Sabotaging their efforts. Betraying her.
“I warned you from the beginning not to trust me,” Grayson told her. He waited for anger that never came.
“Why?” Gigi said. “Even after everything, you helped us, Grayson. You got Mom a lawyer. You found the money somehow. You beat the bad guy.” She paused. “You did beat the bad guy, right?”
Grayson nodded. “Yeah,” he told Gigi. “I did.”
“Why?” his little sister demanded again. “Because it looks an awful lot to me like you care.” She stared at him. “You do. I know you do. So why would you—”
“I had to.” Grayson hadn’t meant to say that, and he hadn’t meant for the words to come out tortured and low. “I had to, Gigi.” Maybe he should have left it there. A week ago, he would have. “I know something about your father that you don’t know, something that you shouldn’t know.”
“Our father” came the stubborn correction.
“He wasn’t a good guy, Gigi.”
“Because of the whole embezzlement-and-tax-evasion thing?”
I could say yes. I could leave it there. And I could lose her. Grayson thought back to his conversation with Avery—Avery, whom he wanted to protect more than just about anyone else in the world.
Just about.
“Before he disappeared, your father—” At his sister’s glare, Grayson corrected himself. “Our father… he tried to kill someone who matters to me. You might not have seen it in the news back then—”
Gigi stared at him. “There was a bomb, right? On a plane? Someone tried to kill the Hawthorne heiress.” Gigi frowned. “Wasn’t your mother arrested for that?”
Grayson swallowed. “They arrested the wrong parent.”
Gigi’s eyes were very round. “Dad?” she whispered. “That whole thing with Aunt Kim and the Hawthornes getting theirs…”
Grayson was walking a dangerous line now. He knew it, just like he knew that no matter what he said, Gigi might still choose to walk away. But he had to try. “He wanted revenge.” Grayson gave her as much of the truth as he could. “For Colin.”
Gigi drew in a long breath and looked up at the ceiling that soared overhead, doing everything she could not to blink. Not to cry.
“It’s always Colin.” Gigi kept right on staring at the ceiling. “I remember being three years old and knowing that my dad loved me… and that he especially loved the way I looked.” Gigi swallowed. “Because I looked like Colin. And as long as I was happy and bubbly and just a silly little girl who didn’t try to matter too much, that was a good thing.”
Grayson pulled her in, and the next thing he knew, his sister’s head was resting on his chest, his arms enveloping her.
“Grayson?” Gigi said softly. “You said wanted. Past tense. You said that Dad wanted revenge. But once he wants something… he doesn’t stop. Ever.”
He didn’t stop with the bomb. He had no intentions of stopping until Toby Hawthorne paid—with Avery’s life and with his own.
Gigi angled her head up toward Grayson. “I guess I’m a lot like Dad that way, with the not stopping.”
Grayson wondered if that was Gigi’s way of telling him that she was going to keep asking questions, keep pushing. He wondered if he’d made a mistake telling her as much as he had.
But all he said in reply was “You are nothing like our father.”
There was a long, painful silence. “He’s not coming back, is he, Grayson?”
No answer would have been an answer, so he gave her what he could. “No.”
“He can’t come back, can he?”
No answer was an answer, the only one he could give her this time.
For more than a minute, Gigi didn’t move. Grayson held her, bracing himself for the moment when she would pull back.
Finally, she did. “You’re going to have to give me the puzzle box back,” she told him. “For Savannah. We’re going to have to make sure there’s something in it, something that gives her an answer she can believe. One that doesn’t involve our dad being an evil mastermind of the non-white-collar variety.”
Grayson stared at her. “What are you saying?”
Gigi stepped back. “My whole life, Savannah has tried to protect me. I mean, she knew about you for years, about Dad’s affair, and she did everything she could to make sure I didn’t have to know. And all of this? With Dad? She doesn’t have to know.” Gigi said those words like an oath. “Savannah loves Dad. She was always closer to him than Mom. She pushed herself so hard for him. So we’re going to protect her this time. You and me. Because I remember something else about the Hawthorne heiress plane bombing. People died. Our father killed people, Grayson. And now he’s…” Gigi didn’t say the word dead. “In Tunisia,” she finished, her tone steely. “And that’s where he needs to stay.”