The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Three moves later, I had him. “Checkmate. You know what that means, Harry.” He gave me a dirty look. “I have to let you buy me breakfast.” Those were the terms of our long-standing bet. When I won, he couldn’t turn down the free meal.

so I reached into the glove box and retrieved the only thing of value that my mother had left me: a stack of postcards. Dozens of them. Dozens of places we’d planned to go together.

Four grandsons. I couldn’t keep my mind from going back to the one Hawthorne I’d already met. Grayson. The perfectly tailored suit. The silvery gray eyes. The arrogance in the way he’d told me to assume he knew everything. Alisa gave me a knowing look. “Take it from someone who’s both been there and done that—never lose your heart to a Hawthorne.” “Don’t worry,” I told her, as annoyed with her assumption as I was with the fact that she’d been able to see any trace of my thoughts on my face. “I keep mine under lock and key.”

“Spend a lot of time in coat closets?” I asked. Xander dusted his hands off on his pants. “Secret passage,” he said, then attempted to dust off his pant legs with his hands. “This place is full of them.”

Objectively, Grayson’s mother was over the top. But subjectively? She was infectious.

They don’t know what’s in the will, either. I suddenly felt like I’d stepped into an arena, utterly unaware of the rules of the game.

“I assure you, there is no mistake.” Mr. Ortega met my gaze, then turned his attention to the others. “And I assure the rest of you, Tobias Hawthorne’s last will and testament is utterly unbreakable. Since the majority of the remaining details concern only Avery, we’ll cease with the dramatics. But let me make one thing very clear: Per the terms of the will, any heir who challenges Avery’s inheritance will forfeit their share of the estate entirely.”

I opened it and saw a screenshot of a news headline. Avery Grambs: Who Is the Hawthorne Heiress? A short message accompanied the picture. Hey, Mystery Girl. You’re officially famous.

I’d learned this much playing chess: The more complicated a person’s strategy seemed, the less likely an opponent was to look for simple answers. If you could keep someone looking at your knight, you could take them with a pawn. Look past the details. Past the complications.

The answer came from the intercom. “Sometimes,” Jameson Hawthorne said, sounding strangely contemplative, “things that appear very different on the surface are actually exactly the same at their core.”

“You’re protective,” Nash commented, “and you seem like you’d fight dirty, and if there’s one thing I respect, it’s those particular traits in combination.”

“There’s a chance that Hawthorne House is just a tiny bit hard to navigate. Imagine, if you will, that a labyrinth had a baby with Where’s Waldo?, only Waldo is your rooms.”

“That’s the thing, Mystery Girl. I don’t think I’m turning anything into a riddle. I don’t think I have to. You are a riddle, a puzzle, a game—my grandfather’s last.”

“Grayson thinks you’re some master manipulator. My aunt is convinced you must have Hawthorne blood. But I think you’re the old man’s final riddle—one last puzzle to be solved.” He took another step, bringing the two of us that much closer. “He chose you for a reason, Avery. You’re special, and I think he wanted us—wanted me—to figure out why.”

“Everything’s a game, Avery Grambs. The only thing we get to decide in this life is if we play to win.” He reached up to brush the hair from my face, and I jerked back.

Jameson, Better the devil you know than the one you don’t—or is it? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. All that glitters is not gold. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. There but for the grace of God go I. Don’t judge. —Tobias Tattersall Hawthorne

but it still felt like I’d wandered into a ballroom where everyone else was dancing a complicated waltz, twisting, spinning around me like I wasn’t even there.

“Oh, honey.” Thea shook her head. “If there’s one thing the Hawthorne family isn’t, it’s fine. They were a twisted, broken mess before you got here, and they’ll be a twisted, broken mess once you’re gone.”

Don’t judge. I’d missed most of my old English teacher’s lecture on proverbs, but there was only one I could think of that started with those two words. Does “Don’t judge a book by its cover” mean anything to you? I asked Jameson. His reply was immediate. Very good, Heiress. Then, a moment later: It sure as hell does.

“Everything is something in Hawthorne House.” Everything, I thought. And everyone.

“Her name was Emily,” he repeated. “And she wasn’t just a girl.” A breath caught in my throat. I forced it out and kept checking books, because I didn’t want him to know how much I’d heard in his tone. Emily mattered to him. She still matters to him.

