The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

The moment I finished explaining, Nash strode off ominously. Libby went with him. Strategizing our next move, I asked Xander where Rebecca and Thea were.

“The cottage.” Xander was rarely this solemn. “Bex was ignoring her mom’s calls, but then her grandma called, after Eve…”

After Eve got the truth out of Mallory, I finished silently. Forcing my mind to focus on that truth and what it meant for us now, I led the boys to my room and showed them the blueprints.

“These are in chronological order,” I said. “I used that chronology to find the construction project erected in the wake of Toby’s conception: the chapel. The altar was made of stone and hollow inside.” I swallowed. “A tomb—but no body hidden in it, just the USB, which your grandfather must have hidden there shortly before his death, and a message scratched into the stone by Toby way back when.”

“Not that you need another nickname,” Xander commented, “but I’m liking Sherlock. What did the message say?”

I looked past Xander to Jameson and… Grayson wasn’t there. I wasn’t sure when we’d lost him. I didn’t let myself wonder why.

“I know what you did, Father.” I answered Xander’s question. “I’m taking that to mean that at some point after Toby found out he was adopted and before he ran away at nineteen…”

“He found out about Liam,” Jameson finished.

I thought about all the messages Toby had left his father: “A Poison Tree,” hidden under a floor tile; a poem of his own making, coded into a book of law; the words inside the altar.

The now-empty altar.

“Toby found the body.” Saying it out loud made it seem real. “It was probably just bones by then. He stole the seal, moved the remains, left a series of hidden messages for the old man, and went on a self-destructive tear across the country that ended in the fire on Hawthorne Island.”

I thought about Toby, about his collision course with my mother and the ways their love might have been different if Toby hadn’t been broken by the horrific secrets he carried.

The real Hawthorne legacy.

I saw now why Toby was determined to stay away from Hawthorne House. I could understand why he’d wanted to protect my mother—his Hannah, the same backward as forward—and later, once she was dead and I’d already been pulled into this mess, why he had needed to at least try to protect Eve from everything that came along with the Hawthorne fortune.

From the truth and the poisonous tree. From Blake.

“The evidence I stole,” I said out loud, staring down at the blueprints, “is in the darkest hole.…”

“The tunnels?” Jameson was behind me—right behind me. I felt his suggestion as much as heard it.

“That’s one possibility,” I said, and then I pulled four sets of blueprints. “The others are these—the additions made to Hawthorne House during the time span in which Toby must have discovered and moved the remains. He could have taken advantage of the construction somehow.”

Toby had been sixteen when he’d discovered that he was adopted, nineteen when he’d left Hawthorne House forever. I pictured crews breaking ground on each of those additions. The evidence I stole is in the darkest hole.…

“This one,” Jameson said urgently, kneeling over the plans. “Heiress, look.”

I saw what he saw. “The hedge maze.”

Jameson and I made our way to the maze. Xander went for reinforcements. “Start at the outside and work our way in?” Jameson asked me. “Or go to the center of the maze and spiral out?”

It felt right somehow that it was just the two of us. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne and me.

The hedges were eight feet tall, and the maze covered an area nearly as large as the House. It would take days for us to search it all. Maybe weeks. Maybe longer. Wherever Toby had hidden the body, his father either hadn’t found it or had chosen not to risk moving it again.

I pictured men planting these hedges.

I pictured nineteen-year-old Toby, in the dead of night, somehow finding a way to bury the bones of the man responsible for half his DNA.

“Start at the center,” I told Jameson, my voice echoing in the space all around us, “and spiral out.”

I knew the path that would take us to the heart of the maze. I’d been there before, more than once—with Grayson.

“I don’t suppose you know where he went, do you, Heiress?” Jameson had a way of making every question sound a little wicked and a little sharp—but I knew, I knew what he was really asking.

What he was always trying not to ask himself when it came to Grayson and me.

“I don’t know where Grayson is,” I told Jameson, and then I hung a left, and the muscles in my throat tightened. “But I do know that he’s going to be okay. He confronted Eve. I think he finally let go of Emily, finally forgave himself for being human.”

Right turn. Left turn. Left again. Straight. We were almost to the center now.

“And now that Gray is okay,” Jameson said close behind me, “now that he’s so delightfully human and ready to move on from Emily…”

I hit the center of the maze and turned around to face Jameson. “Don’t finish that question.”

I knew what he was going to ask. I knew he wasn’t wrong to ask. But still, it stung. And the only way that he was ever going to stop asking—himself, me, Grayson—was if I gave him the full, unvarnished truth.

The truth I hadn’t let myself think too often or too clearly.

“You were right before when you called my bluff,” I told Jameson. “I can’t say that it was always going to be you.”

He walked past me toward the hidden compartment in the ground where the Hawthornes kept their longswords. I heard him opening the compartment, heard him searching.

Because Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was always searching for something. He couldn’t stop. He would never stop.

And I didn’t want to, either. “I can’t say that it was always going to be you, Jameson, because I don’t believe in destiny or fate—I believe in choice.” I knelt next to him and let my fingers explore the compartment. “You chose me, Jameson, and I chose to open up to you, to all of the possibilities of us, in a way that I had never opened up to anyone before.”

Max had told me once to picture myself standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. I felt like I was standing there now, because love wasn’t just a choice—it was dozens, hundreds, thousands of choices.

Every day was a choice.

I moved on from the compartment that held the swords, running my hands over the ground at the center of the maze, looking, searching still. “Letting you in,” I told Jameson, the two of us crouched feet apart, “becoming us—it changed me. You taught me to want.”

How to want things.

How to want him.

“You made me hungry,” I told Jameson, “for everything. I want the world now.” I held his gaze in a way that dared him to look away. “And I want it with you.”

Jameson made his way to me—just as my fingers hit something, buried in the grass, wedged into the soil.

Something small and round and metal. Not the Blake family seal. Just a coin. But the size, the shape…

Jameson brought his hands to my face. His thumb lightly skimmed my lips. And I said the two words guaranteed to take that spark in his eyes and set it on fire.

“Dig here.”