“It ain’t Zara,” Nash replied. Grayson immediately concurred.
“So, what?” Jameson replied. “Alice spent thirty years building the Hawthorne fortune, building the power of the Hawthorne line, and she never chose an heir?”
“Maybe that’s why she made Hannah that offer when Avery was a toddler.” Toby’s voice got rougher, just from saying Hannah’s name. “Hannah said Alice offered her a way to be with me. Maybe her plan was for Hannah to go through the Crucible but not ascend. Maybe it was always her intention that Hannah would come back—to Avery, to me, and to the Hawthorne line, having bargained formysafety.”
“Two birds,” Grayson murmured. “One stone.”
Jameson wondered if Toby realized he was making a very strong argument for Alice to have given Hannah asecondchance at that offer, long after the first was declined.
“But Hannah wouldn’t leave her little girl.” Toby took a ragged breath, and his expression said it all, said that some possibilities were almost too beautiful, too painful, toopainfully beautifulto entertain. “Not for a second,” Toby insisted. “Not for the world. Not even for me.”
“But what if—” Xander started to say.
“Stop.” Toby slammed his fist into the dashboard. “All of you. Do you really think that if there was a way, if there wasany waythat I could see Hannah being alive, that I wouldn’t cling to that possibility? That I wouldn’t give my last breath to believe even for a second that she was still in this world? Somehow? Somewhere?”
This was killing Toby. Jameson could hear it in his voice.
“No,” Toby said. “Hannah isn’t the one in that red cloak. She isn’t the Watcher. Even if my mother came back when Avery was fifteen and Hannah wasdying, her answer still would have been no. Hannah would have looked at my mother and seen her own. And she knew damn well I never wanted the Hawthorne fortune, that it waspoisonto me.”
“So the old man left it to Avery instead,” Grayson said intently.
“My mother knew,” Toby said quietly, “what Avery was to me.”
“The old man thought it was him pulling the strings,” Xander said suddenly. “When he was dying, I helped him set up what I thought was his final game—the Avery game. He really thought it was him.”
“He chose Avery for a multitude of reasons.” Jameson thought back to a message their grandfather had left them, what had seemed to be his final explanation. “Do you remember? He called her a skeleton key forso many little locks.”
The great Tobias Hawthorne had clearlythoughtthat Avery was his choice. Even with everything he’d discovered about his dead wife and the Gilded Blade, even having almost certainly read Alice’s poem himself, the old man had still thought it was him.
I made my choice, then I made you, and at times you saw me…Alice’s poem rang in Jameson’s mind, and he thought:But only at times.
And it didn’t matter. None of this mattered when Avery’s life was at stake.
“You have that look,” Xander told Jameson. “The same one you got before the Skyscraper Incident in Barcelona when you were eight. The same one from the night before your fourteenth birthday, and we all know howthatended.”
“Afraid I’m going to do something rash?” Jameson asked. He tried to think of next steps, but every last option he thought of was the furthest thing fromdiscreet.
“And just like that,” Xander announced, “your mind’s off to the races. The Bad Idea Races.”
Off to the races.Jameson went still—so still, he didn’t even breathe. It took him a moment to realize why. He forced his lungs to take in air. “Say that again.”
“The part about the races?” Xander asked. “Or the part I implied when I wiggled my eyebrows to delicately suggest that you’re thinking of doing something that could end with you chained and bleeding and possibly being set on fire?Again.No matter what bargain Avery struck, there have to be limits, and we all know how you feel about limits.”
“Off to the races,” Jameson murmured. “Iknewthere was something else. Something on the boards. Iknewthere was something I wasn’t seeing, something that was right there.”
Something other than just the name Andy being short for Andromeda or the fact thatLyra, my Lyrawas reallyAlice, my Alice. Something to do with one of thetermson the board.
Jameson had his phone in his hand in an instant. Alisa picked up on the first ring. “I need a plane,” Jameson told her. “Back to London.Right now.”
“That can be arranged,” Alisa said. “But you can’t take Nash with you.”
Jameson hadn’t been planning on it. In truth, he’d been planning to go alone, but the second he paused to think, he knew that wasn’t happening. His brothers wouldn’t let it.
Alisa mistook Jameson’s silence for disagreement. “Nash has spenthis entire life thinking he didn’t have it in him tostay,” she said quietly. “You can’t ask him to leave Libby right now.”
Alisa and Nash had been engaged once upon a time, but no matter how much a younger Nash might have wanted to, he hadn’t been able tostayfor Alisa. But for Libby, Nash had. And if Nash left right now, if anything happened to Libby or the babies—he’d never be okay again.
“I’m not asking anyone to go with me,” Jameson replied. “Just get me the plane.” He hung up the phone.
