No one even remotely Hawthorne-adjacent would have handed over their DNA to one of those databases. “Toby found you,” I reminded Eve gently.
She nodded. “He doesn’t really look like me, either. And he’s a hard person to get to know. But that poem…”
I didn’t make her say anything else. “I get it,” I told her. “It’s fine.”
On my way out the door, I thought about my mom and all the ways we were alike. She’d given me my resilience. My smile. The color of my hair.
The tendency to guard my heart—and the ability, once those guards were down, to love fiercely, deeply, unapologetically.
Unafraid.
CHAPTER 28
I found Jameson on the climbing wall. He was at the top, where the angles became treacherous, his body held to the wall through sheer force of will.
“Your grandfather left me a game,” I said. My voice wasn’t loud, but it carried.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Jameson dropped from the wall.
He was too high up. In my mind, I saw him landing wrong. I heard bones shattering. But just like the first time I’d met him, he landed in a crouch.
When he stood up, he gave no signs of being worse for wear.
“I hate it when you do that,” I told him.
Jameson smirked. “It’s possible that I was deprived of maternal attention as a child unless I was bleeding.”
“Skye noticed if you were bleeding?” I asked.
Jameson gave a little shrug. “Some of the time.” He hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, then stepped forward. “I’m sorry about last night, Heiress. You didn’t even call Tahiti.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I told him. “Just ask me about the game your grandfather designed to be delivered to me if and when Eve and I ever met.”
“He knew about her?” Jameson tried to wrap his mind around that. “The plot thickens. How far through the game are you?”
“Solved the first clue,” I said. “Now I’m looking for a chess set.”
“There are six in the game room,” Jameson replied automatically.
“That’s how many it takes to play Hawthorne chess.”
Hawthorne chess. Why was I not surprised? “I found all six. Do you know if there’s a seventh somewhere else?”
“I don’t know of one.” Jameson gave me a look: part trouble, part challenge. “But do you still have that binder Alisa made for you, detailing
your inheritance?”
I found an entry in the binder’s index: Chess set, royal. I flipped to the page indicated and read, tearing through the description as fast as I could. The set was valued at nearly half a million dollars. The pieces were made of white gold, encrusted with black and white diamonds—nearly ten thousand of them. The pictures were breathtaking.
There was only one place this chess set could be.
“Oren,” I called out to the hallway, knowing he’d be somewhere within earshot. “I need you to take us to the vault.”
The last time I’d been to the Hawthorne vault, I’d jokingly asked Oren if it contained the crown jewels, and his very serious response had been To what country?
“If what you’re looking for isn’t here,” Oren told Jameson and me as we surveyed the steel drawers lining the walls, “some pieces are kept in an even more secure location off-site.”
Jameson and I got to work gingerly opening drawer after drawer. I managed not to gawk at anything until I came to a scepter made of shining gold interwoven with another lighter metal. White gold? Platinum? I had no idea, but it wasn’t the materials that caught my eye. It was the design of the scepter. The metalwork was impossibly intricate. The effect was delicate, but dangerous. Beauty and power.