A quote. I ran my fingers over the inscription and read it out loud. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
That sounded biblical. It was too early to call Max, so I typed the quote into the phone and it gave me a Bible verse: 2 Corinthians 4:18.
I thought about Blake using a different Bible verse as a combination on a lock. How many of his games had a young Tobias Hawthorne played?
“Fix our eyes not on what is seen,” I said out loud, “but on what is unseen.” I stared at the altar. What is unseen?
Kneeling in front of the altar, I ran my fingers along it: up and down, left and right, top to bottom. I made my way around to the back, where I found a slight gap between the marble and the floor. I bent to look, but I couldn’t see anything, so I slid my fingers into the gap.
Almost immediately, I felt a series of raised circles. My first instinct was to push one, but I didn’t want to be rash, so I kept exploring until I had a full count. There were three rows of raised circles, with six in each row.
Eighteen, total. 2 Corinthians 4:18, I thought. Did that mean that I needed to press four of the eighteen raised circles? And if so, which four?
Frustrated, I stood. With Tobias Hawthorne, nothing was ever easy. I walked around the altar again, taking in its size. The billionaire had wanted to build a mausoleum, but he hadn’t. He’d built this chapel, and I couldn’t help but notice that if this giant slab of marble was hollow, there would be room for a body inside.
I can do this. I stared at the verse inscribed on what I suspected was Will Blake’s tomb. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen,” I read out loud again, “but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Unseen.
What did it mean to fix your eyes on something that was unseen? I had no way of looking at the raised circles. I couldn’t see them. I’d had to feel them. With my fingers, I thought, and suddenly, just like that, I knew what this inscription meant—not in a biblical sense, but to Tobias Hawthorne.
I knew exactly how I was supposed to see what was unseen.
I took out my phone, and I looked up how numbers were written in Braille. Four. One. Eight.
Crouching back down behind the altar, I slid my fingers under the marble and pressed only the raised circles indicated. Four. One. Eight.
I heard a creak, and my eyes darted to the top of the altar. A slab of marble had separated from the rest. Unlocked.
I moved the candelabra, the Bible, and the cross to the floor. The slab that had released was maybe two inches thick and too heavy for me to move myself.
I looked to Oren, who was standing guard as always. “I need your help,” I told him.
He stared at me, long and hard, then cursed under his breath and came to help me. We slid the marble slab, and it didn’t take much movement to realize that my instincts had been right. The inside of the altar had been hollowed out. There was a space big enough for a body.
But there were no remains. Instead, I found a shroud, the kind that might have once draped a skeleton or a corpse. By the time the chapel and this altar were finished, would there have been anything left but bones? I didn’t smell death. Stretching to reach in and move the shroud, I saw that the marble inside this makeshift crypt had been defaced with familiar handwriting.
Toby’s.
I wondered how long it had taken him to angrily carve six words into the marble. I wondered if this was where he’d found the Blake family seal. I wondered what else he’d found here.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, FATHER.
Those were the words he’d left behind—the words that Tobias Hawthorne would have found, once Toby ran away, if he’d checked to see if this secret remained.
And then I saw one last thing in what must have once been Will Blake’s tomb.
A USB drive.
CHAPTER 67
I locked my hand around the USB. As I pulled it out, my mind raced. The drive definitely hadn’t been sitting in a tomb for twenty years. It looked new.
“You know, Avery, I want to be surprised that you got here first, but I’m not.” Eve. I whipped my head up to see her standing in the chapel doorway beneath a stone arch. “Some people just have that magic touch,” she continued softly. She walked toward me, toward the altar. “What did you find in there?”
She sounded hesitant, vulnerable, but the second Oren stepped into her path, the matching expression on her face flickered like a light bulb a second before it burns out.
“There was supposed to be human remains in there,” Eve said calmly. Too calmly. “But there weren’t, were there?” She cocked her head to the side, her hair falling in gentle amber waves as her gaze landed on the USB in my hand. “I’m going to need you to give me that.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked. I didn’t notice her hands moving until it was too late.
She’s got a gun. Eve held her weapon the way that Nash had taught me to hold mine. Her gun is pointed straight at me. That thought shouldn’t have computed, but I had a knife in my boot. I’d spent all that time training. So when my body should have been panicking, an unnatural calm settled over me instead.
Oren drew his sidearm. “Put the weapon down,” he ordered.
It was like Eve didn’t even hear him, like the only person in this room she could see or hear was me.
“Where did you even get a gun?” I was stalling for time, assessing the situation. “There’s no way you made it onto the estate with one that first morning.” Even as I said the words, I thought about Eve bolting the moment she’d “discovered” Vincent Blake’s name.
“Put the gun down!” Oren repeated. “I guarantee you that I can get a shot off before you can, and I don’t miss.”
Eve took a step forward, utterly, beautifully unafraid. “Are you really going to let your bodyguard shoot me, Avery?”
This was a different Eve. Gone were the layers of self-protection, the vulnerability, the raw emotion—all of it.
“You helped Blake abduct Toby, didn’t you?” I said, certainty washing over me like a wave of heat.
“I wouldn’t have had to,” Eve replied, her tone smooth and hard, “if Toby had opened up. If he’d just agreed to bring me here. But he wouldn’t.”
“This is the last time that I’m going to tell you to put the gun down!” Oren boomed.
“I’m still Toby’s daughter,” Eve said, adopting a familiar, wide-eyed expression, her gun unwavering. “And honestly, Avery, how do you think Gray will feel if Oren shoots me? What do you think will happen if that beautiful, broken boy walks in here to find me bleeding out on the floor?”
At her mention of Grayson, I instinctively looked for him, but he wasn’t there. My body shaking with pent-up rage, I turned to Oren. “Put the gun down,” I told him.
My head of security stepped directly in front of me. “She puts hers down first.”
A haughty expression on her face, Eve lowered her weapon. Oren was on her in an instant, taking her to the ground, pinning her down.