“Oren can post men to watch the cottage.” Jameson spoke beside me. He knew how much I was hurting but did me the courtesy of pretending he didn’t. “If Eve is a threat, we can keep her contained.”
I turned to look at him. “You know that this isn’t about Grayson and me,” I said, forcing the image of Grayson walking away out of my mind. “Tell me you know that, Jameson.”
“I know,” he replied, “that I love you, and despite all odds, you love me.” Jameson’s smile was smaller but no less crooked than usual. “I also know that Gray’s the better man. He always has been. The better son, the better grandson, the better Hawthorne. I think that’s why I wanted so badly for Emily to choose me. For once, I wanted to be the one. But it was always him, Heiress. I was a game to her. She loved him.”
“No.” I shook my head. “She didn’t. You don’t treat people you love like that.”
“You don’t,” Jameson replied. “You’re honorable, Avery Kylie Grambs. Once you were with me, you were with me. You love me, scars and all. I know that, Heiress. I do.” Jameson said those words, and he meant them. He believed them. “Is it so awful,” he continued, “that I want to be a better man for you?”
I thought about our fight. “Better is being my friend and my partner and realizing that you don’t get to make decisions for me. Better is the way you make me see myself as a person who’s capable of anything. I would jump out of a plane with you, Jameson, snowboard down the side of a volcano with you, bet everything that I have on you—on us, against the world. You don’t get to run off and take risks and expect me to stay behind in a gilded cage of your making. That isn’t who you are, and it’s not what I want.” I didn’t know how to say this so that he would really hear me. “You,” I told him, taking a step closer, “have always made me bold. You’re the one who pushes me out of my comfort zone. You don’t get to box me back in now.”
Jameson looked at me like he was trying to memorize every detail of my face. “I moved on from Emily,” he said. “Gray didn’t. And I know in my soul that if he had, he could have loved you. He would have. With everything you are, Heiress, what other choice would he have had?”
“It was always going to be you,” I told Jameson. He needed to hear it. I needed to say it, even though always painted over so much.
In response, Jameson gave me another crooked smile. “It’s times like this, Heiress, that I wish I’d fallen in love with a girl who wasn’t quite so good at bluffing.”
Jameson left, the way Grayson had.
“Let’s get you back up to the House,” Oren said. He didn’t offer any commentary on what had just happened.
I didn’t let myself think about Jameson or Grayson. I thought about the rest of it instead, about Vincent Blake’s missing son and vengeance and the games that Blake was never going to stop playing with me. The stories in the tabloids, the paparazzi, financial assaults from every side, trying to chip away at my security team, and the entire time, taunting me that he had Toby.
Clue after clue.
Riddle after riddle.
I was sick of it. When I got back to the House, I went to get the phone Blake had sent me. I called the only number I had for him, and when he didn’t answer, I started placing other calls from my real phone—to every person who had received a coveted invitation to the owner’s suite of my NFL team, to every player in Texas society who had tried to cozy up to me at a charity gala, every person who’d wanted my buy-in for a financial opportunity.
Money attracted money. Power attracted power. And I was done waiting for the next clue.
It took some time, but I found someone who had Vincent Blake’s cell phone number and was willing to give it to me, no questions asked. My heart beat with the force of punch after punch in my chest as I dialed the number.
When Blake answered, I didn’t bother with pretense. “I know about Eve. I know about your son.”
“Do you?”
Questions and riddles and games. No more. “What do you want?” I asked. I wondered if he could hear my anger—and every ounce of emotion buried underneath.
I wondered if that made him think he was winning.
“What do I want, Avery Kylie Grambs?” Vincent Blake sounded amused. “Guess.”
“I’m done guessing.”
Silence greeted me on the other end of the line—but he was still there. He didn’t hang up. And I wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence first.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Blake said at long last. “I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son. And I want you, Avery Kylie Grambs, to dig up the past and bring me his body.”
CHAPTER 65
Vincent Blake believed his son was dead. He believed the body was here. I thought about the Blake family seal, the fact that Toby had stolen it, his father’s reaction when he had.
You know what I left there, Toby had written my mother long ago. You know what it’s worth. A teenage Toby had stolen the seal—and left a hidden copy of “A Poison Tree” by William Blake for his father to find.
“He wanted you to know that he knew the truth.” It felt right somehow to be addressing Tobias Hawthorne. This was his legacy.
All of it.
“What did you do,” I whispered, “when you found Vincent Blake’s son on your property?”
When he’d realized that a man had come at him through a sixteen-year-old girl. That girl might have fancied herself in love, but Tobias Hawthorne wouldn’t have seen it that way. Will Blake was in his twenties. Mallory was only sixteen.
And unlike Vincent Blake, Tobias Hawthorne didn’t believe that boys would be boys.
What happened to him? I could hear Eve asking. Your Liam. And all Mallory Laughlin had said was Liam left.
Why did he leave?
He just did.
I started walking and ended up in Toby’s old wing, reading the lines of “A Poison Tree” and the diary that Toby had kept in invisible ink on his walls. I understood young Toby’s anger now, in a way I hadn’t before. He knew something.
About his father.
About the reason the adoption was kept secret.
About Will Blake and the decision to hide a dangerous man’s only grandchild in plain sight. I thought about Toby’s poem, the one we’d decoded months ago.
Secrets, lies,
All I despise.
The tree is poison,
Don’t you see?
It poisoned S and Z and me.
The evidence I stole
Is in the darkest hole.
Light shall reveal all
I writ upon the…
“Wall,” I finished now, the way I had then. But this time my brain was seeing all of it through a new lens. If Toby had known what the seal was when he stole it, that meant he knew who Will Blake was, who Vincent Blake was. And if Toby knew that…
What else had he known?
The evidence I stole
Is in the darkest hole.
When I’d recited this poem for Eve, she’d asked me, Evidence of what? She’d been looking for answers, for proof. For a body, I thought. Or more realistically at this point, for bones. But Eve hadn’t found any of it yet. If she had, Blake wouldn’t have laid this task before me.