The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

Xander plugged the first USB into his computer, dragged the audio file onto the desktop, then removed the USB and exchanged it for the USB from the tomb. He dragged the second file to his desktop, too.

“Play the first one,” Jameson instructed.

Xander did. Garbled, undecipherable speech filled the air, a blast of white noise.

“And the second?” Nash prompted. For as long as I’d known him, he’d resisted dancing to the old man’s tune. But he was here. He was doing this.

The lone file on the second USB was also an audio clip. It was just as messed up as the first.

“What happens if you play them together?” I asked. Grayson had said that to make sense of one file, you needed a decoder. In isolation, the clips were nothing but noise. But if you had both USBs, both files…

Xander opened an audio editing app and dumped the files in. He lined them up, then hit a sequence of buttons that caused them to play.

Combined, the result wasn’t garbled. “Hello, Avery,” a man’s voice said, and I felt the change in the air around me, in all of them. “We’re strangers, you and I. I imagine that’s something you’ve thought about quite a bit.”

Tobias Hawthorne. The one and only time I’d met him, I was six years old. But he was omnipresent in this place. Hawthorne House bore his mark. Every room. Every detail.

The boys bore it, too.

“All great lives should have at least one grand mystery, Avery. I won’t apologize for being yours.” Tobias Hawthorne was a man who didn’t apologize for much. “If you’ve spent late nights and early mornings asking yourself Why me? Well, my dear, you are not the only one. What is the human condition, if not Why me?”

I could feel the shift in each of the Hawthorne brothers as they listened to Tobias Hawthorne’s words and the cadence of his speech.

“As a young man, I believed myself destined for greatness. I fought for it, I thought my way to the top, I cheated, I lied, I made the world bend to my will.” There was a pause, and then: “I got lucky. I can admit that now. I’m dying, and not slowly, either. Why me? Why is this body giving out? Why am I the one sitting in a palace of my own making when there are others out there with minds like mine? I got lucky. Right place, right time, right ideas, right mind.” He let out an audible breath. “If only that were it.

“If you are playing this message, then things have become as dire as I projected. Eve is there, and certain events have led you to finding the tomb that once housed this family’s greatest secret. How much, I wonder, have you put together for yourself, Avery?”

Every time he said my name, I felt like he was here in this room. Like he could see me. Like he had been watching me from the moment I’d stepped through Hawthorne House’s grand front door.

“But then,” he continued, an odd sort of smile in his voice, “you’re not alone, are you? Hello, boys.”

I felt Jameson shift, his arm brushing mine.

“If you boys are indeed there with Avery, then at least one thing has worked out as I intended. You know quite well that she is not your enemy. Perhaps, if I have chosen as well as I think I have, she has reached a place inside of you that I never could. Dare I even say made you whole?”

“Turn it off,” Nash said, but none of us listened. I wasn’t even sure he meant it.

“I hope you enjoyed the game I left you. Whether your mother and aunt have found and played theirs, I cannot say. The odds I’ve calculated suggest it could go either way, which is why, Xander, I left you with the charge I did. I trust that you have looked for Toby. And Avery, I believe in my heart of hearts that Toby has found you.”

Each word the dead man said made this entire situation feel that much eerier. How much of what had happened since he’d died had he foreseen? Not just foreseen, but planned, moving us all around like pawns?

“If you are listening to this, then there is a high likelihood that Vincent Blake has revealed himself as a clear and present threat. I’d hoped to outlive the bastard. For years, he and I have had an armistice of sorts. He considered himself magnanimous at first, to let me go. Later, once he began to resent my growing fortune, my power, my status—well, those things kept him in check.

“I kept him in check.”

There was another pause, and it felt sharper somehow this time, honed.

“But now I am gone, and if Blake knows what I suspect you now know, God help you all. If Eve is there, if Blake knows or even suspects what I have kept from him all these years, then he is coming. For the fortune. For my legacy. For you, Avery Kylie Grambs. And for that, I do apologize.”

I thought of the letter that Tobias Hawthorne had left me. The only explanation I’d been given, back at the start. I’m sorry.

