One, I thought. I know that you’re related to Vincent Blake.
“I tried to get to Toby,” Eve continued intently, “but I couldn’t. Someone brought me back.”
That someone was standing so close to her now.
“Grayson,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
Eve turned to look at him. There was something delicate about the way her hair fell off her shoulder, something almost mesmerizing about the way she lifted her eyes to his.
“Grayson,” I said again, my voice urgent and low.
Jameson didn’t give me the opportunity to say his brother’s name a third time. “Avery found out something that you need to know. Outside, Gray.
Now.”
Grayson walked toward us. Eve came, too. “What did you find out?” she asked.
“What is it you’re hoping I’ll find out—or hoping I won’t?” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but now that I had, I marked her reaction.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Eve snapped, something like hurt flickering over her face.
Was that an act? This whole time—has it all been an act? My gaze landed on the chain around her neck, and I flashed back to the moment she’d stepped out of my bathroom wearing nothing but a towel and a locket.
Why would Eve, who’d insisted she’d spent her whole life with no one, wear a locket?
What was inside?
A small metal disk. Isaiah had said that there were five, that Vincent Blake gave them exclusively to family—and Eve was family.
“Open your locket,” I said sharply. “Show me what’s inside.”
Eve stood very still. I moved, reaching for it—but Grayson caught my hand. He gave me a look like a shard of ice. “What are you doing, Avery?”
“Vincent Blake had a son,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to do this here, in front of Mallory and Mrs. Laughlin, but so be it. “His name was Will. I think he was Toby’s father. And this?” I withdrew the Blake family seal, the one that had been in Toby’s possession when he disappeared. “It was almost certainly Will’s. Blake gave them to family members who held his favor.” I could feel Eve watching me. Her face was blank—so carefully blank. “Isn’t that right, Eve?”
“You have no right,” Mallory Laughlin snapped shrilly, “to come in here and say any of this. Any of it. ” She looked past me to Mrs. Laughlin. “Are you going to just stand there and let her do this?” she demanded, her voice going up an octave. “This is your home!”
“I think it would be best,” Mrs. Laughlin told me stiffly, “if you left.”
I’d spent a year making inroads with her and the rest of the staff. I’d gone from being an outsider and an enemy to being accepted. I didn’t want to lose that, but I couldn’t back down.
“He called himself Liam,” I said quietly, my gaze going to Mallory’s.
“He didn’t tell you who he really was—or why he was here.”
Mrs. Laughlin took a step toward me. “You need to go.”
“Will Blake sought out your daughter,” I said, turning back toward the woman who’d served as a steward of the Hawthorne estate for most of her life. “He would have been in his twenties. She was only sixteen. She snuck him onto the estate—up to Hawthorne House, even.” I didn’t stop. “It was probably his idea.”
A pained expression forced Mrs. Laughlin’s eyes closed. “Stop this,” she begged me. “Please.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, “but I do know that Will Blake hasn’t been seen since. And for some reason, you and your husband let the Hawthornes adopt your grandson and pass him off as their own flesh and blood, even to the baby’s mother.”