I swallowed. “Yes.”
Every muscle in Grayson’s body had gone tight. “He knew,” he repeated savagely. “And he left her there? He knew, and he didn’t say a damn word to any of us?” Grayson strode toward me—then past me. He braced himself against the portico wall, his palms flat, the muscles in his back so tense that it looked like his shoulder blades might split the skin.
“Grayson?” I didn’t say more than that. I wasn’t sure what else to say.
“I used to tell myself that the old man loved us,” Grayson stated with all the precision of a surgeon slicing through good flesh to get to bad. “That if he held us to impossible standards, it was for the noble purpose of forging his heirs into what we needed to be. And if the great Tobias Hawthorne was harder on me than on my brothers, I told myself that it was because I needed to be more. I believed that he taught me about honor and duty because he was honorable, because he felt the weight of his duty and wanted to prepare me for it.”
Grayson slammed his hand down onto the wall hard enough for the rough surface to tear into his palm.
“But the things he did? The dirty little secrets in those file folders? Knowing about Eve and letting her be raised by people who treated her as less than? Pretending that our family owed Toby’s daughter nothing? There’s nothing honorable about that.” Grayson shook. “Any of it.”
I thought about Grayson never allowing himself to break because he knew the man he’d been raised to be. I thought about Jameson saying that Grayson had always been so perfect. “We don’t know how long your grandfather knew about Eve,” I said. “If it was a recent discovery, if he knew that she looked like Emily, maybe he thought it would be too painful—”
“Maybe he thought I was too weak.” Grayson turned to face me. “That’s what you’re saying, Avery, as hard as you try to make it mean something else.”
I took a step toward him. “Grief doesn’t make you weak, Grayson.”
“Love does.” Grayson’s voice went brutally low. “I was supposed to be the one who was above it all. Emotion. Vulnerability.”
“Why you?” I asked. “Why not Nash? He’s the oldest. Why not Jameson or Xan—”
“Because it was supposed to be me.” Grayson took in a ragged breath. I could practically see him fighting to slam the cage door closed on his emotions once more. “My whole life, Avery, it was supposed to be me. That was why I had to be better, why I had to sacrifice and be honorable and put family first, why I could never lose control—because the old man wasn’t going to be around forever, and I was the one who was supposed to take the reins once he was gone.”
It was supposed to be Grayson. I thought. Not me. A year on, and part of Grayson still couldn’t let go of that, even knowing that the old man had never really intended to leave him the fortune.
“And I understood, Avery—I did—why the old man might have looked at this family, looked at me, and decided that we were unworthy of his legacy.” Grayson’s voice shook. “I understood why he thought I wasn’t good enough—and you were. But if the great Tobias Hawthorne wasn’t honorable? If he never met a line he wouldn’t cross for his own selfish gain? If ‘family first’ was just some bullshit lie he fed to me? Then why?” Grayson brought his eyes to mine. “What’s the point, Avery, of any of this?”
“I don’t know.” My voice sounded just as raw as his. Hesitantly, I raised the glass circle again. “But maybe there’s more to it, a piece of the puzzle that we don’t know.…”
“More games.” Grayson slammed his hand against the wall again. “The old bastard has been dead a year, and he’s still pulling strings.”
My right hand holding the blue-green glass, I dropped the towel with my left and reached for him.
“Don’t,” Grayson breathed. He turned to walk past me. “I told you once before, Avery: I’m broken. I won’t break you, too. Go back to bed. Forget about that piece of glass and whatever else was in that bag. Stop playing the old man’s games.”
“Grayson—”
“Just stop.”
That felt final in a way that nothing else between us ever had. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t go after him. And when the way he’d told me to stop rang in my mind, I thought about Jameson, who never stopped.
About the person I was with Jameson.
I walked over to the water. I took off my pants and my shirt, laid the glass gingerly on the side of the pool, and dove in.
CHAPTER 43
I barreled through the water with my eyes open. The blue-green mosaic at the bottom of the pool beckoned me, illuminated by the lights I’d turned on. I swam closer, then ran my hand over the tiles, taking everything in: that color, the smoothness, the variation in the cut and size of the tiny tiles, the way they’d been laid, almost in a swirl.
I kicked off the bottom, and when I broke the surface, I paddled to the side. Taking the glass circle in one hand, I pulled myself along the edge to the shallow end with the other. Standing, I submerged the glass, then went under myself. Don’t breathe.
Filtered through the glass, the blue-green tiles disappeared. Beneath them, I could see a simpler design: squares, some of them light, some dark. A chessboard.
There was always a moment in these games when I was hit with the almost physical realization that nothing Tobias Hawthorne had ever done had been without layers of purpose. All those additions to Hawthorne House, and how many of them contained one of his tricks just waiting for the right game?
Traps upon traps, Jameson had told me once. And riddles upon riddles.
I came back up for air, the image of the chessboard burned into my mind. I thought about Grayson telling me not to play, about Jameson, who should have been playing alongside me. And then I cleared my mind of all of that. I thought about the clues that had preceded this one: the Queen’s Gambit, leading to the royal chess set to Don’t breathe. I went down again, held up the glass again, and mentally populated the squares with pieces.
I played out the Queen’s Gambit in my mind. P-Q4. P-Q4. P-QB4.
Refusing to blink, I memorized the locations of the squares involved in those moves, then came up for air. Setting the glass back on the side of the pool, I pulled myself out, the night air a brutal shock to my system.
P-Q4, I thought. With single-minded purpose, I dove for the bottom. No matter how I pushed or prodded at the mosaic of tiles that made up the first square, nothing happened. I swam to the second—still nothing, then went up for air again, swam to the side again, pulled myself out again, shivering, shaking, ready.
I drew in air, then dove again. P-QB4. The location of the last move in the Queen’s Gambit. This time, when I pushed against the tiles, one turned, hitting the next and the next, like some kind of clockwork marvel.
I watched the chain reaction go, piece by piece, afraid to even blink, terrified that whatever this was, it would only last a moment. A final tile turned, and the entire section—the square I’d seen through the glass—popped up. My lungs starting to burn, I wedged my fingers underneath. They brushed something.
Almost. Almost.