The inheritance games, p.17
The Inheritance Games, page 17
I was still trying to absorb the NFL bombshell when the words media training put a knot of dread in my throat.
“Do I have to—”
“Yes,” Alisa told me. “Yes to the gala this weekend, yes to the game next weekend, yes to the media training.”
I didn’t say another word in complaint. I’d stoked this fire—and protected Libby—knowing that, sooner or later, I’d have to pay the piper.
I got so many stares when we arrived at school that I found myself questioning whether I’d dreamed my last two days at Heights Country Day. This was what I’d expected, back on day one. Just like then, Thea was the first to make a move toward me.
“You did a thing,” she said in a tone that highly suggested what I’d done was both naughty and delicious. Inexplicably, my mind went to Jameson, to the moment on the bridge when his fingers had woven their way between mine.
“Do you really know why Tobias Hawthorne left you everything?” Thea asked, her eyes alight. “The whole school’s talking about it.”
“The whole school can talk about whatever they want.”
“You don’t like me much,” Thea noted. “That’s okay. I’m a hypercompetitive, bisexual perfectionist who likes to win and looks like this. I’m no stranger to being hated.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t hate you.” I didn’t know her well enough to hate her yet.
“That’s good,” Thea replied with a self-satisfied smile, “because we’re going to be spending a lot more time with each other. My parents are going out of town. They seem to believe that, left to my own devices, I might do something ill-advised, so I’ll be staying with my uncle, and I understand that he and Zara have taken up residence at Hawthorne House. I guess they’re not quite ready to cede the family homestead to a stranger.”
Zara had been playing nice—or at least nicer. But I’d had no idea that she’d moved in. Then again, Hawthorne House was so gargantuan that an entire professional baseball team could be living there and I might have no idea.
For all I knew, I might own a professional baseball team.
“Why would you want to stay at Hawthorne House?” I asked Thea. She was the one who’d warned me away.
“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t always do what I want.” Thea tossed her dark hair over her shoulder. “And besides, Emily was my best friend. After everything that happened last year, when it comes to the charms of Hawthorne brothers, I’m immune.”
CHAPTER 50
When I finally got ahold of Max, she wasn’t feeling chatty. I could tell that something was wrong, but not what. She didn’t have a single fake expletive to share on the topic of Thea moving in, and she cut our back-and-forth short without any commentary whatsoever on the Hawthorne brothers’ physiques. I asked if everything was okay. She said that she had to go.
Xander, in contrast, was more than willing to discuss the Thea development. “If Thea’s here,” he told me that afternoon, lowering his voice like the walls of Hawthorne House might have ears, “she’s up to something.”
“She as in Thea?” I asked pointedly. “Or your aunt?”
Zara had thrown me together with Grayson at the foundation, and now she was moving Thea into the House. I recognized someone stacking the board, even if I couldn’t see the play underneath.
“You’re right,” Xander said. “I seriously doubt Thea volunteered to spend time with our family. It is possible that she fervently wishes for vultures to dine upon my entrails.”
“You?” I said. Thea’s issues with the Hawthorne brothers had seemed to revolve around Emily—and that meant, I had assumed, around Jameson and Grayson. “What did you do?”
“It is a story,” Xander said with a sigh, “involving star-crossed love, fake dating, tragedy, penance… and possibly vultures.”
I thought back to asking Xander about Rebecca Laughlin. He hadn’t said anything to indicate she was Emily’s sister. He’d murmured almost exactly what he’d just said about Thea.
Xander didn’t let me ruminate for long. Instead, he dragged me off to what he declared to be his fourth-favorite room in the House. “If you’re going to be going head-to-head with Thea,” he told me, “you need to be prepared.”
“I’m not going head-to-head with anyone,” I said firmly.
“It is adorable that you believe that.” Xander stopped where one corridor met another. He reached up—all six foot three of him—to touch a molding that ran up the corner. He must have hit some kind of release, because the next thing I knew, he was pulling the molding toward us, revealing a gap behind it. He stuck his hand into the gap behind the molding, and a moment later, a portion of the wall swung out toward us like a door.
