The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3)(85)

“So don’t make me do this without you,” I responded.

Fixing her gaze on me with almost frightening precision, Alisa gave a slight nod of her head. Oren cleared his throat.

I turned to face him. “Is this the part where you start talking about duct tape?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Is this the part where you threaten my job?”

On the day that Tobias Hawthorne’s will had been read, I’d tried to tell Oren I didn’t need security. He’d calmly replied that I would need security for the rest of my life. It had never been a question of whether he would protect me.

“This isn’t just a job to you,” I told Oren, because I felt like I owed him that much. “It never has been.”

He’d told me months ago that he owed Tobias Hawthorne his life. The old man had given Oren a purpose, dragged him out of a very dark place. His last request to my head of security had been that Oren protect me.

“I thought he’d done something noble,” Oren said quietly, “asking me to take care of you.”

Oren was my constant shadow. He’d heard Tobias Hawthorne’s message. He knew what my purpose was—and that had to have shed new light on his.

“Your boss asked you to run my security. Taking care of me…” My voice hitched. “That was all you.”

Oren gave me the briefest of smiles, then he allowed himself to fall back into bodyguard mode. “What’s the plan, boss?”

I retrieved the Blake family seal from my pocket. “This.” I let it fall into my palm and closed my fingers around it. “We’re going to Blake’s ranch. I’m going to use this to get past the gates. And I’m going in alone.”

“I have a professional obligation to tell you that I don’t like this plan.”

I gave Oren a sympathetic look. “Would you like it more if I told you that I’ll be doing a press conference right outside his gates so that the whole world knows I’m inside?”

Vincent Blake couldn’t touch me with the paparazzi watching.

“You going to put a stop to this, Oren?” Nash ambled toward us, clearly having overheard our exchange. “Because if you don’t, I will.”

As if drawn by the chaos, Xander chose that moment to pop in, too.

“This doesn’t concern you,” I told Nash.

“Nice try, kid.” Nash’s tone never advertised the fact that he was pulling rank, but no matter how casual the delivery, it was always one hundred percent clear when that was what he was doing. “This ain’t happening.”

Nash didn’t care that I was eighteen, that I owned the House, that I wasn’t actually his sister, or that I would put up one hell of a fight if he tried to stop me.

“You can’t protect the four of us forever,” I told him.

“I can damn well try. You don’t want to test me on this one, darlin’.”

I glanced at Jameson, who was well-acquainted with the pitfalls of testing Nash. Jameson met my gaze, then glanced at Xander.

“Flying leopard?” Jameson murmured.

“Hidden mongoose!” Xander replied, and an instant later, they were crashing into Nash in a truly impressive synchronized flying tackle.

In a one-on-one fight, Nash could take either one of them. But it was hard to get the upper hand when you had one brother on your torso and another pinning your legs and feet.

“We should go,” I told Oren. Nash was cursing up a storm behind us. Xander began serenading him with a brotherly limerick.

“Oren!” Nash hollered.

My head of security didn’t so much as hint at any amusement he might have felt. “Sorry, Nash. I know better than to get in the middle of a Hawthorne brawl.”

“Alisa—” Nash started to say, but I interjected.

“I want you with me,” I told my lawyer. “You’ll wait with Oren, right outside.”

Nash must have smelled defeat because he stopped trying to dislodge Xander from his feet. “Kid?” he called. “You sure as hell better play dirty.”





CHAPTER 77


Vincent Blake’s ranch was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive north, stretching for miles along the Texas/Oklahoma border. Taking the helicopter cut our travel time down to forty-five minutes, plus transit on the ground. Landon had done her part, so the press arrived shortly after I did.

“Earlier today,” I told them in a speech that I had rehearsed, “the remains of a man that we believe to be William Blake were found on the grounds of the Hawthorne estate.”

I stuck to my script. Landon had timed the leak about the body perfectly—the story she’d planted was already up, but it was the footage of what I was saying now that would define it. I sold the story: Will Blake had physically assaulted an underage female, and Tobias Hawthorne had intervened to protect her. Law enforcement was investigating, but based on what we’d been able to piece together ourselves, we expected the autopsy to reveal that Blake had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

Tobias Hawthorne had dealt those blows.

That last bit might not have been true, but it was sensational. It was a story. And I was here now to pay my respects to the deceased’s family, on behalf of myself and the remaining Hawthornes.

I didn’t take questions. Instead, I turned and walked toward the boundary of Vincent Blake’s property. I knew from my research that Legacy Ranch was more than a quarter of a million acres—nearly four hundred square miles.