The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(48)

But his grandfather chose me. “I’m—”

“Don’t say that you are sorry.” Grayson stared at the wall a moment longer, then turned to face me. “Don’t be sorry, Ms. Grambs. Be worthy of it.”

He might as well have ordered me to be fire or earth or air. A person couldn’t be worthy of billions. It wasn’t possible—not for anyone, and definitely not for me.

“How?” I asked him. How am I supposed to be worthy of anything?

He took his time replying, and I found myself wishing that I were the kind of girl who could fill silences. The kind who laughed with abandon, flowers in her hair.

“I can’t teach you how to be anything, Ms. Grambs. But if you’re willing, I can teach you a way of thinking.”

I pushed back the memory of Emily’s face. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Grayson began to walk down the length of the room, passing map after map. “It might feel better to give to someone you know than a stranger, or to donate to an organization whose story brings a tear to your eye, but that’s your brain playing tricks on you. The morality of an action depends, ultimately and only, on its outcomes.”

There was an intensity in the way he spoke, the way he moved. I couldn’t have looked away or stopped listening, even if I’d tried.

“We shouldn’t give because we feel one way or another,” Grayson told me. “We should direct our resources to wherever objective analysis says we can have the largest impact.”

He probably thought he was talking over my head, but the moment he said objective analysis, I smiled. “You’re talking to a future actuarial science major, Hawthorne. Show me your graphs.”





By the time Grayson finished, my head was spinning with numbers and projections. I could see exactly how his mind worked—and it was disturbingly like my own.

“I get why a scattershot approach won’t work,” I said. “Big problems require big thinking and big interventions—”

“Comprehensive interventions,” Grayson corrected. “Strategic.”

“But we also have to spread our risk.”

“With empirically driven cost-benefits analyses.”

Everyone had things they found inexplicably attractive. Apparently, for me it was suit-wearing, silver-eyed guys using the word empirically and taking for granted that I knew what it meant.

Get your mind out of the gutter, Avery. Grayson Hawthorne is not for you.

His phone rang, and he glanced down at the screen. “Nash,” he informed me.

“Go ahead,” I told him. “Take it.” At this point, I needed a breather—from him, but also from this. Math, I understood. Projections, I could wrap my mind around. But this?

This was real. This was power. One hundred million dollars a year.

Grayson answered his phone and left the room. I walked the perimeter, looking at the maps on the walls, memorizing the names of every country, every city, every town. I could help all of them—or none. There were people out there who might live or die because of me, futures good or bad that might be realized because of my choices.

What right did I even have to be the one making them?

Overwhelmed, I came to a stop in front of the very last map on the wall. Unlike the others, this one had been hand-drawn. It took me a moment to realize that the map was of Hawthorne House and the surrounding estate. My eyes went first to Wayback Cottage, a small building tucked in the back corner of the estate. I remembered, from the reading of the will, that Tobias Hawthorne had given lifetime occupancy of this building to the Laughlins.

Rebecca’s grandparents, I thought. Emily’s. I wondered if the girls had come to visit them when they were small, how much time they’d spent on the estate—at Hawthorne House. How old was Emily the first time Jameson and Grayson laid their eyes on her?

How long ago did she die?

The door to the conference room opened behind me. I was glad that Grayson couldn’t see my face. I didn’t want him to know that I’d been thinking about her. I made a show of studying the map in front of me, the geography of the estate, from the northern forest called the Black Wood to a small creek that ran along the western edge of the estate.

The Black Wood. I read the label again, the rush of blood through my veins was suddenly deafening. Blackwood. And there, in smaller letters, the winding body of water was labeled, too. Not a creek. The Brook.

A brook, on the west side of the property. Westbrook.

Blackwood. Westbrook.

“Avery.” Grayson spoke behind me.

“What?” I said, unable to fully tear my mind from the map—and the implications.

“That was Nash.”

“I know,” I said. He’d told me who was on the other end of the line before he’d answered.

Grayson laid a hand gently on my shoulder. Alarm bells rang in the back of my head. Why was he being so gentle? “What did Nash want?”

“It’s about your sister.”





CHAPTER 43


I thought you said you’d take care of Drake.” My fingers tightened around my cell phone, and my free hand wound itself into a fist at my side. “For fun.”

I’d called Alisa the moment I’d made it to the car. Grayson had followed and buckled himself into the back seat beside me. I didn’t have the time or mental space to dwell on his presence beside me. Oren was driving. I was pissed.