Page 10 of The Final Gambit

“Because she’s Toby’s daughter,” Grayson replied, “and that makes her one of us.”

My fingers went to my pin.Eve’s a Hawthorne.That shouldn’t have hurt. It wasn’t news. Eve was Toby’s daughter—but it was already clear to me that Grayson didn’t see her as a cousin.She isn’t related to them by blood. They didn’t grow up together.So when Grayson said that she was one of them, that they owed her protection, all I could think was that he’d once spoken similar words about me.

Est unus ex nobis. Nos defendat eius.

“Can we please just focus on Toby?” I said. Grayson must have heard something in my tone because he stepped back.

Stepped down.

I turned to Jameson. “Pretend for a second that you trust Eve. Pretend she looks nothing like Emily. Pretend she’s telling the truth. Other than Oren’s search, what’s our next move?”

This was what Jameson and I did: questions and answers, looking for what other people missed. If he wouldn’t do this with me, if seeing Eve had thrown him off that much…

“Motive,” Jameson supplied finally. “If we want to find out who took Toby, we need to knowwhythey took him.”

Logically, I could think of three broad possibilities. “They want something from him. They want to use him as leverage.” I swallowed. “Or they want to hurt him.”

They knew his real name. Somehow, they knew how to find him.

“There has to be something we’re missing,” I said. I needed this to be a puzzle. I needed there to be clues.

“You mentioned that Eve said the person who knocked her out went through her pockets.” Jameson had a way of playing with the facts of a situation, turning them over like a coin spun from finger to finger. “So what were they looking for?”

What did Toby have that someone else might want badly enough to kidnap him to get it? What could possibly be worth that kind of risk?

What fits in a pocket?My heart nearly exploded in my chest.

What mystery had Jameson and I spent the last nine months trying to solve?

“The disk,” I breathed.

The door to the bathroom opened. Eve stood there, wrapped in a white towel, wet hair trailing down the sides of her neck. She wore a locket and nothing else except the towel. Grayson tried very hard not to look at her.

Jameson looked at me.

“Did you need something?” I asked Eve. Her hair was darker wet, less remarkable. Without it to distract from her face, her eyes looked bigger, her cheekbones higher.

“Bandage,” Eve replied. If she was self-conscious about standing there in a towel, she didn’t show it. “My cut split open in the shower.”

“I’ll help you,” I volunteered before Grayson could. The sooner I tended to Eve, the sooner I could get back to Jameson and the possibility I’d just breathed into being.

What if the person who took Toby was after the disk?My mind racing, I led Eve back into the bathroom.

“What disk?” she asked behind me. I pulled out a first aid kit and handed it to her. She took it from me, her fingers brushing mine. “When I came into the room, you were talking about what happened to Toby,” she said stubbornly. “You mentioned a disk.”

I wondered how much else she’d heard and whether she’d meant to eavesdrop. Maybe Jameson was right. Maybe we couldn’t trust her.

“It might be nothing,” I said, brushing off the question.

“What might be nothing?” Eve pressed. When I didn’t answer, she dropped another question like a bomb. “Who’s Emily?”

I swallowed. “A girl.” That wasn’t a lie, but it was so far from the truth that I couldn’t leave it there. “She died. The two of you—you’re related.”

Eve chose a bandage and pushed her wet hair back from her face. I almost offered to help her, but something held me back. “Toby told me he was adopted,” she said, fixing the bandage in place. “But he wouldn’t tell me anything about his biological family—or the Hawthornes.”

She waited, like she expected me to tell her something. When I didn’t, she looked down. “I know that you don’t trust me,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust me, either. You have everything, and I have nothing, and I know how that looks.”

So did I. From experience,so did I.