I pushed past Grayson to make my way to the stairs. Jameson had found something. A book that doesn’t match its cover. That was an assumption on my part, but the instant I hit the second story and saw the smile on Jameson Hawthorne’s lips, I knew that I was right. He held up a hardcover book. I read the title. “Sail Away.” “And on the inside…” Jameson was a showman at heart. He removed the cover with a flourish and tossed me the book. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

“Why do I have to tell a story?” I asked. “Because if you don’t tell the story, someone else will tell it for you.” I turned to see Xander Hawthorne standing in the doorway, holding a plate of scones. “Makeovers,” he told me, “like the recreational building of Rube Goldberg machines, are hungry work.” I wanted to narrow my eyes, but Xander and his scones were glare-proof. “What do you know about makeovers?” I grumbled. “If I were a guy, there’d be two racks of clothing in this room, max.” “And if I were White,” Xander returned loftily, “people wouldn’t look at me like I’m half a Hawthorne. Scone?”

“Did Jameson tell you about the old man’s weekly riddles?” Nash asked as we walked. “Yeah,” I said. “He did.” “Sometimes,” Nash told me, “at the beginning of the game, the old man would lay out a collection of objects. A fishing hook, a price tag, a glass ballerina, a knife.” He shook his head in memory. “And by the time the puzzle was solved, damned if we hadn’t used all four.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I was so much older. I had an advantage. Jamie and Gray, they’d team up against me, then double-cross each other right at the end.”

“You might think you’re playing the game, darlin’, but that’s not how Jamie sees it.” Nash’s voice was gentle enough, but for the words. “We aren’t normal. This place isn’t normal, and you’re not a player, kid. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.”

My arms curved around him, and the ground beneath our feet began to move. The wall beside us was rotating, and we were rotating with it, my body pressed flat against his. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne’s. The motion stopped, and I stepped back. We were here for a reason—and that reason had exactly nothing to do with the way my body fit against his.

They’d been expected to be extraordinary. They’d been expected to win. “Am I just a means to an end, worth keeping around until you know how I fit into the puzzle?” “You are the puzzle, Mystery Girl.” Jameson believed that. “You could tap out,” he told me, “decide you can live without answers, or you could get them—with me.” An invitation. A challenge. I told myself that I was doing this because I needed to know—not because of him.

“Oh, don’t be a prude, Abigail,” Skye admonished from inside the bathroom. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we? I make it a policy to befriend everyone who steals my birthright.” I’d never seen passive aggression quite like this. “If you’re done messing with Avery,” Jameson interjected, “I’d like to have a little chat.”

“There’s no one like Jameson.” In no way had I meant to utter those words out loud. “You see?” Skye gave me a knowing look—the same one Alisa had given me my first day at Hawthorne House. “You’re already his.” Skye closed her eyes and lay back in the tub. “We used to lose him when he was little, you know. For hours, occasionally for a day. We’d look away for a second, and he’d disappear into the walls. And every time we found him, I’d pick him up and cuddle him tight and know, to the depths of my soul, that all he wanted was to get lost again.” She opened her eyes. “That’s all you are.” Skye stood up and grabbed a robe. I averted my eyes as she put it on. “Just another way to get lost. That’s what she was, too.”

And technically, I shouldn’t have left the estate. We shouldn’t have taken the car. We shouldn’t have been here. But somewhere around a hundred and fifty miles an hour, I stopped thinking about should. Adrenaline. Euphoria. Fear. There wasn’t room in my head for anything else. Speed was the only thing that mattered. That, and the boy beside me. I didn’t want him to slow down. I didn’t want the car to stop. For the first time since the reading of the will, I felt free. No questions. No suspicions. No one staring or not staring. Nothing except this moment, right here, right now. Nothing except Jameson Winchester Hawthorne and me.

I found Libby in the kitchen, surrounded by cupcakes. Literally hundreds of them. If she’d been an apology baker back home, the addition of an industrial-grade kitchen with triple ovens had basically taken her nuclear. “Libby?” I approached her cautiously. “Do you think I should go for red velvet or salted caramel next?” Libby was holding an icing bag with both hands. Blue hair had escaped her ponytail and was matted to her face. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “She’s been at it for hours,” Nash told me. He stood leaning back against a stainless-steel refrigerator, his thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his well-worn jeans. “Her phone’s been going off for just as long.”

I barely recognized myself in the pictures the paparazzi had taken. The girl in the photos was pretty and full of righteous fury. She looked as arrogant and dangerous as a Hawthorne. I didn’t feel like that girl.

“But…” Jameson’s lips curved upward, his teeth flashing. “You’ll figure it out.” He brought his lips near my ear. “We will, Heiress.” There is no we. Not really. I’m a means to an end for you. I believed that. I did, but somehow what I found myself saying was “Feel like a walk?”

I’d known, from the moment I’d said Emily’s name in Grayson’s presence, that she had mattered to him. But Jameson seemed pretty clear on the fact that he’d been the one involved with her. There is nothing that Emily and I didn’t do.

