Jameson was too much of a Hawthorne to dwell on that. “I was taught to see openings—and take them. For better or worse, the Proprietor will be keeping an eye on me now.”
“If you’re going to succeed,” Ian replied, all trace of laughter gone from his tone, “you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot more than win at the tables.”
Know no fear. Hold nothing back. Jameson felt something unfurling inside himself. “Then I won’t confine my winning to the tables.” He could do this. He was this. “Tomorrow, I’ll start the night in the ring.”
CHAPTER 36
GRAYSON
Eve. Grayson felt nothing when he heard the name. He let himself feel nothing. “What do you want?” he asked Eve’s spy.
“What I want,” the dark-eyed boy replied, coming to a standstill, “is not your concern.” The obvious implication was that what Eve wanted was.
Grayson was not prone toward forgiveness—not for himself, not for her. Betrayal tasted like failure still, bitter as a poisoned root, coppery like blood. Eve had used him to get what she wanted: the full power of her great-grandfather’s fortune, his empire.
His employees, Grayson thought, assessing the spy who’d been tailing him through new eyes. Vincent Blake was dangerous. Anyone who worked for him was likely to be the same.
Raking his gaze over his adversary, Grayson saw flashes of ink on the spy’s forearms. Tattoos, obscured by his shirt. A single back tendril was visible snaking out of his collar and climbing the side of his neck.
“Do you do everything Eve tells you to?” Grayson asked. He could have made that sound like an insult or a challenge. He didn’t. The less you gave away with your tone, the more meaning you could extract from your opponent’s response.
“You don’t want to know what I’ve done.” The guy didn’t so much as blink.
“You’ll have to tell her I spotted you.” Grayson tried again, his tone just as neutral.
“You the kind of guy who likes to tell people what they have to do?” A question of that sort should have been accompanied by some sort of motion: a cock of the head, a narrowing of the eyes, a hardening of the muscles in the jaw. But the guy in front of Grayson was statue-still: unmoving, unmovable.
I don’t have a word to say to you about the kind of man I am. “You can tell Eve that my stance hasn’t changed. She made her choice. She’s nothing to me.”
Nothing except an error in judgment and a reminder of what happened when Grayson let his guard down. What happened when he made mistakes.
“If you think I’m going to tell Eve that, you’re living in a dream world, rich boy.” The spy shifted liquidly from stillness into motion, slowly circling Grayson once more, a predator playing with his prey—then he turned.
The spy spoke as he walked away but didn’t look back. “For what it’s worth, hotshot, you weren’t the one she sent me to Phoenix to watch.”
CHAPTER 37
GRAYSON
Eve had someone staking out the Grayson family. No matter how many times Grayson went over the facts, that was the conclusion he reached. And no matter how many times he came to that conclusion, as he drove back to the hotel, he couldn’t banish the memory that wanted to come.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Yes. You did.” Grayson pulls himself out of the pool. The night air hits his skin like ice—or maybe that’s a side effect of talking to a ghost.
The girl in front of him looks so much like Emily that he can barely breathe.
“My existence disturbs people.” Her voice is like Em’s, too, but with a different kind of sharpness, a more subtle blade. “Side effect of being an affair baby.”
That statement reminds Grayson of who this girl really is—not a Hawthorne by name or blood but twisted in the branches of the family tree nonetheless, theirs to protect.
“What?” Eve demands, probably because of the way he’s looking at her. She pushes her hair back from her face, and Grayson’s gaze catches on the bruise on her temple—ugly, mottled edges pushing beyond the confines of a bandage. Someone hurt her.
And that someone will pay.
“Does it pain you?” He takes a step toward her, drawn like a moth to the flame.
“My existence?”
“Your wound.”
Grayson finally wrenched himself from the memory and focused on what mattered: Eve had someone—a very dangerous someone—watching the Grayson family. Stalking them from afar. Given that Eve was one of the only people on the planet who knew that Sheffield Grayson wasn’t missing, that was an utterly unacceptable risk.