The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

Your move.”

I’m back in the park, playing chess opposite Harry. Toby. The second I think the name, his face changes. The beard is gone, his face bruised and swollen.

“Who did this to you?” I ask, my voice echoing and echoing until I can barely hear myself think. “Toby, you have to tell me.”

If only I can get him to tell me, I’ll know.

“Your move.” Toby thunks the black knight into a new position on the board.

I look down, but suddenly, I can’t see any of the pieces. There’s only shadows and fog where each of them should be.

“Your move, Avery Kylie Grambs.”

I whip my head up because it’s not Toby’s voice that says the words this time.

Tobias Hawthorne stares back at me from across the table. “The thing about strategy,” he says, “is that you always have to be thinking seven moves ahead.” He leans across the table.

The next thing I know, he has me by the neck.

“Some people kill two birds with one stone,” he says, strangling me. “I kill twelve.”

I woke up frozen, locked in my own body, my heart in my throat, unable to breathe. Just a dream. I managed to suck in oxygen and roll sideways off my bed, landing in a crouch. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was still dark outside. I looked up at the bed.

Jameson wasn’t there. That happened sometimes when his brain wouldn’t stop. The only question tonight was stop what?

Trying to shake off the last remnants of the dream, I strapped on my knife then went to look for him, making my way to Tobias Hawthorne’s study.

The study was empty. No Jameson. I found myself staring at the wall of trophies the Hawthorne grandsons had won—and not just trophies. Books they’d published, patents they’d been granted. Proof that Tobias Hawthorne had made his grandsons extraordinary.

He’d made them in his own image.

The dead billionaire had always thought seven moves ahead, always killed twelve birds with one stone. How many times had the boys told me that? Still, I couldn’t help feeling like my subconscious had just served up a warning—and not about Tobias Hawthorne.

Someone else was out there, strategizing, thinking seven steps ahead. A storyteller telling a story—and making moves all the while.

I always win in the end.

Frustration building inside me, I pushed open the balcony doors. I let the night air hit my face, breathed it in. Down below, Grayson was in the pool, swimming in the dead of night, the pool lit just enough that I could make out his form. The moment I saw him, memory took me.

A crystal glass sits on the table in front of him. His hands lay on either side of the glass, the muscles in them tensed, like he might push off at any moment. I didn’t let myself sink into the memory, but another slice of it hit me anyway as I watched Grayson swimming down below.

“You saved that little girl,” I say.

“Immaterial.” Haunted silver eyes meet mine. “She was easy to save.”

Another outdoor light turned on below. The motion sensor by the pool. My hand went to my knife, and I was on the verge of calling out for security when I saw the person who had tripped the sensor.

Eve was wearing a nightgown, one of mine that I didn’t remember her taking. It hit her mid-thigh. A breeze caught the material the second before Grayson saw her. From this distance, I couldn’t make out the expressions on their faces. I couldn’t hear what either of them said.

But I saw Grayson pull himself from the pool.

“Avery.”

I turned. “Jameson. I woke up, and you weren’t there.”

“Hawthorne insomnia. I had a lot on my mind.” Jameson pushed past me and looked down. I took that as permission to look again, too. To see Grayson placing an arm around Eve. He’s wet. She doesn’t care.

“How long would you have stood here, watching them, if I hadn’t come?” Jameson asked, an odd tone in his voice.

“I already told you, I’m worried about Grayson.” My mouth felt like cotton.

“Heiress.” Jameson turned back to me. “That’s not what I meant.”

A ball rose in my throat. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Slowly, deliberately, Jameson pushed me up against the wall. He waited, as he always did, for my nod, then obliterated the space between us. His lips crushed mine. My legs wrapped around him as his body pinned mine to the wall.

Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.

“That was very… specific,” I said, trying to catch my breath. He was still holding on to me, and I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know why he’d needed to kiss me like that. “I’m with you, Jameson,” I said. “I want to be with you.”

Then why do you care how Grayson looks at her? The question was alive in the air between us, but Jameson didn’t ask it.

“It was always going to be Grayson,” he said, letting go of me.

“No,” I insisted. I reached for him, pulled him back.

“For Emily,” Jameson told me. “It was always going to be Grayson. She and I—we were too much alike.”

“You are nothing like Emily,” I said fiercely. Emily had used them, both of them. She’d played them against each other.

“You didn’t know her,” Jameson told me. “You didn’t know me back then.”

“I know you now.”

He looked at me with an expression that made me ache. “I know about the wine cellar, Heiress.”

My heart stilled in my chest, my throat closing in around a breath I couldn’t expel. I pictured Grayson on his knees in front of me. “What is it you think you know?”

“Gray was in a bad place.” Jameson’s tone was a perfect match for that expression on his face—cavernous and full of something. “You went down to check on him. And…”

“And what, Jameson?” I stared at him, trying to anchor myself to this moment, but unable to completely banish memories I had no right to hold.

“And the next day, Grayson couldn’t look at you. Or me. He left for Harvard three days early.”

Comprehension washed over me. “No,” I insisted. “Whatever you’re thinking, Jameson—I would never do that to you.”

“I know that, Heiress.”

“Do you?” I asked, because his voice had gone hoarse. He wasn’t acting like he knew.

“It’s not you who I don’t trust.”

“Grayson wouldn’t—”

“It’s not my brother, either.” Jameson gave me a look, dark and twisted, full of longing. “Trustworthiness has never really been my thing, Heiress.”

That sounded like something Jameson would have said when we first met. “Don’t say that,” I told him. “Don’t talk about yourself that way.”

“Gray has always been so perfect,” Jameson said. “It’s inhuman how good he was at just about everything. If we were competing—at anything, really—and I wanted to win, I couldn’t do it by being better. I had to be worse. I had to cross lines that he wouldn’t, take risks—the bigger and more unfathomable to him the better.”

I thought about Skye and the way she’d told me once that Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was hungry.

“I never learned how to be good or honorable, Heiress.” Jameson placed a hand on either side of my face, pushed his fingers back into my hair. “I learned how to be bad in the most strategic ways. But now? With you?” He shook his head. “I want to be better than that. I do. I don’t ever want for you—for us, for this—to become a game.” He trailed his thumb down my jawline, his fingers lightly skimming my cheekbone. “So if you decide you’re not sure about this, Heiress, about me—”

“I am sure,” I told him, capturing his hands in mine. I pressed his knuckles to my mouth and realized they were swollen. “I am, Jameson.”

“You have to be.” There was an urgency to Jameson’s words, a need. “Because I’m terrible at hurting, Heiress. And if what we have now—if everything we have now—starts to feel like another competition between Grayson and me, like a game? I don’t trust myself not to play.”