There were a lot of firsts I’d never gotten around to after my mother’s death. First dates. First kisses. First times. But this particular first—being dangled off a bridge by a boy who’d just confessed to watching his last girlfriend die—wasn’t exactly on the to-do list. If she was with you, why did you say that Grayson happened to her?

“You don’t like me much,” Thea noted. “That’s okay. I’m a hypercompetitive, bisexual perfectionist who likes to win and looks like this. I’m no stranger to being hated.”

“It is a story,” Xander said with a sigh, “involving star-crossed love, fake dating, tragedy, penance… and possibly vultures.”

“If I were a boy,” Thea told him with a Southern belle smile, “people would just call me driven.” “Thea.” Constantine frowned at her. “Right.” Thea dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “No feminism at the dinner table.” This time, I couldn’t bite back the snort. Point, Thea.

As my hand hooked around the hanger, a voice spoke from behind me. “I’m not going to ask you what Jameson is up to. What you’re up to.” I turned to face Grayson. “You’re not going to ask me,” I repeated, taking in the set of his jaw and those canny silver eyes, “because you already know.”

“If you were smart,” he warned softly, “you’d stay away from Jameson. From the game.” He looked down. “From me.” Emotion slashed across his features, but he masked it before I could tell what, exactly, he was feeling. “Thea’s right,” he said sharply, turning away from me—walking away from me. “This family—we destroy everything we touch.”

“You skipped school today to do something,” I pointed out. “You have a guess.” Jameson smiled like he couldn’t feel the blood welling up on his hands. “Four middle names. Four locations. Four clues—carvings, most likely. Symbols, if the clue on the bridge was infinity; numbers, if it was an eight.”

Something gave inside of me, and I pushed him gently back against the bathroom wall. I need this. His deep green eyes met mine. He needs it, too. “Yes?” I asked him hoarsely. “Yes, Heiress.” My lips closed over his. He kissed me back, gentle at first, then not gently at all. Maybe it was the aftereffects of shock, but as I drove my hands into his hair, as he grabbed my ponytail and angled my face upward, I could see a thousand versions of him in my mind: Balanced on the balcony’s railing. Shirtless and sunlit in the solarium. Smiling. Smirking. Our hands touching on the bridge. His body protecting mine in the Black Wood. Trailing a washcloth down my neck— Kissing him felt like fire. He wasn’t soft and sweet, the way he had been while washing away the blood and dirt. I didn’t need soft or sweet. This was exactly what I needed. Maybe I could be what he needed, too. Maybe this didn’t have to be a bad idea. Maybe the complications were worth it.

Thea smiled. “And here I was thinking your priorities all had the last name Hawthorne.” “That’s not true,” I said. But isn’t it? How much time had I spent thinking about them? How badly had I wanted Jameson to mean it when he’d told me I was special?

At the bottom of the stairs, I saw Grayson. He wore a tuxedo exactly the way he wore a suit. He was holding a glass—clear, with clear liquid inside. The moment he saw me, he froze in place, as suddenly and fully as if someone had stopped time. I thought back to standing with him at the bottom of the hidden staircase, to the way he’d looked at me, and on some level, I thought that was the way he was looking at me now. I thought I’d taken his breath away. Then he dropped the glass in his hand. It hit the floor and shattered, shards of crystal spraying everywhere.

“The night of the shooting, I saw someone else in the tunnels. I didn’t say anything, because Emily wouldn’t have wanted me to. I owed her, Avery. After what I did—I owed her.” “Who did you see?” I asked. She didn’t answer. “Drake?” Rebecca met my eyes. “He wasn’t alone.” “Who else was there?” I waited. Nothing. “Rebecca, who else was in the tunnel with Drake?” Who would Emily have wanted her to protect? “One of the boys?” I asked, feeling like the ground was crumbling beneath me. “No,” Rebecca said quietly. “Their mother.”

Grayson let out a ragged breath, and then I felt him gently turning my face back toward his. “Avery.” He almost never used my given name. He gently traced the line of my jaw. “I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again. You have my word.”

“He kept saying that,” Xander murmured. “That no matter what he planned, it might not work. That it was…” “A very risky gamble,” Grayson finished, his gaze making its way to me. My name? I tried to process that. First my birthday, now my name. Was that it? Was that why? How had Tobias Hawthorne even found me?

“I will always protect you,” he told me, his jaw tight, his eyes shadowed. “You deserve to feel safe in your own home. And I’ll help you with the foundation. I’ll teach you what you need to know to take to this life like you were born to it. But this… us…” He swallowed. “It can’t happen, Avery. I’ve seen the way Jameson looks at you.” He didn’t say that he wouldn’t let another girl come between them. He didn’t have to.