The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

A motion-sensor light came on as I stepped onto the patio. In my mind, in the span of a single heartbeat, I saw the pool the way it looked in daytime, with light reflecting off the water, the tiles on the bottom making it look as breathtakingly blue-green as the Mediterranean.

The same shade as the piece of glass I carried in my right hand. I held the beach towel in my left. Clearly, this was going to require getting wet.

At night, the water was darker, shadowy. I heard Grayson swimming before I saw him and felt the exact moment he became aware of my presence.

Grayson Davenport Hawthorne’s hand slapped the edge of the pool. He pulled himself upright. “Avery.” His voice was quiet, but in the still of the night, it carried. “You shouldn’t be here.” With me went unsaid. “You should be asleep.”

Grayson and his oughts and shoulds. Hawthornes aren’t supposed to break. His voice spoke deep in my memory. Especially me.

I shook off the memory as much as I could. “Is there a light out here?” I asked. I didn’t want to have to deal with things going dark every time I stood too still—and I couldn’t bring myself to look at Grayson, look at his light, piercing eyes, the way I had that night.

“There’s a control panel under the portico.”

I managed to find it and turn the pool lights on but ended up accidentally turning a fountain on, too. Water sprayed upward in a magnificent arc as the pool light cycled through colors: pink, purple, blue, green, violet. It felt like watching fireworks. Like magic.

But I hadn’t come down here for magic. One touch turned off the fountain. Another stopped the cycle of colors in the light.

“What are you doing?” Grayson asked me, and I knew that he was asking why I was here, with him.

“Did Jameson tell you about the bag your grandfather left me?” I asked.

Grayson pushed off the wall, treading water as he measured his response. “Jamie doesn’t tell me everything.” The silences in Grayson’s sentences always spoke volumes. “In fairness, there’s quite a bit that I don’t tell him.”

That was the closest he’d ever come to mentioning that night in the wine cellar, the things he’d confessed to me.

I held up the glass circle. “This was one of several items in a bag that your grandfather instructed be delivered to me if Eve and I ever met. There was also—”

“What did you say?” Without warning, Grayson pulled himself out of the water. It was October and cool enough at night that he had to be freezing, but he did a very good impression of someone utterly incapable of feeling cold.

“When I met Eve, it triggered one of your grandfather’s games.”

“The old man knew?” Grayson was standing so still that if the pool light hadn’t been on, he would have disappeared into the darkness. “My grandfather knew about Eve? He knew that Toby had a daughter?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

Every muscle in Grayson’s body had gone tight. “He knew,” he repeated savagely. “And he left her there? He knew, and he didn’t say a damn word to any of us?” Grayson strode toward me—then past me. He braced himself against the portico wall, his palms flat, the muscles in his back so tense that it looked like his shoulder blades might split the skin.

“Grayson?” I didn’t say more than that. I wasn’t sure what else to say.

“I used to tell myself that the old man loved us,” Grayson stated with all the precision of a surgeon slicing through good flesh to get to bad. “That if he held us to impossible standards, it was for the noble purpose of forging his heirs into what we needed to be. And if the great Tobias Hawthorne was harder on me than on my brothers, I told myself that it was because I needed to be more. I believed that he taught me about honor and duty because he was honorable, because he felt the weight of his duty and wanted to prepare me for it.”

Grayson slammed his hand down onto the wall hard enough for the rough surface to tear into his palm.

“But the things he did? The dirty little secrets in those file folders? Knowing about Eve and letting her be raised by people who treated her as less than? Pretending that our family owed Toby’s daughter nothing? There’s nothing honorable about that.” Grayson shook. “Any of it.”

I thought about Grayson never allowing himself to break because he knew the man he’d been raised to be. I thought about Jameson saying that Grayson had always been so perfect. “We don’t know how long your grandfather knew about Eve,” I said. “If it was a recent discovery, if he knew that she looked like Emily, maybe he thought it would be too painful—”

“Maybe he thought I was too weak.” Grayson turned to face me. “That’s what you’re saying, Avery, as hard as you try to make it mean something else.”

I took a step toward him. “Grief doesn’t make you weak, Grayson.”

“Love does.” Grayson’s voice went brutally low. “I was supposed to be the one who was above it all. Emotion. Vulnerability.”

“Why you?” I asked. “Why not Nash? He’s the oldest. Why not Jameson or Xan—”

“Because it was supposed to be me.” Grayson took in a ragged breath. I could practically see him fighting to slam the cage door closed on his emotions once more. “My whole life, Avery, it was supposed to be me. That was why I had to be better, why I had to sacrifice and be honorable and put family first, why I could never lose control—because the old man wasn’t going to be around forever, and I was the one who was supposed to take the reins once he was gone.”

It was supposed to be Grayson. I thought. Not me. A year on, and part of Grayson still couldn’t let go of that, even knowing that the old man had never really intended to leave him the fortune.

“And I understood, Avery—I did—why the old man might have looked at this family, looked at me, and decided that we were unworthy of his legacy.” Grayson’s voice shook. “I understood why he thought I wasn’t good enough—and you were. But if the great Tobias Hawthorne wasn’t honorable? If he never met a line he wouldn’t cross for his own selfish gain? If ‘family first’ was just some bullshit lie he fed to me? Then why?” Grayson brought his eyes to mine. “What’s the point, Avery, of any of this?”

“I don’t know.” My voice sounded just as raw as his. Hesitantly, I raised the glass circle again. “But maybe there’s more to it, a piece of the puzzle that we don’t know.…”

“More games.” Grayson slammed his hand against the wall again. “The old bastard has been dead a year, and he’s still pulling strings.”

My right hand holding the blue-green glass, I dropped the towel with my left and reached for him.

“Don’t,” Grayson breathed. He turned to walk past me. “I told you once before, Avery: I’m broken. I won’t break you, too. Go back to bed. Forget about that piece of glass and whatever else was in that bag. Stop playing the old man’s games.”

“Grayson—”

“Just stop.”

That felt final in a way that nothing else between us ever had. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t go after him. And when the way he’d told me to stop rang in my mind, I thought about Jameson, who never stopped.

About the person I was with Jameson.

I walked over to the water. I took off my pants and my shirt, laid the glass gingerly on the side of the pool, and dove in.