We found the remains.
I brought out my phone, ready to place the call to Blake, but before I could pull the trigger, it rang. I glanced at caller ID and stopped breathing.
“Alisa?” I forced my lungs to start working again. “Are you—”
“Going to kill Grayson Hawthorne?” Alisa said evenly. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
Just hearing her voice—and the absolute normality of her tone—sent a shock wave of relief through me. It was like I’d been carrying extra weight and pressure in every cell in my body, and suddenly, all that tension was gone.
And then I processed what Alisa had said.
“Grayson?” I repeated, my heart seizing in my chest. “He’s the reason Blake let me go. A trade.”
I should have known when he hadn’t come with us to find the body. Grayson Hawthorne and his grand gestures. Frustration, fear, and something almost painfully tender threatened to bring tears to my eyes.
“Your brother’s playing sacrificial lamb,” I told Jameson, trying to let that first emotion mute the rest. Xander heard my terse statement, too, and Nash appeared behind them.
“Alisa?” he said.
“She’s fine,” I reported. And this time, we’ll take care of her. “Oren, can you have someone bring her in?”
Oren gave a curt nod, but the expression in his eyes betrayed how glad he was that she was okay. “Give me the phone, and I’ll coordinate a pickup.”
I passed the phone to him.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Jameson told me. “Blake still has the upper hand.”
He had Grayson. There was a terrifying symmetry to that. Tobias Hawthorne had stolen Vincent Blake’s grandson—and now he had Tobias Hawthorne’s.
He has Toby. He has Grayson. And I have his son’s remains. All I had to do was give Vincent Blake what he wanted, and this would be over.
Or at least, that was what Blake wanted me to believe.
But Tobias Hawthorne’s final message hadn’t just cautioned me that Blake would be coming for the truth, for proof. No, Tobias Hawthorne had told me that Blake would be coming for me, that he would box me in, hold me down, have no mercy. Tobias Hawthorne had been expecting a full-on assault on his empire. Assuming he’d projected correctly, Vincent Blake wasn’t just after the truth.
He is coming. For the fortune. For my legacy. For you, Avery Kylie Grambs.
But Tobias Hawthorne—manipulative, Machiavellian man that he was—had also thought that I had a sliver of a chance. I just had to outplay Blake.
Take as your consolation this, my very risky gamble: I have watched you. I have come to know you. The words pumped through my body like blood, my heart beating out a brutal, uncompromising rhythm. Tobias Hawthorne had believed that Blake would underestimate me.
On the phone, he’d called me little girl.
What did that mean? That he expects me to react, not act. That he thinks I’ll never look ahead.
I forced myself to stop, to slow down, to think. All around me, the others were fighting loudly about next moves. But I shut out the sound of Jameson’s voice, of Nash’s and Xander’s, Oren’s, everyone’s. And eventually, I circled back to the Queen’s Gambit. I thought about how it required ceding control of the board. It required a loss.
And it worked best when your opponent thought it was a rookie error, rather than strategy.
A plan took shape in my mind. It ossified. And I made a call.
