The last time I’d been to the Hawthorne vault, I’d jokingly asked Oren if it contained the crown jewels, and his very serious response had been To what country?
“If what you’re looking for isn’t here,” Oren told Jameson and me as we surveyed the steel drawers lining the walls, “some pieces are kept in an even more secure location off-site.”
Jameson and I got to work gingerly opening drawer after drawer. I managed not to gawk at anything until I came to a scepter made of shining gold interwoven with another lighter metal. White gold? Platinum? I had no idea, but it wasn’t the materials that caught my eye. It was the design of the scepter. The metalwork was impossibly intricate. The effect was delicate, but dangerous. Beauty and power.
“Long live the Queen,” Jameson murmured.
“The Queen’s Gambit,” I said, my mind racing. Maybe we weren’t looking for a chess set.
But before I could follow that thought any further, Jameson opened another drawer and spoke again. “Heiress.” There was something different in his tone this time.
I looked at the drawer he’d opened. So this is what ten thousand diamonds looks like. Each chess piece was magnificent; the board looked like a jewel-encrusted table. According to the binder, forty master artisans had spent more than five thousand hours bringing this chess set to life—and it looked it.
“You want to do the honors, Heiress?”
This was my game. A familiar, electric feeling coming over me, I examined each piece, starting with the white pawns and working my way up to the king. Then I did the same thing with the black pieces, glittering with black diamonds.
The bottom of the black queen had a seam. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have seen it. “I need a magnifying glass,” I told Jameson.
“How about a jeweler’s loupe?” he countered. “There has to be one around here somewhere.”
Eventually, he found one: a small lens with no handle, just a cylindrical rim. Using the loupe to look at the bottom of the black queen told me that what I’d seen as a seam was actually a gap, like someone had cut a paper-thin line into the bottom of the piece. And peeking through that gap, I saw something.
“Were there any other jeweler’s tools with the loupe?” I asked Jameson.
Even the smallest file he brought me couldn’t fully fit into the gap, but I managed to wedge the tip through—and it caught on something.
“Tweezers?” Jameson offered, his shoulder brushing mine.
File. Tweezers. Loupe.
File. Tweezers. Loupe.
Sweat was pouring down my temples by the time I finally managed to lock the tweezers onto the edge of something. A strip of black paper.
“I don’t want to tear it,” I told Jameson.
His green eyes met mine. “You won’t.”
Slowly, painstakingly, I pulled the strip out. It was no bigger than a fortune tucked inside a fortune cookie. Golden ink marked the page—with handwriting I recognized all too well.
The only message Tobias Hawthorne had ever left me before was that he was sorry. Now, to that, I could add two more words.
I turned to Jameson and read them out loud: “Don’t breathe.”
CHAPTER 29
A person stopped breathing when they were awestruck or terrified. When they were hiding and any sound could give them away. When the world around them was on fire, the air thick with smoke.
Jameson and I scoured every single smoke detector in Hawthorne House.
“You’re smiling,” I told him, disgruntled when the last one turned up nothing.
“I like a challenge.” Jameson gave me a look that reminded me that I’d been a challenge for him. “And maybe I’m feeling nostalgic for Saturday mornings. Say what you will about my childhood, but it was never boring.”
I thought back to the balcony. “You didn’t mind being set against your brothers?” I asked. Against Grayson? “Being forced to compete?”
“Saturday mornings were different,” Jameson said. “The puzzles, the thrill, the old man’s attention. We lived for those games. Maybe not Nash, but Xander and Grayson and me. Hell, Gray even let loose sometimes because the games didn’t reward perfection. He and I used to team up against Nash, at least until the end. Everything else our grandfather did—everything he gave us, everything expected of us—was about molding the next generation of Hawthornes to be something extraordinary. But Saturday mornings, those games—they were about showing us that we already were.”
Extraordinary, I thought. And a part of something. That was the siren call of Tobias Hawthorne’s games.
“Do you think that’s why your grandfather left me this game?” I asked.
The billionaire had set my game to start if and only if I met Eve. Had he known that I would start questioning his almighty judgment in choosing me the moment she showed up? Had he wanted to show me what I was capable of?
That I was extraordinary?
“I think,” Jameson murmured, relishing the words, “that my grandfather left three games when he died, Heiress. And the first two both told us something about why he chose you.”
Don’t breathe. We didn’t solve the clue that night. The next day was Monday. Oren cleared me to go to school so long as he stuck to my side. I could have called out sick and stayed home, but I didn’t. My game had proven an effective distraction, but Toby was still in danger, and nothing could keep my mind off that for long.
I went to school because I wanted the paparazzi—that my opponent had so kindly set on me like dogs—to take a picture of me with my head held high.
I wanted the person who had taken Toby to realize that I wasn’t down.
I wanted him to make his next damn move.
I spent my free mods in the Archive—prep school for library. I was almost done with the calculus homework I’d ignored over the long weekend when Rebecca came in. Oren allowed her past.
“You told Thea.” Rebecca stalked toward me.
“Is that such a bad thing?” I asked—from a safe distance.
“She is relentless,” Rebecca muttered.
Proving the point, Thea appeared in the doorway behind her. “I was under the impression that you liked relentless.” Only Thea could make that sound flirty in these circumstances.
Rebecca grudgingly met her girlfriend’s eyes. “I kind of do.”
“Then you’re going to love this part,” Thea told her. “Because it’s the part where you stop fighting this, stop fighting me, stop running away from this conversation, and let go.”
“I’m fine, Thea.”
“You’re not,” Thea told her achingly. “And you don’t have to be, Bex. It’s not your job to be fine anymore.”
Rebecca’s breath hitched.
I knew when my presence wasn’t necessary. “I’m going to go,” I said, and neither one of them even seemed to hear me. In the hallway, I was informed by an office aid that the headmaster’s office was looking for me.
The headmaster’s office? I thought. Not the headmaster?