The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(84)

As he stalked away into the night, I called after him. “Where are you going?”

“Congratulations, Heiress,” Jameson called back, his voice dripping with everything but felicitations. “I guess you had the good fortune of being born on the right day. Mystery solved.”





CHAPTER 78


There had to be more to the puzzle than this. There had to be. I couldn’t just be a random person born on the right calendar date. That can’t be it. What about my mother? What about her secret—a secret she’d mentioned on my fifteenth birthday, a full year before Emily had died? And what about the letter Tobias Hawthorne had left me?

I’m sorry.

What had Tobias Hawthorne had to apologize for? He didn’t just randomly select a person with the right birthday. There has to be more to it than that.

But I could still hear Nash telling me: You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.

“I’m sorry.” Grayson spoke again beside me. “It’s not Jameson’s fault that he’s like this. It’s not Jameson’s fault…” The invincible Grayson Hawthorne seemed to be having trouble talking. “… that this is how the game ends.”

I was still wearing my clothes from the gala. My hair was still in Emily’s braid.

“I should have known.” Grayson’s voice was swollen with emotion. “I did know. The day that the will was read, I knew that all of this was because of me.”

I thought of the way Grayson had shown up at my hotel room that night. He’d been angry, determined to figure out what I had done.

“What are you talking about?” I searched his face and eyes for answers. “How is this because of you? And don’t tell me you killed Emily.”

No one—not even Thea—had called Emily’s death a murder.

“I did,” Grayson insisted, his voice low and vibrating with intensity. “If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been there. She wouldn’t have jumped.”

Jumped. My throat went dry. “Been where?” I asked quietly. “And what does any of this have to do with your grandfather’s will?”

Grayson shuddered. “Maybe I was meant to tell you,” he said after a long while. “Maybe that was always the point. Maybe you were always meant to be equal parts puzzle… and penance.” He bowed his head.

I’m not your penance, Grayson Hawthorne. I didn’t get the chance to say that out loud before he was talking again—and once he started, it would have taken an act of God to stop him.

“We’d always known her. Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin have been at Hawthorne House for decades. Their daughter and granddaughters used to live in California. The girls came to visit twice a year—once with their parents at Christmastime, and again in the summer, for three weeks, alone. We didn’t see much of them at Christmas, but in the summers, we all played together. It was a bit like summer camp, really. You have camp friends, who you see once a year, who have no place in your ordinary life. That was Emily—and Rebecca. They were so different from the four of us. Skye said it was because they were girls, but I always thought it was because there were only two of them, and Emily came first. She was a force of nature, and their parents were always so worried she’d overexert herself. She was allowed to play cards with us, and other quiet, indoor games—but she wasn’t allowed to roam outside the way we did, or to run.

“She’d get us to bring her things. It became a bit of a tradition. Emily would set us on a hunt, and whoever found what she’d requested—the more unusual and hard to find, the better—won.”

“What did you win?” I asked.

Grayson shrugged. “We’re brothers. We didn’t have to win anything in particular—just win.”

That tracked. “And then Emily got a heart transplant,” I said. Jameson had told me that much. He’d said that afterward, she wanted to live.

“Her parents were still protective, but Emily had lived in glass cages long enough. She and Jameson were thirteen. I was fourteen. She’d breeze in for the summers, the consummate daredevil. Rebecca was always after us to be careful, but Emily insisted that her doctors had said that her activity level was only limited by her physical stamina. If she could do it, there was no reason she shouldn’t. The family moved here permanently when Emily was sixteen. She and Rebecca didn’t live on the estate, the way they had during visits, but my grandfather paid for them to attend private school.”

I saw where this was going. “She wasn’t just a summer camp friend anymore.”

“She was everything,” Grayson said—and he didn’t exactly say it like it was a compliment. “Emily had the entire school eating out of the palm of her hand. Maybe that was our fault.”

Even just being Hawthorne-adjacent changed the way that people looked at you. Thea’s statement came back to me.

“Or maybe,” Grayson continued, “it was just because she was Em. Too smart, too beautiful, too good at getting what she wanted. She had no fear.”

“She wanted you,” I said. “And Jameson, and she didn’t want to choose.”

“She turned it into a game.” Grayson shook his head. “And God help us, we played. I want to say that it was because we loved her—that it was because of her, but I don’t even know how much of that was true. There’s nothing more Hawthorne than winning.”