The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3)(71)

Money attracted money. Power attracted power. And I was done waiting for the next clue.

It took some time, but I found someone who had Vincent Blake’s cell phone number and was willing to give it to me, no questions asked. My heart beat with the force of punch after punch in my chest as I dialed the number.

When Blake answered, I didn’t bother with pretense. “I know about Eve. I know about your son.”

“Do you?”

Questions and riddles and games. No more. “What do you want?” I asked. I wondered if he could hear my anger—and every ounce of emotion buried underneath.

I wondered if that made him think he was winning.

“What do I want, Avery Kylie Grambs?” Vincent Blake sounded amused. “Guess.”

“I’m done guessing.”

Silence greeted me on the other end of the line—but he was still there. He didn’t hang up. And I wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence first.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Blake said at long last. “I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son. And I want you, Avery Kylie Grambs, to dig up the past and bring me his body.”





CHAPTER 65


Vincent Blake believed his son was dead. He believed the body was here. I thought about the Blake family seal, the fact that Toby had stolen it, his father’s reaction when he had.

You know what I left there, Toby had written my mother long ago. You know what it’s worth. A teenage Toby had stolen the seal—and left a hidden copy of “A Poison Tree” by William Blake for his father to find.

“He wanted you to know that he knew the truth.” It felt right somehow to be addressing Tobias Hawthorne. This was his legacy.

All of it.

“What did you do,” I whispered, “when you found Vincent Blake’s son on your property?”

When he’d realized that a man had come at him through a sixteen-year-old girl. That girl might have fancied herself in love, but Tobias Hawthorne wouldn’t have seen it that way. Will Blake was in his twenties. Mallory was only sixteen.

And unlike Vincent Blake, Tobias Hawthorne didn’t believe that boys would be boys.

What happened to him? I could hear Eve asking. Your Liam. And all Mallory Laughlin had said was Liam left.

Why did he leave?

He just did.

I started walking and ended up in Toby’s old wing, reading the lines of “A Poison Tree” and the diary that Toby had kept in invisible ink on his walls. I understood young Toby’s anger now, in a way I hadn’t before. He knew something.

About his father.

About the reason the adoption was kept secret.

About Will Blake and the decision to hide a dangerous man’s only grandchild in plain sight. I thought about Toby’s poem, the one we’d decoded months ago.


Secrets, lies,

All I despise.

The tree is poison,

Don’t you see?

It poisoned S and Z and me.

The evidence I stole

Is in the darkest hole.

Light shall reveal all

I writ upon the…



“Wall,” I finished now, the way I had then. But this time my brain was seeing all of it through a new lens. If Toby had known what the seal was when he stole it, that meant he knew who Will Blake was, who Vincent Blake was. And if Toby knew that…

What else had he known?

The evidence I stole

Is in the darkest hole.

When I’d recited this poem for Eve, she’d asked me, Evidence of what? She’d been looking for answers, for proof. For a body, I thought. Or more realistically at this point, for bones. But Eve hadn’t found any of it yet. If she had, Blake wouldn’t have laid this task before me.

I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son.

Hawthorne House was full of dark places: hidden compartments, secret passages, buried tunnels. Maybe all Toby had ever found was the seal. Or maybe he found human remains. That thought was insidious because some part of me had suspected, deep down, that that was what we were looking for, before Vincent Blake had ever told me as much.

His son had come here. He’d targeted a child under Tobias Hawthorne’s protection. In his home.

Where would a man like Tobias Hawthorne hide a body?

Oren had disposed of Sheffield Grayson’s body—how, I wasn’t sure. But Vincent Blake’s son had disappeared long before Oren had come to work for the old man. Back then, the Hawthorne fortune was new and considerably smaller. Tobias Hawthorne probably hadn’t even had security.

Back then, Hawthorne House was just another mansion.

Tobias Hawthorne added onto it every year. That thought wound its way through my mind; my heart pumped it through my veins.

And suddenly, I knew where to start.





I pulled out the blueprints that Mr. Laughlin had given me. Each one detailed an addition that Tobias Hawthorne had made to Hawthorne House over the decades since it was built. The garage. The spa. The movie theater. The bowling alley. I unrolled sheet after sheet, plan after plan. The rock-climbing wall. The tennis court. I found plans for a gazebo, an outdoor kitchen, a greenhouse, and so much more.

Think, I told myself. There were layers of purpose in everything Tobias Hawthorne had ever done—everything he’d built. I thought about the compartment at the bottom of the swimming pool, about the secret passages in the House, the tunnels beneath the estate, all of it.