“Family first,” Jameson said softly beside me.
“No man has ever built an empire without doing a thing or two they aren’t proud of, but Tobias didn’t let that follow him home. His hands weren’t always clean, but he never once raised them—not to Alice or their children or you boys.”
“You would have killed him if he had,” Jameson said affectionately.
“The mouth on you,” Nan chided.
His hands weren’t always clean. That single phrase sent me back to the first message we’d received from Toby’s kidnapper. At the time, it had seemed likely that the target of revenge was either Toby or me. But what if it was Tobias Hawthorne himself?
What if this—all of it—had always been about the old man? What if I’m just the one he chose? What if Toby is just his lost son? The possibility took hold of my mind, gripped it like fingernails digging into flesh.
“What did your son-in-law do?” I asked. “Why weren’t his hands clean?”
Nan offered no reply to that question.
Jameson reached out and took her hand. “If I told you that someone wanted revenge against the Hawthorne family—”
Nan patted the side of his face. “I’d tell that person to get in line.”
CHAPTER 38
Identify your assumptions. Question them. Negate them. As I stepped out of the chapel, I felt like a shell over my brain had been cracked wide open, and now possibilities were streaming in from every side.
What would I have done from the very beginning if I’d assumed that Toby had been taken as revenge for something that his father had done? I thought about Eve talking about Hawthorne secrets—dark secrets, maybe even dangerous ones—and then about Nan and her talk of empires and dirty hands.
What had Tobias Hawthorne done on his way to the top? Once he’d amassed all that money and all that power, what had he used it to do? And to whom?
My brain sorting through possible next moves at warp speed, I turned to Oren. “You tracked threats against Tobias Hawthorne, back when you were his head of security. He had a List, like mine.”
List, capital L, threats. People who required watching.
“Mr. Hawthorne had a List,” Oren confirmed. “But it was a bit different than yours.”
My List was heavy on strangers. From the moment I’d been named Tobias Hawthorne’s heir, I’d been thrust into the kind of worldwide spotlight that automatically came with online death threats and would-be stalkers, people who wanted to be me and people who wanted to hurt me.
It was always worse right after a new story broke. Like now.
“Would my grandfather’s List happen to be a list of people he screwed over?” Jameson asked Oren.
He saw what I did: If Toby’s captor was telling a story about envy, revenge, and triumphing over an old enemy, Tobias Hawthorne’s List was a hell of a place to start.
Jameson and I caught the others up to speed, and Oren had the List delivered to the solarium. The room had glass walls and a glass ceiling, so no matter where you stood, you could feel the sun on your skin. After our near all-nighter, the seven of us were going to need all the help staying awake that we could get.
Especially because this was going to take a while.
Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t just had a list of names. He’d had file folders like the one he’d assembled on me, but for hundreds of people. Hundreds of threats.
“You tracked all these people?” I asked Oren, staring at the stack and stacks of files.
“It wasn’t a matter of actively tracking so much as knowing what they looked like, knowing their names, keeping an eye out.” Oren’s expression was smooth, unreadable, professional. “The files were Mr. Hawthorne’s doing, not mine. I was only allowed to look at them if the person started popping up.”
Right now, we didn’t have a face. We didn’t have a name, so I focused on what we did have. “We’re looking for an older man,” I told the others quietly. “Someone who was bested and betrayed by Tobias Hawthorne.” I wanted there to be more than that for us to go on. “There might be a family connection or a family-like connection or maybe even just a story focused on three people.”
“Three men,” Eve said, seeming to have recovered her voice, her grit, and her poise. “In the parable, they’re all men. And this guy took Toby, not Zara or Skye. He took the son.”
She’d clearly been thinking about this. I stole a look at Grayson, and the way he was looking at Eve made me think that she hadn’t been thinking alone.
“Well,” Xander said, in an attempt at cheer. “That’s not nothing to go on!”
I turned my attention back to the folders—stacks and stacks of them that left a heavy feeling in my stomach. “Whoever this man is,” I said, “whatever his history with Tobias Hawthorne, whatever he lost—he’s wealthy, powerful, and connected now.”
CHAPTER 39
By the time we’d each made it through three or four folders, even the sunlight streaming in from all sides couldn’t banish the dark pall that had settled over the room.
This was what I’d known before reading the files: Tobias Hawthorne had filed his first patents in the late sixties and early seventies. At least one had turned out to be valuable, and he’d used the profits from that to fund the land acquisitions that had made him a major player in Texas oil. He’d eventually sold his oil company for upward of a hundred million dollars, and after that, he’d diversified with a Midas touch for turning millions to billions.
All of that was public information. The information in these files told the parts of the story that the myth of Tobias Hawthorne glossed over. Hostile takeovers. Competitors run out of business. Lawsuits filed for the sole purpose of bankrupting the other party. The ruthless billionaire had a habit of zeroing in on a market opportunity and moving into that space with no mercy, buying up patents and smaller corporations, hiring the best and the brightest and using them to destroy the competition—only to pivot to a new industry, a new challenge.
He paid his employees well, but when the wind changed or the profits dried up, he laid them off without mercy.
Tobias Hawthorne was never in the business of making friends. I’d asked Nan exactly what her son-in-law had done that he wasn’t proud of. The answer was all around us, and it was impossible to ignore the details in any of the files just because they didn’t match what we were looking for.
I stared down at the folder in my hand: Seaton, Tyler. It appeared that Mr. Seaton, a brilliant biomedical engineer, had been caught up in one of Tobias Hawthorne’s pivots after seven years of loyal—and lucrative—service. Seaton was downsized. Like all Hawthorne employees, he’d been given a generous severance package, including an extension of his company insurance. But eventually, that extension had run out, and a noncompete clause in the fine print of his contract had made it nearly impossible for him to find other employment.
And insurance.
Swallowing, I forced myself to stare at the pictures in this file folder. Pictures of a little girl. Mariah Seaton. She’d been diagnosed with cancer at age nine, just before her father lost his job.
She was dead by twelve.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I forced myself to continue paging through the file. The final sheet contained financial information about a transaction—a generous donation the Hawthorne Foundation had made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.