The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“The world is the board, Heiress. We just have to keep rolling the dice.”

“I am dangerously good at birthdays.” Jameson Hawthorne was dangerously good at a lot of things.

My head of security’s expression was absolutely unreadable… until the party came into full view. Then he almost smiled. “I also may have vetoed a few names on that list.” And by a few, I realized a moment later, he meant almost all of them.

“The neckline on that dress makes you look like a floozy.” She wagged her cane at me, then grunted. “I approve.”

“My mind is more like a roller coaster inside a labyrinth buried in an M. C. Escher painting that is riding on another roller coaster.”

“I definitely, one hundred percent, entirely… would have told Rebecca,” Xander admitted. “In retrospect, good on you for not telling me. Excellent call, shows solid judgment.”

“It also wouldn’t be the worst time to tell me that you aren’t jealous of Eve standing that close to Grayson.”

“The one that Toby accidentally-but-kind-of-on-purpose set. It’s a long, tragic story involving daddy issues, inebriated teenagers, premeditated arson, and a freak lightning strike.”

“If you had a baby…,” I said. “When I have a baby,” came the deep, heart-shattering reply, “she’ll be my whole world.” “She?” I repeated. Nash settled back into his seat. “I can picture Lib with a little girl.”

“I don’t do vulnerable,” Thea retorted. “It clashes with my bitch aesthetic.”

I ALWAYS WIN IN THE END.

“Bring on the distractions, Xander Hawthorne.” “That,” I warned her, “is a very dangerous thing to say.”

“This looks bad.” “On the contrary, Heiress, bleeding is a devastatingly good look for me.”

“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.”

Tobias Hawthorne had left me his fortune, but the only message I’d ever received from him was a grand total of two words: I’m sorry.

At some point, I’d started believing, deep down, that I’d only been chosen to inherit because Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t realized there was someone out there who suited his purposes better than I did. A stone that killed at least as many birds. A more elegant glass ballerina. A sharper knife.

“Everything hurts.” Only Grayson Hawthorne could say that and still sound utterly bulletproof. “It hurts all the time, Avery, but I know the man I was raised to be.”

“It’s possible that I was deprived of maternal attention as a child unless I was bleeding.” “Skye noticed if you were bleeding?”

“Anyone else wondering if we have a secret uncle out there no one knows about? Because at this point, secret uncle just kind of feels like it belongs on the Hawthorne bingo card.”

“My father liked to say that our minds have a way of tricking us into choosing between two options when there are really seven. The Hawthorne gift has always been seeing all seven.”

“Finding Nan,” Xander explained to Eve, in what appeared to be an attempt to cheer her up, “is a bit like a game of Where’s Waldo, except Waldo likes to jab people with her cane.”

“Praying?” Nan grumbled. “More like giving our Maker a piece of my mind.” “My grandfather built this chapel so Nan would have someplace to yell at God,”

“Did your son-in-law have any family of his own?” I asked. “Parents?” “As opposed to what, girl? Springing forth fully formed from the head of Zeus?” Nan snorted. “Tobias always did have a God complex.”

“Is this your father?” I said gently. “Isaiah Alexander?” Xander turned to look at me. Then, as if coming to a very serious decision, he lifted his hand and pressed one finger to the end of my nose. “Boop.”

“By the time this is over, you’ll know what kind of man I was—and what kind of man you want to be.”

Traps upon traps, Jameson had told me once. And riddles upon riddles.

Grayson was dutiful and Xander was brilliant, but Jameson had been the old man’s favorite because Tobias Hawthorne had been born hungry, too.

“But mostly, I can’t hate him, Avery Kylie Grambs, because he brought me you.”

“You’re the one playing the piano now, girl. Men like Vincent Blake—they’ll break every one of those fingers of yours if you let them.”

“The only person I trust with all that I am and all that could be, Heiress, is you.”

Trying to calm myself, I took out my knife, plotted murder, then gave away ten thousand dollars to strangers struggling to pay rent.

“If you want to borrow some duct tape when the knuckleheads get back,” Nash drawled, “I could be persuaded.”

“I don’t want to have to explain to you what I don’t want to explain to you. I just want to finish this doughnut and eat his four best doughnut-y friends and congratulate myself for probably not vomiting.”

“I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery—some things are too precious to gamble.”

“You,” I told him, taking a step closer, “have always made me bold. You’re the one who pushes me out of my comfort zone. You don’t get to box me back in now.”

“It was always going to be you,” I told Jameson. He needed to hear it. I needed to say it, even though always painted over so much. In response, Jameson gave me another crooked smile. “It’s times like this, Heiress, that I wish I’d fallen in love with a girl who wasn’t quite so good at bluffing.”

I wondered how long it had taken him to angrily carve six words into the marble. I wondered if this was where he’d found the Blake family seal. I wondered what else he’d found here. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, FATHER.

“Hello, Avery,” a man’s voice said, and I felt the change in the air around me, in all of them. “We’re strangers, you and I. I imagine that’s something you’ve thought about quite a bit.”

Each word the dead man said made this entire situation feel that much eerier. How much of what had happened since he’d died had he foreseen? Not just foreseen, but planned, moving us all around like pawns?

“But better you than them.” Tobias Hawthorne paused. “Yes, Avery. I really am that much of a bastard. I really did paint a target on your forehead. Even without the truth surfacing, I saw the probabilities for what they were. Once I was no longer there to hold him at bay, Blake was always going to make his move. Hunting season, he might call it—playing the game, destroying all opponents, taking what was mine. And that, my dear, is why it is now yours.”

I hadn’t realized, hadn’t ever even suspected, that Tobias Hawthorne had named me his heir because I was disposable.

So here we are, Avery Kylie Grambs. The little girl with the funny little name. A skeleton key for so many little locks.

Traps upon traps. And riddles upon riddles. Even if you thought that you’d manipulated our grandfather into this, I guarantee that he’d be the one manipulating you. This family—we destroy everything we touch. You’re not a player, kid. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.

Tobias Hawthorne’s game hadn’t made me extraordinary. It had shown me that I already was.

“Bad dog. Just for that… you have to cuddle Grayson.”

“I can’t accept this, Ave.” “I know.” I smirked. “That’s why I gave the keys to Nash.”