The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

There was no point in cross-examining the person who delivered the package. We knew who it was from. We knew what he wanted.

“Everything okay?” Libby asked me when Oren’s man appeared in the foyer with the package. I shook my head. Whatever this is—it’s definitely not okay.

Oren completed his initial security screen, then handed both the contents and the packaging over to me: one gift box large enough to hold a sweater; inside it, thirteen letter-sized envelopes; inside each envelope, a clear, thin, rectangular sheet of plastic with an abstract black-and-white design inked onto it. Looking at any one sheet in isolation was like doing one of those inkblot tests.

“Stack them,” Jameson suggested. I wasn’t sure when he’d come into the room, but he wasn’t alone. All four of the Hawthorne brothers circled around me. Libby hung back, but only slightly.

I laid sheet on top of sheet, the designs combining to form a single picture—but it wasn’t that easy. Of course it wasn’t. There were four ways that each sheet could go—up or down, front or back.

I felt the sheets with my fingertips, locating the side on which the ink had been printed. Moving with lightning speed, I began matching the sheets in the lower left corner, using the patterns to guide me.

One, two, three, four—no, that one’s the wrong way. I kept going, one sheet on top of another on top of another, until a picture emerged. A black-and-white photograph.

And in that photograph, Alisa Ortega lay on a dirt floor, her head lolled to one side, her eyes closed.

“She’s alive,” Jameson said beside me. “Unconscious. But she doesn’t look…”

Dead, I finished for him. What, besides Toby, do I have that you want? I could hear Vincent Blake saying. I am so very glad you asked.

“Lee-Lee.” Nash didn’t sound calm, not this time.

I swallowed. “Is there any chance she’s in on it?” I asked, hating myself for even giving life to the question, for letting Blake get to me that much.

“None,” Nash said, biting out the word with almost inhuman ferocity.

I looked to Jameson and Grayson. “Your grandfather said don’t trust anyone, not just don’t trust her. He at least considered it possible that Blake would be able to get to someone else in my inner circle.” I looked back down at Alisa’s seemingly unconscious body. “And right now, Alisa and her firm have a lot to lose if I don’t agree to a trust.”

The power behind the fortune. The ability to move mountains and make men.

“You can trust Alisa,” Nash said roughly. “She’s loyal to the old man, always has been.” Libby came closer and laid a hand on his back, and he turned his head to look at her. “This ain’t what you think, Lib. I don’t have feelings for her, but just because things don’t work out with a person doesn’t mean they stop mattering.”

“No one ever stops mattering,” Libby said, like the words were a revelation, “to you.”

“Nash is right. There’s no way Alisa is in on it,” Jameson said. “Vincent Blake took her, just like he took Toby.”

Because she works for me.

“The bastard can’t do this,” Grayson swore with a powerful intensity I hadn’t seen from him in months. “We’ll destroy him.”

You can’t. That was why Tobias Hawthorne had disinherited them, why he’d drawn Blake’s focus to me—and the people I cared about. Oren had assigned a bodyguard to Max. He’d brought Thea and Rebecca here. He’d shut down avenue after avenue of using other people to get to me—but Alisa hadn’t been on lockdown.

She’d been out there playing games of her own.

With shaking hands, I called her number. Again. And again. She didn’t pick up. “Alisa always picks up,” I said out loud. I forced my eyes to Oren’s. “Now can we call the police?”

Toby was a dead man. You couldn’t report a dead man missing. But Alisa was very much alive, and we had the picture as proof of foul play.

“Blake will have someone—maybe multiple someones—high up in all the local police departments.”

“And I don’t?” I said.

“You did,” Oren told me, past tense, and I remembered what he’d said about the rash of recent transfers.

“What about the FBI?” I asked. “I don’t care if the case is federal or not—Tobias Hawthorne had people, and they’re my people now. Right?”

No one replied, because whoever Tobias Hawthorne may or may not have had in his pocket, there was no one in mine. Not without Alisa there to pull the strings.

Check. I could practically see the board, see the moving pieces, see the way that Vincent Blake was boxing me in.

“Lee-Lee wouldn’t want us to go to the authorities.” Nash seemed to have trouble finding his voice. It came out in a slow, deep rumble. “The optics.”

“You don’t care about optics,” I told him.

Nash took off his cowboy hat, his eyes shadowed. “I care about a lot of things, kid.”

“What do we have to do,” Libby asked fiercely, “to get Alisa back?”

I was the one who answered the question. “Find a body—or what’s left of one after forty years.”

Nash’s eyes narrowed. “This had better be one hell of an explanation.”