The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(63)

“I don’t have heirs,” I said. “I don’t even have a will.”

“You don’t need a will to have heirs.” Alisa glanced at Oren. “Has her sister been cleared?”

“Libby?” I was incredulous. Had they met my sister?

“The sister’s clear,” Oren told Alisa. “She was with Nash during the shooting.”

He might as well have detonated a bomb for how well that went over.

Eventually, Alisa gathered her composure and turned back to me. “You won’t legally be able to sign a will until you turn eighteen. Ditto for the paperwork regarding the foundation conservatorship. And that is the other oversight here. Originally, I was focused only on the will, but if you are unable or unwilling to fulfill your role as conservator, the conservatorship passes.” She paused heavily. “To the boys.”

If I died, the foundation—all the money, all the power, all that potential—went to Tobias Hawthorne’s grandsons. A hundred million dollars a year to give away. You could buy a lot of favors for money like that.

“Who knows about the terms of the foundation’s conservatorship?” Oren asked, deadly serious.

“Zara and Constantine, certainly,” Alisa said immediately.

“Grayson,” I added hoarsely, my wounds throbbing. I knew him well enough to know that he would have demanded to see the conservatorship papers himself. He wouldn’t hurt me. I wanted to believe that. All he does is warn me away.

“How soon can you have documents drawn up leaving control of the foundation to Avery’s sister in the event of her death?” Oren demanded. If this was about control of the foundation, that would protect me—or else it would put Libby in danger, too.

“Is anyone going to ask me what I want to do?” I asked.

“I can have the documents drawn up tomorrow,” Alisa told Oren, ignoring me. “But Avery can’t legally sign them until she’s eighteen, and even then, it’s unclear if she’s authorized to make that kind of decision prior to assuming full control of the foundation at the age of twenty-one. Until then…”

I had a target on my forehead.

“What would it take to evoke the protection clause in the will?” Oren changed tactics. “There are circumstances under which Avery could remove the Hawthornes as tenants, correct?”

“We’d need evidence,” Alisa replied. “Something that ties a specific individual or individuals to acts of harassment, intimidation, or violence, and even then, Avery can only kick out the perpetrator—not the whole family.”

“And she can’t live somewhere else for the time being?”

“No.”

Oren didn’t like that, but he didn’t waste time on unnecessary commentary. “You’ll go nowhere without me,” Oren told me, steel in his voice. “Not on the estate, not in the House. Nowhere, you understand? I was always close by. Now I get to play visible deterrent.”

Beside me, Alisa narrowed her eyes at Oren. “What do you know that I don’t?”

There was a single moment’s pause, then my bodyguard answered the question. “I had my people check the armory. Nothing is missing. In all likelihood, the weapon fired at Avery wasn’t a Hawthorne gun, but I had my men pull the security footage from the past few days anyway.”

I was too busy trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Hawthorne House had an armory to process the rest.

“The armory had a visitor?” Alisa asked, her voice almost too calm.

“Two of them.” Oren seemed like he might stop there, for my benefit, but he pressed on. “Jameson and Grayson. Both have alibis—but both were looking at rifles.”

“Hawthorne House has an armory?” That was all I could manage to say.

“This is Texas,” Oren replied. “The whole family grew up shooting, and Mr. Hawthorne was a collector.”

“A gun collector,” I clarified. I hadn’t been a fan of firearms before I’d almost been shot.

“If you’d read the binder I left you detailing your assets,” Alisa interjected, “you’d know that Mr. Hawthorne had the world’s largest collection of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Winchester rifles, several of which are valued at upward of four hundred thousand dollars.”

The idea that anyone would pay that much for a rifle was mind-boggling, but I barely batted an eye at the price tag, because I was too busy thinking that there was a reason Jameson and Grayson had both made visits to the armory to look at rifles—one that had nothing to do with shooting me.

Jameson’s middle name was Winchester.





CHAPTER 57


Even though it was the dead of night, I made Oren take me to the armory. Following him through twisting hallway after hallway, all I could think was that someone could hide forever in this house.

And that wasn’t counting the secret passages.

Eventually, Oren came to a stop in a long corridor. “This is it.” He stood in front of an ornate gold mirror. As I watched, he ran his hand along the side of the frame. I heard a click, and then the mirror swung out into the hallway, like a door. Behind it, there was steel.

Oren stepped up, and I saw a line of red go down over his face. “Facial recognition,” he informed me. “It’s really only meant as a backup security measure. The best way to keep intruders from breaking into a safe is to make sure they don’t even know it’s there.”