Page 16 of The Final Gambit

“I don’t know,” Jameson replied intensely, “but I do know what it says.”

I stared at the letters scattered across the page.

A

RE

ANCE

A R

“It’s a simple trick,” Jameson told me. “One of my grandfather’s favorites. You decode the message by inserting the same sequence of letters into every blank. Five letters, in this case.”

My heart brutalizing the inside of my rib cage, I tried to focus. What five letters could go afterAorREand beforeANCE?

After a few seconds, I saw it. Slowly, painstakingly, my brain ticked off the answer, letter by letter. “V.E.N.” I took a sharp breath. “G.E.”

Venge.Completed, the message was anything but comforting. “Avenge,” I made myself say out loud. “Revenge. Vengeance.” Decoded, the last line seemed more like a signature.

My eyes flashed to Jameson’s, and he said it for me. “Avenger.”

CHAPTER 13

Itexted Grayson and Xander. When they met us in the circular library, Eve was with them. Wordlessly, I held up the disk. Hesitantly, Eve took it from me, and the room went silent.

“How much did you say it was worth?” she asked, her voice a jagged whisper.

I shook my head. “We don’t know, not exactly—but a lot.” It was another four or five seconds before Eve reluctantly handed the disk back to me.

“There was a message?” Grayson asked, and I passed the paper over. “They didn’t demand a ransom,” he noted, his voice almost too calm.

My chest burned like I’d been holding a breath for far too long, even though I hadn’t. “No,” I said. “They didn’t.” The day before, I’d come up with three motives for kidnapping.The kidnapper wanted something from Toby. The kidnapper wanted to use Toby as leverage.

Or the kidnapper wanted to hurt him.

One of those options seemed much more likely now.

Xander craned his neck over Grayson’s shoulder to get a closer look at the note. He decoded the message as quickly as Jameson had. “Revenge themed. Cheery.”

“Revenge for what?” Eve asked desperately.

The obvious answer had occurred to me the moment I’d decoded the message, and it hit me again now with the force of a shovel swung at my gut. “Hawthorne Island,” I said. “The fire.”

More than two decades earlier, Toby had been a reckless, out-of-control teenager. The fire that the world presumed had taken his life had also taken the lives of three other young people.David Golding. Colin Anders Wright. Kaylie Rooney.

“Three victims.” Jameson began circling the room like a panther on the prowl. “Three families. How many suspects does that give us in total?”

Eve moved, too, toward Grayson. “What fire?”

Xander popped between them. “The one that Toby accidentally-but-kind-of-on-purpose set. It’s a long, tragic story involving daddy issues, inebriated teenagers, premeditated arson, and a freak lightning strike.”

“Three victims.” I repeated what Jameson had said, but my eyes went to Grayson’s. “Three families.”

“One yours,” Grayson replied. “And one mine.”

My mom’s sister had died in the fire on Hawthorne Island. Billionaire Tobias Hawthorne had saved his own family’s reputation by pinning the blame for the fire on her. Kaylie Rooney’s family—my mom’s family—was full of criminals. The violent kind.

The kind who hated Hawthornes.