Page 49 of The Final Gambit

“What about older siblings?” Jameson asked.

One father, two sons…

“None of those, either. By the time Tobias met my Alice, he was well and truly alone. Father died of a heart attack when Tobias was a teenager. Mother only outlasted the father by about a year.”

“What about mentors?” Jameson asked. I could practically see him playing out a dozen different scenarios in his mind. “Father figures? Friends?”

“Tobias Hawthorne was never in the business of making friends. He was in the business of making money. He was a single-minded bastard, wily and brutal.” Nan’s voice shook. “But he was good to my Alice. To me.”

“Family first,” Jameson said softly beside me.

“No man has ever built an empire without doing a thing or two they aren’t proud of, but Tobias didn’t let that follow him home. His hands weren’t always clean, but he never once raised them—not to Alice or their children or you boys.”

“You would have killed him if he had,” Jameson said affectionately.

“The mouth on you,” Nan chided.

His hands weren’t always clean.That single phrase sent me back to the first message we’d received from Toby’s kidnapper. At the time, it had seemed likely that the target of revenge was either Toby or me. But what if it was Tobias Hawthorne himself?

What if this—all of it—had always been about the old man?What if I’m just the onehechose? What if Toby is justhislost son?The possibility took hold of my mind, gripped it like fingernails digging into flesh.

“What did your son-in-law do?” I asked. “Why weren’t his hands clean?”

Nan offered no reply to that question.

Jameson reached out and took her hand. “If I told you that someone wanted revenge against the Hawthorne family—”

Nan patted the side of his face. “I’d tell that person to get in line.”

CHAPTER 38

Identify your assumptions. Question them. Negate them.As I stepped out of the chapel, I felt like a shell over my brain had been cracked wide open, and now possibilities were streaming in from every side.

What would I have done from the very beginning if I’d assumed that Toby had been taken as revenge for something that his father had done? I thought about Eve talking about Hawthorne secrets—dark secrets, maybe even dangerous ones—and then about Nan and her talk of empires and dirty hands.

What had Tobias Hawthorne done on his way to the top? Once he’d amassed all that money and all that power, what had he used it to do?And to whom?

My brain sorting through possible next moves at warp speed, I turned to Oren. “You tracked threats against Tobias Hawthorne, back when you were his head of security. He had a List, like mine.”

List, capital L, threats. People who required watching.

“Mr. Hawthorne had a List,” Oren confirmed. “But it was a bit different than yours.”

My List was heavy on strangers. From the moment I’d been named Tobias Hawthorne’s heir, I’d been thrust into the kind of worldwide spotlight that automatically came with online death threats and would-be stalkers, people who wanted to be me and people who wanted to hurt me.

It was always worse right after a new story broke.Like now.

“Would my grandfather’s List happen to be a list of people he screwed over?” Jameson asked Oren.

He saw what I did: If Toby’s captor was telling a story about envy, revenge, and triumphing over an old enemy, Tobias Hawthorne’s List was a hell of a place to start.

Jameson and I caught the others up to speed, and Oren had the List delivered to the solarium. The room had glass walls and a glass ceiling, so no matter where you stood, you could feel the sun on your skin. After our near all-nighter, the seven of us were going to need all the help staying awake that we could get.

Especially because this was going to take a while.

Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t just had a list of names. He’d had file folders like the one he’d assembled on me, but for hundreds of people. Hundreds ofthreats.

“You tracked all these people?” I asked Oren, staring at the stack and stacks of files.