The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3)(92)

Slowly, the expression in her deep brown eyes shifted. She knew that I was telling her to believe that I’d been chosen for a reason. That this was the reason.

This was our play.

“Do you have any idea how risky this is?” Alisa asked me.

“It always has been,” I replied, “from the moment Tobias Hawthorne changed his will.”

This was his very risky gamble—and mine.





CHAPTER 83


Blake let me play white, which meant that the first move was mine. I went with the Queen’s Gambit. It wasn’t until a dozen moves later that Vincent Blake realized my instincts went beyond classic maneuvers. Four moves after that, he took my bishop, allowing me to execute a sequence that ended with me taking his queen.

Slowly, move by move and counterattack by counterattack, Vincent Blake realized that we were much more evenly matched than he’d anticipated.

“I see now,” he told me, “what you’re doing.”

He saw what I had done. The young woman he was playing against now wasn’t the one who’d lost to Eve. I’d hustled him, and he knew it—far too late.

In four moves, I thought, my heartbeat brutal and incessant in my chest, I’ll have him.

After two, he realized I had him trapped. He stood, tipping his king, conceding the match. White gold clattered as the piece hit the jewel-encrusted board, the black-diamond king glittering in the sun.

Vincent Blake was a dangerous man, a wealthy man, a formidable opponent—and he had underestimated me.

“You can keep the chess set,” I told him.

For a moment, I felt Blake fighting with himself. The lawyers had been there to ensure my end of the bargain—not his. I promise I won’t slowly and strategically destroy you wasn’t a legally enforceable term. I’d bet everything on the only real assurance Tobias Hawthorne had given me.

That if I bested Blake, he’d honor the win.

“What just happened here?” Eve demanded.

Vincent Blake offered me one last hard look, and then he rocked back on his heels. “She won.”





CHAPTER 84


Vincent Blake would honor our wager, but he never wanted to see me on his property again. “Escort Avery, Grayson, and Ms. Ortega back to the gate,” he ordered his men. “See that the press is dispersed before they get there.”

A hand locked around my forearm, suggesting exactly what kind of “escort” I could expect. But the next thing I knew, the man who’d grabbed me was on the ground, and Toby was standing over him. “I’ll escort them,” he said.

Blake’s men looked to their boss.

Vincent Blake gave Toby a foreboding smile. “As you wish, Tobias Blake.”

The name was a razor-sharp reminder: I might have won my wager, but Toby had lost his. With a hand on my back, he led me away, back around the house.

We’d nearly made it to the driveway when a voice spoke behind us. “Stop.”

I wanted to ignore Eve, but I couldn’t. Slowly, I turned to face her, aware that Grayson was exercising ironclad control over any impulse he might have felt to do the same.

“You let me win,” Eve said. That was an accusation, furious and low. Her gaze slipped to Toby’s. “Did you throw our game, too?” she asked him, her voice shaking. When Toby didn’t reply, Eve turned back to me. “Did he?” she demanded.

“Does it matter?” I asked. “You got what you wanted.”

Eve had won all five seals. She was now the sole heir to Blake’s empire.

“I wanted,” Eve whispered, her voice quiet but brutally fierce, “for once in my life, to prove to someone that I was good enough.” Her eyes betrayed her, going to Grayson, but he didn’t turn around. “I wanted Blake to see me,” Eve continued, her gaze coming back to mine, “but now the only thing he is ever going to see when he looks at me is you.”

I’d used Eve to best Blake, and she was right—he would never forget that.

“I saw you, Eve.” Grayson’s voice was emotionless, his body still. “You could have been one of us.”

Eve’s expression wavered, and for the barest moment, I was reminded of the little girl in the locket. Then the person in front of me straightened, a haughty look settling over her features like a porcelain mask. “The girl you knew,” she told Grayson, “was a lie.”

If she thought that would get a rise out of Grayson Davenport Hawthorne, she was wrong.

“Get them out of here.” Eve whipped her head toward Toby. “Now.”

“Eve—” Toby started to say.

“I said go.” A spark of victory, hard and cruel, glinted in her emerald eyes. “You’ll be back.”

That felt like an arrow aimed at my heart. Toby doesn’t have a choice.

Without flinching, he escorted me away from his daughter and didn’t speak until he, Alisa, Grayson, and I had made it to the truck.

“What you did back there with Blake was very risky,” Toby told me—half censure, half praise.

I shrugged. “You’re the one who chose my name.” Avery Kylie Grambs. A very risky gamble. Toby had helped bring me into the world. He’d named me. He’d come to me when my mother died. He’d saved me when I needed saving.