I was never going to get used to this.
“Welcome to… my lair!” Xander sounded overjoyed to be saying those words.
I stepped into his “lair” and saw… a machine? Contraption probably would have been the more accurate term. There were dozens of gears, pulleys, and chains, a complicated series of connected ramps, several buckets, two conveyor belts, a slingshot, a birdcage, four pinwheels, and at least four balloons.
“Is that an anvil?” I asked, frowning and leaning forward for a better look.
“That,” Xander said proudly, “is a Rube Goldberg machine. As it so happens, I am a three-time world champion at building machines that do simple things in overly complicated ways.” He handed me a marble. “Place this in the pinwheel.”
I did. The pinwheel spun, blowing a balloon, that tipped a bucket…
As I watched each mechanism set off the next, I glanced at the youngest Hawthorne brother out of the corner of my eye. “What does this have to do with Thea moving in?”
He’d told me that I needed to be prepared, then brought me here. Was this supposed to be some kind of metaphor? A warning that Zara’s actions might appear complicated, even when the goal was simple? An insight into Thea’s charge?
Xander cast a sideways look at me and grinned. “Who said this had anything to do with Thea?”
CHAPTER 51
That night, in honor of Thea’s visit, Mrs. Laughlin made a melt-in-your-mouth roast beef. Orgasmic garlic mashed potatoes. Roasted asparagus, broccoli florets, and three different kinds of crème brûlée.
I couldn’t help feeling like it was pretty revealing that Mrs. Laughlin had pulled out all the stops for Thea—but not for me.
Trying not to seem petty, I sat down to a formal dinner in the “dining room,” which probably should have been called a banquet hall instead. The massive table was set for eleven. I cataloged the participants in this little family dinner: four Hawthorne brothers. Skye. Zara and Constantine. Thea. Libby. Nan. And me.
“Thea,” Zara said, her voice almost too pleasant, “how is field hockey?”
“We’re undefeated this season.” Thea turned toward me. “Have you decided which sport you’ll be playing, Avery?”
I managed to resist the urge to snort, but barely. “I don’t do sports.”
“Everyone at Country Day does a sport,” Xander informed me, before stuffing his mouth with roast beef. His eyes rolled upward with pleasure as he chewed. “It is an actual, real requirement and not a figment of Thea’s delightfully vindictive imagination.”
“Xander,” Nash said in warning.
“I said she was delightfully vindictive,” Xander replied innocently.
“If I were a boy,” Thea told him with a Southern belle smile, “people would just call me driven.”
“Thea.” Constantine frowned at her.
“Right.” Thea dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “No feminism at the dinner table.”
This time, I couldn’t bite back the snort. Point, Thea.
“A toast,” Skye declared out of nowhere, holding up her wineglass and slurring the words enough that it was clear she’d already been imbibing.
“Skye, dear,” Nan said firmly, “have you considered sleeping it off?”
“A toast,” Skye reiterated, glass still held high. “To Avery.”
For once, she’d gotten my name right. I waited for the guillotine to drop, but Skye said nothing else. Zara raised her glass. One by one, every other glass went up.
Every person in this room had probably gotten the message: No good could come of challenging the will. I might have been the enemy—but I was also the one with the money.
Is that why Zara brought Thea here? To get close to me? Is that why she left me alone at the foundation with Grayson?
“To you, Heiress,” Jameson murmured to my left. I turned to look at him. I hadn’t seen him since the night before. I was fairly certain he’d skipped school. I wondered if he’d spent the day in the Black Wood, looking for the next clue. Without me.
“To Emily,” Thea added suddenly, her glass still raised, her eyes on Jameson. “May she rest in peace.”
Jameson’s glass came down. His chair was pushed roughly back from the table. Farther down, Grayson’s fingers tightened around the stem of his own glass, his knuckles going white.
