Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (61)

Grayson had to admit: The man wasn’t wrong.

“My father did a number on you boys,” Toby commented, and Grayson thought again about how easy it had been for him to build a wall in his mind around everything he needed Lyra not to know. He sat with the discomfort of that thought until it began to dissipate—and then he changed the subject.

“Did Nash also tell you that Eve is interfering with the game?” Grayson asked.

“He did.” Toby’s brow furrowed then smoothed with the air of a man who’d spent far longer than Grayson had learning to let things come. “I really thought I was getting somewhere with her, but the only version of me that Eve wants is the version that has nothing to do with Avery at all.”

Eve was Toby’s daughter, but Avery was Hannah’s, and that meant that Avery would never be nothing to the man. Toby had been there the night Avery was born. He’d loved Avery long before she’d known that he existed, and Grayson knew that Eve looked at Avery and saw everything that should have been hers. Toby. The Hawthorne fortune. Acceptance as one of them. Incredible, undying love.

“Avery is Eve’s target.” Once Grayson verbalized the obvious, it was like a line of dominoes had been knocked over in his mind. If Eve wanted Lyra to lose, that strongly suggested that she wanted a different player to win. There were limited suspects, and even fewer who could pose a threat to Avery, and Grayson knew for a fact that Eve had everything she needed to manipulate one player in particular.

He would have seen it before—they all would have—if they hadn’t been so focused on Alice, on that threat.

“Savannah.” Grayson wanted to be wrong about that. “My sister. Sheffield Grayson’s daughter,” he clarified for Toby. “She’s the one Eve is trying to use.”

“Damn it, Eve.” Toby’s voice wasn’t angry so much as rough. Out the front of the chopper, Hawthorne Island came into view. Toby turned the copter, taking another wide arc—wider than necessary. “I’d bet a lot of money that Eve led your sister to believe that Avery’s the one who killed your father.”

Grayson could see it all now—not just Eve’s plan but Savannah’s pain, her fury. He took in everything he knew about the Grandest Game and saw immediately where this was heading.

“You’ll read Jameson and Avery in,” Grayson told Toby, knowing that they would be able to infer the situation as well as he had. “And Alisa Ortega.”

“I’ll also find Eve,” Toby replied, “and try to talk some sense into my daughter. In the meantime…” Toby’s voice thickened. “You tell your sister that it was me. You tell her that I’m the one who killed Sheffield Grayson. I pulled the trigger.”

“You didn’t,” Grayson pointed out.

“Neither did Avery,” Toby replied. “And the actual truth would be harder for your sister to swallow. If Savannah needs a Hawthorne target, you damn well make it me.”

They were close enough to the island now to see the house—close enough to see the section of the forest that was still charred after all these years, ravaged by a fire that a teenage Toby had as good as set.

“I gave Avery my permission to host the game here,” Toby said, locking his own eyes on to the island’s scars. “I don’t get to be a victim of my own sins, and this—the Grandest Game, making puzzles, giving people the experience of a lifetime—it means something to Avery. Hannah’s girl. Our girl. And Kaylie, Hannah’s sister who died in the fire—she would have approved.”

There was enough raw emotion in Toby’s voice that Grayson couldn’t help feeling an echo of it himself, and he had to ask: “Do you regret staying away from them for all those years? Avery. Hannah.”

“I had my reasons. And now my Hannah the Same Backward as Forward is gone anyway, and I regret it every day.” Toby went in for the landing. “Maybe if I’d learned to love differently, I could have loved her better.” He looked at Grayson again as the chopper touched down. “I certainly couldn’t have loved her more. I protected Hannah and Avery the only way I knew how.”

“From the old man,” Grayson said, and now his voice was the one that was thick. “From his enemies. From everything it means to be a Hawthorne.”

Toby dropped his hands from the controls, but he didn’t kill the engine “Nash didn’t come right out and say that there was a threat, but he made it clear enough that Eve is not the only reason I’m here.”

Grayson said nothing. Silence was its own kind of answer.

“You won’t tell me the details. That’s fine.” Toby hit a button and powered down the chopper. “All you have to tell me, nephew, is whether or not the threat in question starts with the letter A.”





Chapter 52





ROHAN


There was a game that Rohan liked to play, one that had proven of use to him on more than one occasion, called Who Will Betray You First? Since becoming Factotum, he’d often been the one throwing that question out to the person in his sights, letting them wonder if they had already been betrayed—and by whom.

But long before he’d won his place as the second-in-command at the Mercy, Rohan had been a master at playing Who Will Betray You First? all by himself. This time, there was only one candidate, only one player in this game who could betray him.