“Going to kill Grayson Hawthorne?” Alisa said evenly. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
Just hearing her voice—and the absolute normality of her tone—sent a shock wave of relief through me. It was like I’d been carrying extra weight and pressure in every cell in my body, and suddenly, all that tension was gone.
And then I processed what Alisa had said.
“Grayson?” I repeated, my heart seizing in my chest.
“He’s the reason Blake let me go. A trade.”
I should have known when he hadn’t come with us to find the body. Grayson Hawthorne and his grand gestures. Frustration, fear, and something almost painfully tender threatened to bring tears to my eyes.
“Your brother’s playing sacrificial lamb,” I told Jameson, trying to let that first emotion mute the rest. Xander heard my terse statement, too, and Nash appeared behind them.
“Alisa?” he said.
“She’s fine,” I reported. And this time, we’ll take care of her. “Oren, can you have someone bring her in?”
Oren gave a curt nod, but the expression in his eyes betrayed how glad he was that she was okay. “Give me the phone, and I’ll coordinate a pickup.”
I passed the phone to him.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Jameson told me. “Blake still has the upper hand.”
He had Grayson. There was a terrifying symmetry to that. Tobias Hawthorne had stolen Vincent Blake’s grandson—and now he had Tobias Hawthorne’s.
He has Toby. He has Grayson. And I have his son’s remains. All I had to do was give Vincent Blake what he wanted, and this would be over.
Or at least, that was what Blake wanted me to believe.
But Tobias Hawthorne’s final message hadn’t just cautioned me that Blake would be coming for the truth, for proof. No, Tobias Hawthorne had told me that Blake would be coming for me, that he would box me in, hold me down, have no mercy. Tobias Hawthorne had been expecting a full-on assault on his empire. Assuming he’d projected correctly, Vincent Blake wasn’t just after the truth.
He is coming. For the fortune. For my legacy. For you, Avery Kylie Grambs.
But Tobias Hawthorne—manipulative, Machiavellian man that he was—had also thought that I had a sliver of a chance. I just had to outplay Blake.
Take as your consolation this, my very risky gamble: I have watched you. I have come to know you. The words pumped through my body like blood, my heart beating out a brutal, uncompromising rhythm. Tobias Hawthorne had believed that Blake would underestimate me.
On the phone, he’d called me little girl.
What did that mean? That he expects me to react, not act. That he thinks I’ll never look ahead.
I forced myself to stop, to slow down, to think. All around me, the others were fighting loudly about next moves. But I shut out the sound of Jameson’s voice, of Nash’s and Xander’s, Oren’s, everyone’s. And eventually, I circled back to the Queen’s Gambit. I thought about how it required ceding control of the board. It required a loss.
And it worked best when your opponent thought it was a rookie error, rather than strategy.
A plan took shape in my mind. It ossified. And I made a call.
CHAPTER 75
What did you just do?” Jameson looked at me the way he had the night he’d told me that I was their grandfather’s last puzzle, like after all this time, there were still things about me, about what I was capable of, that could surprise him.
Like he wanted to know them all.
“I called the authorities and reported that human remains had been found at Hawthorne House.” That much had probably been obvious if they’d overheard me. What Jameson was really asking me was why.
“Far be it from me to state the obvious,” Thea cut in, “but wasn’t the point of digging that up to make a trade?”
I could feel Jameson reading me, feel his brain sorting through the possibilities in mine.
“I have another call to make,” I said.
“To Blake?” Rebecca asked.
“No,” Jameson answered for me.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I told all of them.
“You’re playing him.” Jameson didn’t phrase that as a question.
“Blake said to bring him the body, and it will be returned to him. Eventually. And when it is, I won’t have broken any laws.”
It was easier thinking of this like chess. Trying to see my opponent’s moves coming before he made them. Baiting the moves I wanted, blocking attacks before they happened.
Xander’s eyes widened. “You think that if you’d taken him the remains, he would have held the illegality of that move over you?”
“I can’t afford to hand him any more leverage.”
“Because, of course, this is all about you.” Thea’s voice was dangerously pleasant—never a good sign.
“Thea,” Rebecca said quietly. “Let it go.”
“No. This is your family, Bex. And no matter how hard you try, no matter how angry you manage to get—that’s always going to matter to you.” Thea lifted a hand to the side of Rebecca’s face. “I saw you back there with your mom.”
Rebecca looked like she wanted to get lost in Thea’s eyes, but she didn’t let herself. “I always thought there was something wrong with me,” she said, her voice breaking. “Emily was my mom’s world, and I was a shadow, and I thought it was me.”
“But now you know,” Thea said softly, “it was never you.”
Mallory’s trauma was Rebecca’s trauma—probably was Emily’s, too.
“I am done living in the shadows, Thea,” Rebecca said. She turned to me. “Bring on the light. Tell the world the truth. Do it.”
That wasn’t my plan—not exactly. There was one move that would let me protect the people who needed protecting. One sequence, if I could execute it.
If Blake didn’t see it coming.
Reporting the body was just step one. Step two was controlling the narrative.
“Avery.” Landon answered my call on the third ring. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but our working relationship came to an end quite some time ago.”
I’d had other publicists and media consultants since, but for what I was planning, I needed the best. “I need to talk to you about a dead body and the story of the century.”
Silence—enough of it that I wondered if she’d hung up on me. Then Landon offered up two words, her British accent crisp. “I’m listening.”
I threw Tobias Hawthorne under the bus. Thoroughly and without mercy. Dead men didn’t get to be picky about their reputations, and that went double for dead men who’d used me the way he had.
Tobias Hawthorne had killed a man forty years ago—and covered it up. That was the story I was telling, and it was one hell of a story.
“Where are you going?” Jameson called after me once I’d hung up with Landon.
“The vault,” I replied. “There’s something I need before I go to confront Vincent Blake.”
Jameson ran to catch up with me. He made it past me, then turned back just as I took a step that put his body far too close to mine.
“And what do you need out of the vault?” Jameson asked.
“If I tell you,” I said, “are you going to try to lock me up again?”
Jameson lifted a hand to the side of my neck. “Is it risky?”