Page 84 of The Final Gambit

Jameson left, the way Grayson had.

“Let’s get you back up to the House,” Oren said. He didn’t offer any commentary on what had just happened.

I didn’t let myself think about Jameson or Grayson. I thought about the rest of it instead, about Vincent Blake’s missing son andvengeanceand the games that Blake was never going to stop playing with me. The stories in the tabloids, the paparazzi, financial assaults from every side, trying to chip away at my security team, and the entire time, taunting me that he had Toby.

Clue after clue.

Riddle after riddle.

I was sick of it. When I got back to the House, I went to get the phone Blake had sent me. I called the only number I had for him, and when he didn’t answer, I started placing other calls from my real phone—to every person who had received a coveted invitation to the owner’s suite ofmyNFL team, to every player in Texas society who had tried to cozy up to me at a charity gala, every person who’d wanted my buy-in for afinancial opportunity.

Money attracted money. Power attracted power. And I was done waiting for the next clue.

It took some time, but I found someone who had Vincent Blake’s cell phone number and was willing to give it to me, no questions asked. My heart beat with the force of punch after punch in my chest as I dialed the number.

When Blake answered, I didn’t bother with pretense. “I know about Eve. I know about your son.”

“Do you?”

Questions and riddles and games.No more.“What do youwant?” I asked. I wondered if he could hear my anger—and every ounce of emotion buried underneath.

I wondered if that made him think he was winning.

“What do I want, Avery Kylie Grambs?” Vincent Blake sounded amused. “Guess.”

“I’m done guessing.”

Silence greeted me on the other end of the line—but he was still there. He didn’t hang up. And I wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence first.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Blake said at long last. “I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son. And I want you, Avery Kylie Grambs, to dig up the past and bring me his body.”

CHAPTER 65

Vincent Blake believed his son was dead. He believed the body washere. I thought about the Blake family seal, the fact that Toby had stolen it, his father’s reaction when he had.

You know what I left there, Toby had written my mother long ago.You know what it’s worth.A teenage Toby had stolen the seal—and left a hidden copy of “A Poison Tree” by William Blake for his father to find.

“He wanted you to know that he knew the truth.” It felt right somehow to be addressing Tobias Hawthorne. This was his legacy.

All of it.

“What did you do,” I whispered, “when you found Vincent Blake’s son on your property?”

When he’d realized that a man had come at him through a sixteen-year-old girl. That girl might have fancied herself in love, but Tobias Hawthorne wouldn’t have seen it that way. Will Blake was in his twenties. Mallory was only sixteen.

And unlike Vincent Blake, Tobias Hawthorne didn’t believe thatboys would be boys.

What happened to him?I could hear Eve asking.Your Liam.And all Mallory Laughlin had said wasLiam left.

Why did he leave?

He just did.

I started walking and ended up in Toby’s old wing, reading the lines of “A Poison Tree” and the diary that Toby had kept in invisible ink on his walls. I understood young Toby’s anger now, in a way I hadn’t before.He knew something.

About his father.

About the reason the adoption was kept secret.