“Nash. Grayson. Jameson. Xander.” He said their names one at a time.
“You were the clay, and I was the sculptor, and it has been the joy and honor of my life to make you better men than I will ever be. Men who may curse my name but will never forget it.”
My hand found its way to Jameson’s, and he held on to me for dear life.
“On your marks, boys,” Tobias Hawthorne said on the recording. “Get set. Go. ”
CHAPTER 70
Silence had never sounded this loud. I’d never seen the Hawthorne brothers so still—all of them, like they’d been stung with a paralyzing venom. As big an impact as hearing the truth from Tobias Hawthorne’s mouth had on me, he wasn’t the formative influence of my life.
I forced myself to speak because they couldn’t. “You always did say that the old man liked to kill ten birds with one stone.”
Jameson brought his eyes up from the ground to me, then let out a rough, pained chuckle. “Twelve.”
Twelve birds, one stone. I’d been warned. From the moment I’d received a ring holding a hundred keys—from before that, even—I’d been warned by each of the Hawthorne brothers in turn.
Traps upon traps. And riddles upon riddles.
Even if you thought that you’d manipulated our grandfather into this, I guarantee that he’d be the one manipulating you.
This family—we destroy everything we touch.
You’re not a player, kid. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.
And then there was the message that Tobias Hawthorne had left me himself, back at the very beginning. I’m sorry.
“We did exactly what he thought we would.” Xander snapped out of it and began to move—wild gestures, weight on the balls of his feet. “All of us. From the beginning.”
“That sonofabitch.” Nash let out a long whistle, then leaned back against the wall. “How dangerous do we think Vincent Blake is?” The question sounded casual and calm, but I could imagine Nash strolling up to a rabid bull with that exact expression on his face.
“Dangerous enough to require a decoy.” Grayson’s calm was a different sort than Nash’s—icy and controlled. “We’re dealing with a family whose fortune, though significantly smaller, goes back a lot further than ours.
There’s no telling what people or institutions Blake has in his pocket.”
“The old man took the four of us off the board.” Jameson swore. “He raised us to fight but never intended this fight for us.”
I thought about Skye saying that her father had never considered her a player in the grand game, then about a letter that Tobias Hawthorne had left his daughters. There was a part where he’d said that not one of them would see his fortune. There are things I have done that I am not proud of, legacies that you should not have to bear.
The truth had been there, right in front of us, for months. Tobias Hawthorne had left me his fortune so that if and when his enemies descended after his death, they would descend on me. He’d picked his target carefully, placed me as a cog in a complicated machine.
Twelve birds, one stone.
If you are listening to this, Blake is coming. He will box you in. He will hold you down. He will have no mercy. I could feel something inside me hardening. Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t foreseen exactly how Vincent Blake would come at me. Hawthorne hadn’t known that Toby would be caught in Blake’s plot, but he’d damn well known what the man was capable of. And his only consolation to me had been that he thought there was a sliver of a chance that I could survive.
I wanted to despise Tobias Hawthorne—or at least judge him—but all I could think was the other words he’d left me. You may be tested by the flames, but you need not burn.