I swallowed.
“Liam snapped and lunged for her again. Mal—she fought back.” Mr. Laughlin’s eyes closed. “I came in just as Mr. Hawthorne was pulling that man off my daughter. He got that bastard under control, had his arms pinned behind his back, and then—” Mr. Laughlin forced his eyes open and looked toward Rebecca. “Then my little girl picked up a brick. She went at him too quick for me to stop her. And not just once.… She hit him over and over again.”
“It was self-defense,” Jameson said.
Mr. Laughlin looked down, then forced his gaze to mine, like he needed me, of everyone here, to understand. “No. It wasn’t.”
I wondered how many times Mallory had hit her Liam before they stopped her. I wondered if they had stopped her.
“I got a hold of her,” Mr. Laughlin said, his voice heavy. “She just kept saying that she thought he loved her. She thought—” There were no tears in his eyes, but a sob racked his chest. “Mr. Hawthorne told me to go. He told me to take Mal and get her out of there.”
“Was Liam dead?” I asked, my mouth almost painfully dry.
There wasn’t a hint of remorse in the groundskeeper’s face. “Not yet.”
Will Blake had been breathing when Mr. Laughlin left him alone with Tobias Hawthorne.
“Your daughter had just attacked Vincent Blake’s son.” Jameson was wired to find hidden truths, to turn everything into a puzzle, then solve it. “Back then, our family wasn’t wealthy enough or powerful enough to protect her. Not yet.”
“Do you even know what happened after you left?” Rebecca asked after a long and painful silence.
“My understanding is that he needed medical attention.” Mr. Laughlin looked at each of us in turn. “Shame he didn’t get it.”
I pictured Tobias Hawthorne standing there and watching a man die. Letting him die.
“And afterward?” Xander said, uncharacteristically muted.
“I never asked,” Mr. Laughlin said stiffly. “And Mr. Hawthorne never told me.”
My mind raced—through the years, navigating through everything we knew. “But when Toby moved the body…” I started to say.
Mr. Laughlin locked his gaze back on the horizon. “I knew he’d buried something. Once Toby ran off and Mr. Hawthorne started asking questions, I figured out pretty quick what that something was.”
And you never said a word, I thought.
“Show them the spot if you have to, Rebecca.” Mr. Laughlin gently pushed his granddaughter’s hair away from her face. “But if Vincent Blake asks what happened, you protect your mother. You tell him that it was me.”
CHAPTER 74
We found the remains.
I brought out my phone, ready to place the call to Blake, but before I could pull the trigger, it rang. I glanced at caller ID and stopped breathing.
“Alisa?” I forced my lungs to start working again. “Are you—”
“Going to kill Grayson Hawthorne?” Alisa said evenly. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
Just hearing her voice—and the absolute normality of her tone—sent a shock wave of relief through me. It was like I’d been carrying extra weight and pressure in every cell in my body, and suddenly, all that tension was gone.
And then I processed what Alisa had said.
“Grayson?” I repeated, my heart seizing in my chest.
“He’s the reason Blake let me go. A trade.”
I should have known when he hadn’t come with us to find the body. Grayson Hawthorne and his grand gestures. Frustration, fear, and something almost painfully tender threatened to bring tears to my eyes.
“Your brother’s playing sacrificial lamb,” I told Jameson, trying to let that first emotion mute the rest. Xander heard my terse statement, too, and Nash appeared behind them.
“Alisa?” he said.
“She’s fine,” I reported. And this time, we’ll take care of her. “Oren, can you have someone bring her in?”
Oren gave a curt nod, but the expression in his eyes betrayed how glad he was that she was okay. “Give me the phone, and I’ll coordinate a pickup.”
I passed the phone to him.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Jameson told me. “Blake still has the upper hand.”
He had Grayson. There was a terrifying symmetry to that. Tobias Hawthorne had stolen Vincent Blake’s grandson—and now he had Tobias Hawthorne’s.
He has Toby. He has Grayson. And I have his son’s remains. All I had to do was give Vincent Blake what he wanted, and this would be over.
Or at least, that was what Blake wanted me to believe.
But Tobias Hawthorne’s final message hadn’t just cautioned me that Blake would be coming for the truth, for proof. No, Tobias Hawthorne had told me that Blake would be coming for me, that he would box me in, hold me down, have no mercy. Tobias Hawthorne had been expecting a full-on assault on his empire. Assuming he’d projected correctly, Vincent Blake wasn’t just after the truth.
He is coming. For the fortune. For my legacy. For you, Avery Kylie Grambs.
But Tobias Hawthorne—manipulative, Machiavellian man that he was—had also thought that I had a sliver of a chance. I just had to outplay Blake.
Take as your consolation this, my very risky gamble: I have watched you. I have come to know you. The words pumped through my body like blood, my heart beating out a brutal, uncompromising rhythm. Tobias Hawthorne had believed that Blake would underestimate me.
On the phone, he’d called me little girl.
What did that mean? That he expects me to react, not act. That he thinks I’ll never look ahead.
I forced myself to stop, to slow down, to think. All around me, the others were fighting loudly about next moves. But I shut out the sound of Jameson’s voice, of Nash’s and Xander’s, Oren’s, everyone’s. And eventually, I circled back to the Queen’s Gambit. I thought about how it required ceding control of the board. It required a loss.
And it worked best when your opponent thought it was a rookie error, rather than strategy.
A plan took shape in my mind. It ossified. And I made a call.
CHAPTER 75
What did you just do?” Jameson looked at me the way he had the night he’d told me that I was their grandfather’s last puzzle, like after all this time, there were still things about me, about what I was capable of, that could surprise him.
Like he wanted to know them all.
“I called the authorities and reported that human remains had been found at Hawthorne House.” That much had probably been obvious if they’d overheard me. What Jameson was really asking me was why.
“Far be it from me to state the obvious,” Thea cut in, “but wasn’t the point of digging that up to make a trade?”
I could feel Jameson reading me, feel his brain sorting through the possibilities in mine.
“I have another call to make,” I said.
“To Blake?” Rebecca asked.
“No,” Jameson answered for me.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I told all of them.
“You’re playing him.” Jameson didn’t phrase that as a question.
“Blake said to bring him the body, and it will be returned to him. Eventually. And when it is, I won’t have broken any laws.”