Hawthorne patriarch for dying without ever telling his family he was sick? Don’t judge the games he was playing from beyond the grave? Don’t judge the way he had pulled the rug out from underneath his daughters and grandsons?

I looked back at Jameson’s text, then to the letter, and read it again from the beginning. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t—or is it? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. All that glitters is not gold. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. There but for the grace of God go I.

I imagined being Jameson, getting this letter—wanting answers and being given platitudes instead. Proverbs. My brain supplied the alternate term, and my eyes darted back down to the sign-off. Jameson had thought we were looking for a wordplay or a code. Every line in this letter, barring the proper names, was a proverb or a slight variation thereon.

Every line except one.

Don’t judge. I’d missed most of my old English teacher’s lecture on proverbs, but there was only one I could think of that started with those two words.

Does “Don’t judge a book by its cover” mean anything to you? I asked Jameson.

His reply was immediate. Very good, Heiress. Then, a moment later: It sure as hell does.





CHAPTER 27


We could be making something out of nothing,” I said hours later. Jameson and I stood in the Hawthorne House library, looking up at the shelves circling the room, filled with books from eighteen-foot ceiling to floor.

“Hawthorne-born or Hawthorne-made, there’s always something to be played.” Jameson spoke with a singsong rhythm, like a child skipping rope. But when he brought his gaze down from the shelves to me, there was nothing childlike in his expression. “Everything is something in Hawthorne House.”

Everything, I thought. And everyone.

“Do you know how many times in my life one of my grandfather’s puzzles has sent me to this room?” Jameson turned slowly in a circle. “He’s probably rolling in his grave that it took me this long to see it.”

“What do you think we’re looking for?” I asked.

“What do you think we’re looking for, Heiress?” Jameson had a way of making everything sound like it was either a challenge or an invitation.

Or both.

Focus, I told myself. I was here because I wanted answers at least as much as the boy beside me did. “If the clue is a book by its cover,” I said, turning the riddle over in my mind “then I’d guess that we’re looking for either a book or a cover—or maybe a mismatch between the two?”

“A book that doesn’t match its cover?” Jameson’s expression gave no hint of what he thought of that suggestion.

“I could be wrong.”

Jameson’s lips twisted—not quite a smile, not quite a smirk. “Everyone is a little wrong sometimes, Heiress.”

An invitation—and a challenge. I had no intention of being a little wrong—not with him. The sooner my body remembered that, the better. I physically turned away from Jameson to do a three-sixty, slowly taking in the scope of the room. Just looking up at the shelves felt like standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. We were completely encircled by books, going up two stories. “There must be thousands of books in here.” Given how big the library was, given how high the shelves went up, if we were looking for a book mismatched to its cover sleeve…