Page 89 of The Final Gambit

“Assuming this USB is my grandfather’s handiwork,” Grayson told her, “you would need a decoder to make sense of any of the files. A Hawthorne never leaves any knowledge of value unprotected.”

“So I’ll break the encryption,” Eve said dismissively.

Grayson arched an eyebrow at her. “Not without a second drive.”

A second drive.

“You can’t do this to me, Grayson. We’re the same, you and I.” There was something in the way Eve said that, something in her voice that made me think she believed it.

Grayson didn’t blink. “Not anymore.”

An instant later, Oren’s men came crashing through the door.

Oren turned to me. “How do you want to handle this, Avery?”

Eve had pointed a gun at me. That, at least, was a crime. Lying to us wasn’t. Manipulating us wasn’t. I couldn’t prove anything else. And she wasn’t therealenemy here.

The real threat.

“Have your men escort Eve off the estate,” I told Oren. “We’ll deal directly with Vincent Blake from now on.”

Eve didn’t make them drag her. “You haven’t won,” she told me. “He’ll keep coming—and sooner or later, all of you will wish to God that this had ended with me.”

CHAPTER 68

Oren left Grayson and me alone in the chapel.

“I owe you an apology.”

I met Grayson Hawthorne’s eyes, as light and piercing as they’d been the first time I saw him. “You don’t owe me anything,” I said—not out of compassion but because it hurt to let myself think about how much I’d expected from him.

“Yes. I do.” After a long moment, Grayson looked away. “I,” he said, like that one word cost him everything, “have been punishing myself for so long. Not just for Emily’s death—for every weakness, every miscalculation,every—” He cut off, like his windpipe had closed suddenly around the words. I watched as he forced a jagged breath into his lungs. “No matter what I was or what I did—it was never enough. The old man was always there, pushing for better, for more.”

I’d thought once that he had bulletproof confidence. That he was arrogant and incapable of second-guessing himself and utterly sure of his own power.

“And then,” Grayson said, “the old man was gone. And then… there was you.”

“Grayson.” His name caught in my throat.

Grayson just looked at me, his light eyes shadowed. “Sometimes, you have an idea of a person—about who they are, about what you’d be like together. But sometimes that’s all it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved theideaof Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.”

That was a confession and self-condemnation and a curse. “That’s not true, Grayson.”

He looked at me like the act of doing so was painful and sweet. “It was never just the idea of you, Avery.”

I tried not to feel like the ground was suddenly moving underneath my feet. “Youhatedthe idea of me.”

“But not you.” The words were just as sweet, just as painful. “Never you.”

Something gave inside me. “Grayson.”

“I know,” he said roughly.

I shook my head. “You’re still so convinced that you know everything.”

“I know that Jamie loves you.” Grayson looked at me the way you look at art in a glass case, like he wanted to reach out to touch me but couldn’t. “And I’ve seen the way that you look at him, the way the two of you are together. You’re in love with my brother, Avery.” He paused. “Tell me you’re not.”

I couldn’t do that. He knew I couldn’t. “I am in love with your brother,” I said, because it was true. Jameson was part of me now—part of who I’d spent the past year becoming. I’d changed. If I hadn’t, maybe things could have been different, but there was no going back.