The Brothers Hawthorne (The Inheritance Games, #4)(86)

This is it. Jameson felt that all the way to his bones. He felt it in the part of him that had been forged in Tobias Hawthorne’s fire. This is the key that opens the box that will win me the Game.

He righted the stone.

“Good.” A crisp voice said, the speaker’s posh accent pronounced. “You’ve found the final key. Hand it over, then.”

Jameson stood and looked to Katharine, who cast a long shadow on the stones beneath her feet, that white suit just as pristine as it had been down on the beach.

“Why the hell would we do that?” Avery beat him to the question.

“Because,” another voice called out behind them, “I want you to.”

Jameson turned, his grip on the key tightening, and watched as his father stepped through the wrought-iron gate.

Ian Johnstone-Jameson met Jameson’s eyes and smiled. “Well done, my boy.”





CHAPTER 70





GRAYSON


I can open this box. I just have to get it back to my hotel room.

Beside Grayson, Gigi pounced. “What is it? You have something face.”

Grayson liked to think he was a bit harder to read than that. “Pardon?” He fell back on formal speech, one extra layer safeguarding everything he thought or felt.

“What do you mean, pardon? I saw that light bulb go off, mister. The gears in your mind are turning. The hamster is officially on the wheel!” From her spot beside him on the threadbare twin bed, Gigi rose to her knees, putting her hands on either side of the puzzle box and leaning forward. “Six hamsters!” she amended dramatically. “Six wheels! They’re all spinning.”

Time to do damage control. “I think we need to go back over the box,” Grayson told Gigi. “Look for something that fits this opening.”

Savannah snorted. “It took six hamsters to come up with that?”

No. Grayson let the thought roll over him but kept all hint of it off his face. We won’t find what we need by examining the box. I already have it.

He could picture Sheffield Grayson retrieving the safe-deposit box key from inside his computer, removing the faux USB drive from the picture frame, driving to the bank, withdrawing money, adding the slip to the box, and driving out here.

Clearly, their father had had a system. A routine.

“Stop.” A shrill voice hit Grayson’s ears like fingernails on a chalkboard. “Put the box down!” Kimberly Wright hovered in the doorway, her entire body wound tight. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Grayson knew somehow that she was talking to him—and just to him.

“In my son’s room,” she continued, her voice high-pitched but rough. “Sitting on his bed.”

This isn’t about the bed. Or the room. Grayson wasn’t certain what this was about—or what had changed. He stood but made no move to hand over the box.

Gigi’s forehead wrinkled. “Aunt Kim, we—”

“I wasn’t good enough to be your aunt. Your father took my boy. My Colin. And once he was dead and gone, I wasn’t even allowed to meet you girls. Shep didn’t want me anywhere near you.” Kim’s eyes closed tight, and when she opened them again, they found Grayson’s, like darts thrown with an unsteady hand that hit their target nonetheless. “Do you two know who he is?” Her tone turned accusatory. “I saw those other boys outside. Cinnamon got away from me, and the taller one went after her. Introduced himself.”

Xander, Grayson thought. Alexander Blackwood Hawthorne had never met a stranger or baked good he didn’t want to immediately introduce himself to.

“They’re Hawthornes.” Kim spit out the name, then whirled on Grayson. “You’re a Hawthorne,” she said, the way a person might have said the words you’re a murderer. “My brother, sometimes he’d bring bourbon with him when he came here. And the second it hit his lips, he’d start talking—about Hawthornes.”

Grayson assessed his options for shutting this conversation down. Fast. “We should go,” he told Gigi and Savannah.

Kim scowled. “Shep—he always said that Toby Hawthorne was the reason Colin was dead, that Toby set the fire that killed my baby. Arson. And Toby’s father, that billionaire bastard—he covered it up.”

To Grayson’s surprise, Gigi stepped in front of him, shielding him from their aunt. “Even if that’s true,” she said, “it’s not Grayson’s fault.”

Gigi wasn’t tall enough to block Kim’s desperate, angry stare.

“My brother hated you,” the woman told Grayson. “All you Hawthornes. But he said—he said he was going to make sure you’d all get yours. My brother was going to—”

That was not a sentence that Grayson could allow her to finish. “Going to what?” There was no threat in Grayson’s tone, just a warning: Think carefully before you answer. I am not a person you want to cross.

Kim clamped her mouth closed. Unlike her nieces, she wasn’t immune to Grayson’s ability to command a room and every person in it. “Get out,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “And leave the box.”

“We can’t do that.” Savannah came to stand in front of Grayson, right next to her twin, and for a split second, his heart clenched.