Page 71 of The Inheritance Games

“Em didn’t like to choose.” Rebecca seemed to be picking her words carefully. “She wantedeverythingmore than I wanted anything. And the one time I wanted something…” She shook her head and aborted that sentence. “My job was to keep my sister happy. It’s something my parents used to tell me when we were little—that Emily was sick, and I wasn’t, so I should do what I could to make her smile.”

“And the boys?” I asked.

“They made her smile.”

I read into what Rebecca was saying—what she’d been saying.Em didn’t like to choose.“She dated both of them?” I tried to get a handle on that. “Did they know?”

“Not at first,” Rebecca whispered, like some part of her thought Emily might hear us talking.

“What happened when Grayson and Jameson found out she was dating both of them?”

“You’re only asking that because you didn’t know Emily,” Rebecca said. “She didn’t want to choose, and neither one of them wanted to let her go. She turned it into a competition. A little game.”

And then she died.

“How did Emily die?” I asked, because I might never get another opening like this one—not with Rebecca, not with the boys.

Rebecca was looking at me, but I got the general sense that she wasn’t seeing me. That she was somewhere else. “Grayson told me that it was her heart,” she whispered.

Grayson.I couldn’t think beyond that. It wasn’t until Rebecca had left that I had realized she’d never gotten around to telling me what, specifically, sheoughtto have been warning me about.

CHAPTER 56

It was another three hours before Oren and his team cleared me to go back to Hawthorne House. I rode back in the ATV withthreebodyguards.

Oren was the only one who spoke. “Due in part to Hawthorne House’s extensive network of security cameras, my team was able to track and verify locations and alibis for all members of the Hawthorne family, as well as Ms. Thea Calligaris.”

They have alibis. Grayson has an alibi.I felt a rush of relief, but a moment later, my chest tightened. “What about Constantine?” I asked. Technically, he wasn’t a Hawthorne.

“Clear,” Oren told me. “He did not personally wield that gun.”

Personally.Reading between those lines shook me. “But he might have hired someone?”Any of them might have,I realized. I could hear Grayson telling me that there would always be people tripping over themselves to do favors for his family.

“I know a forensic investigator,” Oren said evenly. “He works alongside an equally skilled hacker. They’ll take a deep dive into everyone’s finances and cell phone records. In the meantime, my team is going to focus on the staff.”

I swallowed. I hadn’t even met most of the staff. I didn’t know exactly how many of them there were, or who might have had opportunity—or motive. “The entire staff?” I asked Oren. “Including the Laughlins?” They’d been kind to me after I’d emerged from washing up, but right now I couldn’t afford to trust my gut—or Oren’s.

“They’re clear,” Oren told me. “Mr. Laughlin was at the House during the shooting, and security footage confirms Mrs. Laughlin was at the cottage.”

“What about Rebecca?” I asked. She’d left the estate right after talking to me.

I could see Oren wanting to say that Rebecca wasn’t a threat, but he didn’t. “No stone will be left unturned,” he promised. “But I do know that the Laughlin girls never learned to shoot. Mr. Laughlin wasn’t even allowed to keep a gun at the cottage when they were present.”

“Who else was on the premises today?” I asked.

“Pool maintenance, a sound technician working on upgrades in the theater, a massage therapist, and one of the cleaning staff.”

I committed that list to memory, then my mouth went dry. “Which cleaning staff?”

“Melissa Vincent.”

The name meant nothing to me—until it did. “Mellie?”

Oren’s eyes narrowed. “You know her?”

I thought of the moment she’d seen Nash outside Libby’s room.

“Something I should know?” Oren asked—and it wasn’t really a question. I told him what Alisa had said about Mellie and Nash, what I’d seen in Libby’s room, whatMelliehad seen. And then we pulled up to Hawthorne House, and I saw Alisa.