You have a daughter, I’d told him.
I have two.
“Am I ever going to see you again?” I asked, my throat closing in on the words.
He leaned forward, pressed a kiss to my forehead, and stepped back. “It would be a very risky gamble.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but the door to the warehouse flew inward. Men poured inside. Oren’s men.
My head of security stepped between me and Toby Hawthorne and then leveled a deadly look at Tobias Hawthorne’s only son. “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”
CHAPTER 86
I wasn’t able to overhear whatever words were exchanged between Oren and Toby. I was shuttled into the SUV, and when Oren took his place in the driver’s seat a few minutes later, I noted that he’d left several of his men inside.
I thought about Sheffield Grayson, dead on the floor. About Toby’s plan for that body. “Is disposing of corpses part of your job description?” I asked Oren.
He met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “You want a real answer to that?”
I looked out the window. The world blurred as the SUV picked up speed. “Skye and Ricky didn’t plant that bomb,” I said. I tried to focus on the facts, not the flood of emotions I was barely holding back. “They were framed.”
“This time,” Oren said. “Skye has already tried to have you killed once. Both of them are threats. I suggest we let them cool their heels in prison at least until your emancipation goes through.”
Once I was legally an adult, once I could write my own will, Ricky and Skye would stand to gain nothing by my death.
“Rebecca.” I lunged forward in my seat suddenly, remembering. “Thea helped Mellie abduct me because someone had Rebecca.”
“It’s been handled,” Oren told me. “They’re fine. So are you. The rest of the family is none the wiser.” From his tone, you would have thought this was just business as usual. The kidnapping. The body. The cover-up.
“Was it like this for the old man?” I asked. “Or am I just lucky?”
I thought about Toby, sparing Eve from my fate, like inheriting this fortune was less blessing than curse.
“Mr. Hawthorne had a list.” Oren took his time with his reply. “It was a different kind of list from yours. He had enemies. Some of them had resources, but by and large, we knew what to expect. Mr. Hawthorne had a way of seeing things coming.”
I was starting to think that if I was going to survive being the Hawthorne heiress, I was going to have to start doing the same. I would have to learn to think like the old man.
Twelve birds, one stone.
Back at Hawthorne House, Oren made it clear that he intended to escort me all the way to my room. When we hit the grand staircase, I cleared my throat.
“We’ll need to disable the passageway,” I told him. “Permanently.”
I paused on the staircase, in front of Tobias Hawthorne’s portrait. Not for the first time, I stared at the old man. Had he known who Mellie and Eli were? Had he known about Eve? I was certain he would have run a DNA test on me at some point. He knew I wasn’t Toby’s daughter—not by blood.
But he’d still used me to lure Toby out—the same way Sheffield Grayson had, the same way Mellie and Eli had. You’re not a player, Nash had told me a small eternity ago. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.
Maybe I was both. Maybe I was a dozen different things, chosen for a dozen different reasons—none of them having a damn thing to do with who I was or what made me special.
I met the portrait’s eyes and thought about my dream—about playing chess with the old man. You didn’t choose me. You used me. You’re still using me. But as of this moment?
I was done being used.
CHAPTER 87
An hour later, I went in search of a Hawthorne. “I have something to tell you.”
Xander was in his “lab,” a hidden room where he built machines that did simple things in complicated ways. “Something to tell me? Is it possible you have me confused with one of my brothers?” he asked. “Because people don’t tell me things.”
He was tinkering with some kind of miniature catapult mechanism, part of a complicated chain reaction born from the brain of Xander Hawthorne.
“This was your game,” I said. “The old man left it to you.”
“Or so it appeared.” Xander settled a metal ball on the catapult. “At first.”
I gave him a look. “What do you mean?”
“Jameson has laser focus. Grayson always finishes what he starts. Even Nash, he might take the scenic route, but he’s wired to go from point A to point B.” Xander finished tinkering and finally turned to face me. “But me? I’m not wired that way. I start at point A, and somewhere along the way, I end up at the intersection of one hundred and twenty-seven and purple.” He shrugged. “It’s one of my many charms. My brain likes diversions. I follow the paths that I find. The old man knew that.” Xander shrugged. “Did he expect me to start the ball rolling this time? Yes. But where I’d end up?” Xander stepped back from his work and took in the entirety of the Rube Goldberg machine he’d built. “The old man knew damn well that it wasn’t going to be point B.”