Gigi drew in a long breath and looked up at the ceiling that soared overhead, doing everything she could not to blink. Not to cry.
“It’s always Colin.” Gigi kept right on staring at the ceiling. “I remember being three years old and knowing that my dad loved me… and that he especially loved the way I looked.” Gigi swallowed. “Because I looked like Colin. And as long as I was happy and bubbly and just a silly little girl who didn’t try to matter too much, that was a good thing.”
Grayson pulled her in, and the next thing he knew, his sister’s head was resting on his chest, his arms enveloping her.
“Grayson?” Gigi said softly. “You said wanted. Past tense. You said that Dad wanted revenge. But once he wants something… he doesn’t stop. Ever.”
He didn’t stop with the bomb. He had no intentions of stopping until Toby Hawthorne paid—with Avery’s life and with his own.
Gigi angled her head up toward Grayson. “I guess I’m a lot like Dad that way, with the not stopping.”
Grayson wondered if that was Gigi’s way of telling him that she was going to keep asking questions, keep pushing. He wondered if he’d made a mistake telling her as much as he had.
But all he said in reply was “You are nothing like our father.”
There was a long, painful silence. “He’s not coming back, is he, Grayson?”
No answer would have been an answer, so he gave her what he could. “No.”
“He can’t come back, can he?”
No answer was an answer, the only one he could give her this time.
For more than a minute, Gigi didn’t move. Grayson held her, bracing himself for the moment when she would pull back.
Finally, she did. “You’re going to have to give me the puzzle box back,” she told him. “For Savannah. We’re going to have to make sure there’s something in it, something that gives her an answer she can believe. One that doesn’t involve our dad being an evil mastermind of the non-white-collar variety.”
Grayson stared at her. “What are you saying?”
Gigi stepped back. “My whole life, Savannah has tried to protect me. I mean, she knew about you for years, about Dad’s affair, and she did everything she could to make sure I didn’t have to know. And all of this? With Dad? She doesn’t have to know.” Gigi said those words like an oath. “Savannah loves Dad. She was always closer to him than Mom. She pushed herself so hard for him. So we’re going to protect her this time. You and me. Because I remember something else about the Hawthorne heiress plane bombing. People died. Our father killed people, Grayson. And now he’s…” Gigi didn’t say the word dead. “In Tunisia,” she finished, her tone steely. “And that’s where he needs to stay.”
Grayson could feel her pushing down her pain, and the idea of it almost destroyed him. “I can’t ask you…” he started to say.
“You’re not asking me to do anything,” Gigi told him. “I’m telling you how it’s going to be. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m very good at getting what I want. And I want a happy sister and a big brother who keeps a very open mind about any mysterious, nefarious types I might choose to pursue for brief romantic liaisons.”
Grayson narrowed his eyes at her. “Not funny.”
Gigi smiled, and something about the set of her lips felt like pins through his heart.
“I never meant to hurt you,” Grayson told her.
“I know,” Gigi said simply.
She’s not leaving. I haven’t lost her. Grayson didn’t ignore the emotions twisting in his gut and rising up inside him. For once in his life, he just let them come. “I like my little sister,” he told her.
This time, there was nothing pained about Gigi’s smile. “I know.”
CHAPTER 96
GRAYSON
The next morning, after reassembling the box with the fake journal inside and sending it back with Gigi, Grayson found himself picking up the briefcase of photographs from the safe-deposit box. He made his way through the wing where he and his brothers had spent hours upon hours playing as children, up to their childhood library—the loft library. Behind one of the bookshelves, there was a hidden staircase. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a Davenport desk.
Grayson opened it and found two journals inside: Sheffield Grayson’s original and his translation. Grayson opened the suitcase and methodically began to pull out photographs of himself—nineteen years of photographs, starting the day he was born—and place them in the desk.
Faceup this time.
When he came to the photograph he’d paused on before, he turned it over in his hands, and looked at the date on the back. The wrong date. And then he paused.
Grayson searched through the photos, for another one he could precisely date. The year was right. The day was, too.
But the month was wrong.
Grayson grabbed another picture, then another. The month is always wrong.
He hadn’t let himself spend much time thinking about these pictures, about what might have led a father who had made it very clear that he was not wanted to take and keep them. Maybe part of it was a sense of possession. A desire for a son. But these pictures had been in a box with the withdrawal slips that served as a key for decoding the journal. And in that journal, Sheffield Grayson had documented illegal transactions by identifying the countries in which he kept accounts. Just the countries.
There hadn’t been a single account number, no routing numbers, no numbers at all.
It took Grayson three days to piece together all of the account information, using the numbers on the back of the pictures—the wrong months, in chronological order based on the photos they corresponded to. There were seven accounts total, millions of dollars.
All of it untraceable.
When he was sure he had it all, Grayson called Alisa. “Hypothetically, if information about all of Sheffield Grayson’s offshore accounts somehow made its way to the FBI, how likely do you think it is they’d keep looking for the man himself?”
Alisa considered the question. “Hypothetically,” she said, “if the right strings were pulled? Very unlikely.”
Grayson hung up the phone. It was as good as done, another thread tied off, another secret buried—for good, he hoped.
Gigi knows the truth, and I didn’t lose her. She knows, and she didn’t leave.
Later that night, Grayson unpacked the bag he’d taken with him to London and Phoenix. He unpacked the velvet ring box that Nash had entrusted to his keeping. And for the first time since Nash had given him the damn thing, when that question echoed in his mind, Grayson didn’t run from it.
Why not you, Gray? Someday, with someone—why not you?
He thought about the made-up story he’d spun for Gigi about his “girlfriend,” about meeting someone at the damn grocery store buying limes.
He thought about phone calls and riddles, about burying himself in his work, about Nash breaking things off with Alisa, certain that there was something wrong with him.
About the way Nash fit with Libby.
Moving with purpose—the way he always did—Grayson took the black opal ring out of the box and turned it over in his hand. He stared at it, at the flecks of color in the jewel, at the diamond leaves that surrounded it, and he swallowed.
“Why not me?”
CHAPTER 97
JAMESON
It was Jameson’s idea to rebuild the tree house. Every now and then, as they worked, he dropped tantalizing bits of information about the father he’d met, the castle he’d won, the duchess he’d saved—not in that order.
He didn’t tell his brothers about the Devil’s Mercy, but he did tell them about the Game—not about the prizes at stake or the powerful figures behind it, but about the riddles, the cliffs, the stone garden, the chandelier, the bell tower.
The silver ballerina.
It took his brothers the better part of a day to figure out the final answer, though Jameson knew they would have been much quicker if they’d seen the silent silver music box themselves.