“Theadora,” Constantine hissed.
Thea took a drink and adopted the world’s most innocent expression. “What?”
Everything in me wanted to follow Jameson, but I waited a few minutes before excusing myself. Like that would keep any of them from knowing exactly where I was going.
In the foyer, I pressed my hand flat against the wall panels, hitting the sequence designed to reveal the coat closet door. I needed my coat if I was going to venture off into the Black Wood. I was sure that was where Jameson had gone.
As my hand hooked around the hanger, a voice spoke from behind me. “I’m not going to ask you what Jameson is up to. What you’re up to.”
I turned to face Grayson. “You’re not going to ask me,” I repeated, taking in the set of his jaw and those canny silver eyes, “because you already know.”
“I was there last night. At the bridge.” There were edges in Grayson’s tone—not rough, but sharp. “This morning, I went to see the Red Will.”
“I still have the decoder,” I pointed out, trying not to read anything into the fact that he’d seen his brother and me at the bridge—and didn’t sound happy about it.
Grayson shrugged, his shoulders pulling against the confines of his suit. “Red acetate is easy enough to come by.”
If he’d seen the Red Will, he knew that their middle names were clues. I wondered if his mind had gone immediately to their fathers. I wondered if that hurt him, the way it hurt Jameson.
“You were there last night,” I said, echoing back what he’d told me. “At the bridge.” How much had he seen? How much did he know?
What had he thought when Jameson and I had touched?
“Westbrook. Davenport. Winchester. Blackwood.” Grayson took a step toward me. “They’re last names—but they are also locations. I found the clue on the bridge after you and my brother had gone.”
He’d followed us there. He’d found what we’d found.
“What do you want, Grayson?”
“If you were smart,” he warned softly, “you’d stay away from Jameson. From the game.” He looked down. “From me.” Emotion slashed across his features, but he masked it before I could tell what, exactly, he was feeling. “Thea’s right,” he said sharply, turning away from me—walking away from me. “This family—we destroy everything we touch.”
CHAPTER 52
I knew from the map roughly where the Black Wood was. I found Jameson on the outskirts, standing eerily still, like he couldn’t move. Without warning, he broke that stillness, punching furiously at a nearby tree, hard and fast, the bark tearing at his hands.
Thea brought up Emily. This is what even the mention of her name does to him.
“Jameson!” I was almost to him now. He jerked his head toward me, and I stopped, overwhelmed with the feeling that I shouldn’t have been there, that I had no right to witness any of the Hawthorne boys hurting that much.
The only thing I could think to do was try to make what I’d just seen matter less. “Broken any fingers lately?” I asked lightly. The Pretending It Doesn’t Matter Game.
Jameson was ready and willing to play. He held his hands up, grunting as he bent them at the knuckles. “Still intact.”
I dragged my eyes from him and took in our surroundings. The perimeter was so densely wooded that if the trees hadn’t already shed their leaves, no light would have been able to make it to the forest floor.
“What are we looking for?” I asked. Maybe he didn’t consider me a real partner in this hunt. Maybe there was no real we—but he answered.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Heiress.”
All around us, bare branches stretched up overhead, skeletal and crooked.
“You skipped school today to do something,” I pointed out. “You have a guess.”
Jameson smiled like he couldn’t feel the blood welling up on his hands. “Four middle names. Four locations. Four clues—carvings, most likely. Symbols, if the clue on the bridge was infinity; numbers, if it was an eight.”
I wondered what, if anything, he’d done to clear his mind between last night and entering the Black Wood. Climbing. Racing. Jumping.
Disappearing into the walls.
“Do you know how many trees four acres can hold, Heiress?” Jameson asked jauntily. “Two hundred, in a healthy forest.”
“And in the Black Wood?” I prompted, taking first one step toward him, then another.
“At least twice that.”
It was like the library all over again. Like the keys. There had to be a shortcut, a trick we weren’t seeing.
