The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

Oren left Grayson and me alone in the chapel.

“I owe you an apology.”

I met Grayson Hawthorne’s eyes, as light and piercing as they’d been the first time I saw him. “You don’t owe me anything,” I said—not out of compassion but because it hurt to let myself think about how much I’d expected from him.

“Yes. I do.” After a long moment, Grayson looked away. “I,” he said, like that one word cost him everything, “have been punishing myself for so long. Not just for Emily’s death—for every weakness, every miscalculation, every—” He cut off, like his windpipe had closed suddenly around the words. I watched as he forced a jagged breath into his lungs. “No matter what I was or what I did—it was never enough. The old man was always there, pushing for better, for more.”

I’d thought once that he had bulletproof confidence. That he was arrogant and incapable of second-guessing himself and utterly sure of his own power.

“And then,” Grayson said, “the old man was gone. And then… there was you.”

“Grayson.” His name caught in my throat.

Grayson just looked at me, his light eyes shadowed. “Sometimes, you have an idea of a person—about who they are, about what you’d be like together. But sometimes that’s all it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved the idea of Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.”

That was a confession and self-condemnation and a curse. “That’s not true, Grayson.”

He looked at me like the act of doing so was painful and sweet. “It was never just the idea of you, Avery.”

I tried not to feel like the ground was suddenly moving underneath my feet. “You hated the idea of me.”

“But not you.” The words were just as sweet, just as painful. “Never you.”

Something gave inside me. “Grayson.”

“I know,” he said roughly.

I shook my head. “You’re still so convinced that you know everything.”

“I know that Jamie loves you.” Grayson looked at me the way you look at art in a glass case, like he wanted to reach out to touch me but couldn’t. “And I’ve seen the way that you look at him, the way the two of you are together. You’re in love with my brother, Avery.” He paused. “Tell me you’re not.”

I couldn’t do that. He knew I couldn’t. “I am in love with your brother,” I said, because it was true. Jameson was part of me now—part of who I’d spent the past year becoming. I’d changed. If I hadn’t, maybe things could have been different, but there was no going back.

I was who I was because of Jameson. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told him that I didn’t want him to be anyone else.

So why was this so hard?

“I wanted Eve to be different,” Grayson told me. “I wanted her to be you.”

“Don’t say that,” I whispered.

He looked at me one last time. “There are so many things that I will never say.”

He was getting ready to walk away, and I had to let him—but I couldn’t. “Promise me you won’t leave again,” I told Grayson. “You can go back to Harvard. You can go wherever you want, do whatever you want—just promise me that you won’t shut us out again.” I lifted my hand to my Hawthorne pin. I knew he had one of his own. I knew that, but I took mine off and pinned it on him anyway. “Est unus ex nobis. You said that to Jameson once, do you remember? She is one of us. Well, it goes both ways, Gray.”

Grayson closed his eyes, and I was hit with the feeling that I would never forget the way he looked standing there in the light from the stained-glass windows. Without his armor. Without pretense. Raw.

“Scio,” Grayson told me. I know.

I looked down at the USB in his hand.

“I have the other one,” I told him. “It was the one object in the leather satchel that we never used, remember?”

Grayson’s eyes opened. He stepped out of the light. “Are you going to call my brothers?” he asked me. “Or shall I?”