“But better you than them.” Tobias Hawthorne paused. “Yes, Avery. I really am that much of a bastard. I really did paint a target on your forehead. Even without the truth surfacing, I saw the probabilities for what they were. Once I was no longer there to hold him at bay, Blake was always going to make his move. Hunting season, he might call it—playing the game, destroying all opponents, taking what was mine. And that, my dear, is why it is now yours.”

I’d known that I was a tool. I’d known he’d chosen me for what he could use me to do. But I hadn’t realized, hadn’t ever even suspected, that Tobias Hawthorne had named me his heir because I was disposable.

“I met your mother, you know.” The billionaire didn’t stop. He never stopped. “Once when I believed her to be merely a waitress and once after I had deduced that she was Hannah Rooney, my only son’s great love. I thought to use her to get to Toby. I tried my hand at working her—cajoling, threatening, bribing, manipulating. And do you know what your mother told me, Avery? She told me that she knew who Vincent Blake was, knew what had happened to his son, knew where Toby had hidden the Blake family seal, and that if I came near her—or you—again, she would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.”

I tried to picture my mom threatening a man like Tobias Hawthorne.

“Did you know about the seal?” Tobias asked, his tone almost conversational. “Did you know this family’s darkest secret? I think not, but I am a man who has made an empire by always, always questioning my own assumptions. I excel at nothing if not contingencies. So here we are, Avery Kylie Grambs. The little girl with the funny little name. A skeleton key for so many little locks.

“I had six weeks from my diagnosis until now. Another two, I wager, until my deathbed. Enough time to put the final pieces in place. Enough time to draw up one last game with so very many layers. Why you, Avery? To draw the boys in one last time? To bequeath to them a mystery befitting Hawthornes, the puzzle of a lifetime? To bring them back together through you? Yes.” He said the word yes like a man who relished saying it. “To pull Toby out of the shadows? To do in death what I was unable to do in life and force him back onto the board? Yes.”

The sound of my own body was suddenly overwhelming. The beating of my heart. Each breath I somehow managed to draw. The rush of blood in my ears.

“And,” Tobias Hawthorne continued with an air of finality, “to my great shame, to pull Blake’s attention and focus—and the attention and focus of all of my enemies, of whom there are doubtlessly many—to you.”

Yes. He didn’t say it this time, but I thought it, and then I thought about Nan telling me that I was the one playing the piano now—and men like Vincent Blake, they’d break every single one of my fingers if they could.

“Call it misdirection,” the dead billionaire said. “I needed someone to draw fire, and who better than Hannah Rooney’s daughter, on the off chance that she had told you my secret? You’d hardly have motive to reveal it once the money was yours.”

Traps upon traps. And riddles upon riddles. The words that Jameson had spoken to me long ago came back to me—followed by something Xander had said. Even if you thought that you’d manipulated our grandfather into this, I guarantee that he’d be the one manipulating you.

“But take as your consolation this, my very risky gamble: I have watched you. I have come to know you. As you draw fire away from those that I hold most dear, know that I believe there is at least a sliver of a chance that you will survive the hits you take. You may be tested by the flames, but you need not burn.

“If you are listening to this, Blake is coming.” Tobias Hawthorne’s tone was intense now. “He will box you in. He will hold you down. He will have no mercy. But he will also underestimate you. You’re young. You’re female. You’re nobody—use that. My greatest adversary—and yours now—is an honor-bound man. Best him, and he’ll honor the win.”

Something in Tobias Hawthorne’s tone made those words sound not just like advice but also like good-bye.

“My boys.” Hawthorne sounded like he was smiling again, a crooked smile like Jameson’s, a hard one like Grayson’s. “If you are indeed listening to this, judge me as harshly as you like. I’ve made my deals with so very many devils. Find me wanting. Hate me if you must. Let your anger light a fire that the world will never extinguish.

“Nash. Grayson. Jameson. Xander.” He said their names one at a time. “You were the clay, and I was the sculptor, and it has been the joy and honor of my life to make you better men than I will ever be. Men who may curse my name but will never forget it.”

My hand found its way to Jameson’s, and he held on to me for dear life.

“On your marks, boys,” Tobias Hawthorne said on the recording. “Get set. Go.”