Page 43 of The Final Gambit

“Is Rebecca—”

“Someone got a picture of Eve standing outside the gates of Hawthorne House. It just went live.”

I winced. “Was that the bad news or—”

“It went live,” Thea continued, “on the internet’s biggest gossip site, alongside a picture of Emily and an exposé on rumors that Emily Laughlin was killed by Grayson and Jameson Hawthorne.”

CHAPTER 32

Itexted Alisa first. Handling scandals like this was part of her job. Breaking the news to the boys and Eve was harder. Forcing my mouth to say the words felt like breaking my ankle.A moment of wrongness. A sickcrunch. The shock.Then the shock wore off.

“This is bullshit,” Nash bit out. He took a breath, then turned discerning eyes on his brothers. “Jamie? Gray?”

“I’m fine.” Grayson’s face was like stone.

“And in keeping with my general superiority in our sibling relationship,” Jameson added with a sardonic smile that was just a little too sharp, “I am better than fine.”

This was Luke’s doing. It had to be.

Eve pulled the gossip site up on her phone. She stared at it. Her own picture. Emily’s.

I flashed back to that moment in Toby’s wing when she’d told me that she didn’t look like anyone in her family.

“Why does it say you killed her?” Eve asked, her voice reedy. She didn’t look up from her phone, but I knew who she was addressing that question to.

“Because,” Grayson replied, his voice blade-edged, “we did.”

“Like hell you did,” Nash swore. He looked around at the rest of us. “What’s the rule about fightin’ dirty?” he asked. No one answered. “Gray? Jamie?” He swiveled his gaze to me.

“There’s no such thing as fighting dirty,” I said lowly, “if you win.” I wanted to win. I wanted to get Toby back. I wanted to take the bastard who had kidnapped him—the bastard who had just done this to Jameson and Grayson and Eve—down.

“Fighting dirty?” Eve asked, finally looking up from the website. “Is that what you call this? My face is going to be everywhere.”

This was exactly what Tobyhadn’twanted.

“Glitter cannon,” Xander said.

I shot him a look. This really wasn’t the time for levity—or sparkles.

“This right here is a glitter cannon,” Xander reiterated. “Detonate one in the middle of a game, and it makes a huge mess. The kind that gets everywhere, sticks to everything.”

Grayson’s expression hardened. “And runs down the clock while you clean it up.”

“While youtryto clean it up,” Libby said gently. She’d been quiet in all of this, but my sister had empathy in spades, and she didn’t have to know Grayson or Jameson or even Eve as well as I did to know how hard they’d been hit.

“Some things don’t clean easy,” Nash agreed in a slow, steady drawl, his eyes finding Libby’s like it was the most natural thing in the world. “You’ll think you’ve finally got it all. Everything’s fine. And then five years later…”

“There’s still glitter in Grayson’s bathroom,” Xander finished. I got the feeling that wasn’t a metaphor.

“Luke did this,” I said. “He set this up. He detonated the blast. He wants us distracted.”He wants to run down the clock. He wants us to lose.

Tick tock.

Eve turned her phone off and tossed it roughly onto the desk. “Screw the glitter,” she said. “I don’t want to figure out what happens to Toby if that timer hits zero.”

None of us did.

Xander played the conversation with Luke back again, and we got to work.