The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

Rebecca and Thea led me to a doughnut shop, then waited outside. I found Xander sitting at a table by himself, stacking doughnuts one on top of the other. By my count, there were five.

“Behold!” Xander declared. “The Leaning Tower of Bavarian Cream-a!”

“Where are the other seven doughnuts?” I asked him, taking his cue and not pushing this too much too soon.

Xander shook his head. “I have so many regrets.”

“You literally just picked up another doughnut,” I pointed out.

“I couldn’t possibly regret this doughnut,” Xander stated emphatically.

I softened my voice. “You just found out that the Hawthorne family faked a paternity test to keep your father, who wanted you, out of your life. It’s okay to be angry or devastated or…”

“I don’t super excel at anger, and devastation is really more for people who slow down long enough to let their brains focus on the sadness. My expertise falls more squarely in the Venn diagram overlap between unbridled enthusiasm and infinite—”

“Xander.” I reached across the table and laid my hand on top of his. For a moment, he just sat there, looking down at our hands.

“You know I love you, Avery, but I don’t want to talk to you about this.” Xander removed his hand from underneath mine. “I don’t want to have to explain to you what I don’t want to explain to you. I just want to finish this doughnut and eat his four best doughnut-y friends and congratulate myself for probably not vomiting.”

I didn’t say another word. I just sat there with him until Oren appeared in my peripheral vision. He inclined his head to the right. Xander and I had been spotted—by a local, I was guessing, but when it came to the Hawthorne family and the Hawthorne heiress nothing stayed local for long.

We went back to Isaiah’s garage. “Do you want us to wait outside?” I asked Xander.

“No. I just want you to give me that little metal disk,” Xander replied. “I’m assuming you have it on you?”

I did, and I handed it to him because right now, I would have done anything Xander wanted.

He pushed open the door and walked slowly back to the car Isaiah was working on. “I need to ask you two things. First, what are your thoughts on Rube Goldberg machines?”

“Never made one.” Isaiah met Xander’s gaze. “But I tend to think they should have catapults.”

Xander nodded, like that was an acceptable answer. “Second, have you ever seen something like this before?” He held the disk out to Isaiah, the two of them towering over everyone else present.

Isaiah took the disk from Xander. “Where the hell did you kids get this?”

“You do know what it is,” Xander said, his eyes lighting up. “Some kind of artifact?”

“Artifact?” Isaiah shook his head, handing the disk back to Xander, who handed it to me. “No. That is Mr. Blake’s calling card. He always called it the family seal.”

I thought about the wax seal on the envelope of the last message, bearing the same symbol.

“I think he had, what, five of those coins?” Isaiah continued. “If you had one of the seals, it meant you had Blake’s blessing to play in his empire as you wished—until you displeased him. If that happened, you were stripped of the seal and the status and power that came with it. It’s how Blake kept his family on a very short string. Every person with a drop of his blood or his dead wife’s fought tooth and nail to have one of the seals.”

I considered the implications. “Only family?”

“Only family,” Isaiah confirmed. “Nephews, great-nephews, cousins once removed.”

“What about Blake’s son?” I asked. Nan had mentioned a son.

“I heard there was a son,” Isaiah replied. “But he took off years before I came into the picture.”

The prodigal son, I thought suddenly, and adrenaline rushed into my veins.

“What do you mean when you say Vincent Blake’s son took off?” I asked Isaiah.

“I meant what I said.” Isaiah fixed me with a look. “The son took off at some point and didn’t come back. It’s part of what made the seals so valuable. There was no direct heir to the family fortune. Rumor had it, when Blake dies, anyone holding one of those—” Isaiah nodded toward the disk. “Gets a stake.”

Isaiah had said that there were five seals. That meant the disk I was holding in my hand was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars. I thought of Toby and the instructions he’d left my mother about going to Jackson if she needed anything. You know what I left there, he’d written. You know what it’s worth.

“More than twenty years ago, Toby Hawthorne stole this from his father.” I stared at the seal, at the layers of concentric rings. “But why did Tobias Hawthorne have one of the Blake family seals? There’s no way Blake was planning to leave one-fifth of his fortune to a billionaire who betrayed him.”

Isaiah gave a shrug, but there was something hard about it, like he refused to give Tobias Hawthorne or Vincent Blake any space in his mind. “I’ve told you what I know,” he said. “And I should be getting back to work.” His gaze went to Xander. “Unless…”

For a moment, I heard the same uncertainty in his tone that I’d heard in Xander’s when I asked him about his father’s file.

“I do want to talk,” Xander said, rushing the words. “I do, I mean, if you do.”

“Okay, then,” Isaiah said.

The rest of us were almost out the door when Rebecca stopped and turned around. “What was the name of Vincent Blake’s son?” she asked, an odd tone in her voice.

“It’s been a long time,” Isaiah said, but then he glanced back at Xander and sighed. “Just let me think for a minute.… Will.” Isaiah snapped his fingers. “The son’s name was Will Blake.”

Will Blake. For a split second, I wasn’t standing there in Isaiah’s shop. I was in Toby’s wing of Hawthorne House, reading a poem inscribed on metal.

William Blake. “A Poison Tree.”