“Here.” Jameson bent down, then placed a roll of glow-in-the-dark duct tape in my hand, letting his fingers brush mine as he did. “I’ve been marking off trees as I check them.”
I concentrated on his words—not his touch. Mostly. “There has got to be a better way,” I said, turning the duct tape over in my hands, my eyes finding their way to his once more.
Jameson’s lips twisted into a lazy, devil-may-care smirk. “Got any suggestions, Mystery Girl?”
Two days later, Jameson and I were still doing things the hard way, and we still hadn’t found anything. I could see him becoming more and more single-minded. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne would push until he hit a wall. I wasn’t sure what he would do to break through it this time, but every once in a while, I caught him looking at me in a way that made me think he had some ideas.
That was how he was looking at me now. “We aren’t the only ones searching for the next clue,” he said as dusk began to give way to darkness. “I saw Grayson with a map of the woods.”
“Thea’s tailing me,” I said, ripping off a piece of tape, hyperaware of the silence all around us. “The only way I can shake her is when she sees an opportunity to mess with Xander.”
Jameson brushed gently past me and marked off the next tree over. “Thea holds a grudge, and when she and Xander broke up, it was ugly.”
“They dated?” I slid past Jameson and searched the next tree, running my fingers over the bark. “Thea is practically your cousin.”
“Constantine is Zara’s second husband. The marriage is recent, and Xander’s always been a fan of loopholes.”
Nothing with the Hawthorne brothers was ever simple—including what Jameson and I were doing now. Since we’d worked our way to the center of the forest, the trees were spread farther apart. Up ahead, I could see a large open space—the only place in the Black Wood where grass was able to grow on the forest floor.
My back to Jameson, I moved to a new tree and began running my hands over the bark. Almost immediately, my fingers hit a groove.
“Jameson.” It wasn’t pitch-dark yet, but there was little enough light in the woods that I couldn’t entirely make out what I’d found until Jameson appeared beside me, shining an extra light. I ran my fingers slowly over the letters carved into the tree.
TOBIAS HAWTHORNE II
Unlike the first symbol we’d found, these letters weren’t smooth. The carving hadn’t been done with an even hand. The name looked like it had been carved by a child.
“The I’s at the end are a Roman numeral,” Jameson said, his voice going electric. “Tobias Hawthorne the Second.”
Toby, I thought, and then I heard a crack. A deafening echo followed, and the world exploded. Bark flying. My body thrown backward.
“Get down!” Jameson yelled.
I barely heard him. My brain couldn’t process what I was hearing, what had just happened. I’m bleeding.
Pain.
Jameson grabbed me and pulled me toward the ground. The next thing I knew, his body was over mine and the sound of a second gunshot rang out.
Gun. Someone’s shooting at us. There was a stabbing pain in my chest. I’ve been shot.
I heard footsteps beating against the forest floor, and then Oren yelled, “Stay down!” Weapon drawn, my bodyguard put himself between us and the shooter. A small eternity passed. Oren took off running in the direction the shots had come from, but I knew, with a prescience I couldn’t explain, that the shooter was gone.
“Are you okay, Avery?” Oren doubled back. “Jameson, is she okay?”
“She’s bleeding.” That was Jameson. He’d pulled back from my body and was looking down at me.
My chest throbbed, just below my collarbone, where I’d been hit.
“Your face.” Jameson’s touch was light against my skin. The moment his fingertips skimmed lightly over my cheekbone, the nerves in my face were jarred alive. Hurts.
“Did they shoot me twice?” I asked, dazed.
“The assailant didn’t shoot you at all.” Oren made quick work of displacing Jameson and ran his hands expertly over my body, checking for damage. “You got hit by a couple of pieces of bark.” He probed at the wound below my collarbone. “The other cut’s just a scratch, but the bark’s lodged deep in this one. We’ll leave it until we’re ready to stitch you up.”
