A chill hit the base of my neck, like the feeling of being watched from behind or standing knee-deep in long grass and hearing the rattle of a snake. My grip tightening around the crystal, I couldn’t look away.
DON’T TRUST ANYONE.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said, my stomach lined with dread as I finally looked to Jameson and Grayson in quick succession. “Is it a clue?”
We still had one object left in the bag. This wasn’t over. Maybe the letters of this warning could be rearranged, or the first letter in every word made out initials, or—
“Can I see the crystal?” Jameson asked. I gave it to him, and he slowly rotated it under the flashlight’s beam until he found what he was looking for. “There, at the top. Three letters, too small and faint to make out without the light.”
“Fin?” Grayson said, an edge to the question.
“Fin.” Jameson placed the crystal back in my hand, then brought his dark green eyes to mine. “As in finished, Heiress. The end. This isn’t a clue. This is it.”
My game. Quite possibly the last bequest of Tobias Hawthorne. And this was it? Don’t trust anyone. “But what about the USB?” I said. The game couldn’t be over. This couldn’t be all that Tobias Hawthorne had left us with.
“Misdirection?” Jameson tossed out. “Or maybe the old man left you a game and a USB. Either way, this started with the delivery of the bag, and it ends here.”
Setting my jaw, I righted the crystal in the flashlight’s beam, and the words reappeared on the floor. DON’T TRUST ANYONE.
After everything, that was all the billionaire had for me? My grandfather always thought seven steps ahead, I could hear Jameson saying. He saw dozens of permutations in how things could play out, planned for every eventuality, strategized for each and every possible future.
What kind of strategy was this? Was I supposed to think that Toby’s captor was closer than he appeared? That his reach was long, and anyone could be in his pocket? Was I supposed to question everyone around me?
Take a step back, I thought. Go back to the beginning. Consider the framing and your charge. I stopped. I breathed. And I thought. Eve. This game had been triggered when we met. Jameson had theorized that his grandfather had foreseen something about the trouble that had brought Eve here, but what if it was simpler than that?
Much, much simpler.
“This game started because Eve and I met.” I said the words out loud, each leaving my mouth with the force of a shot, though I barely spoke over a whisper. “She was the trigger.”
My thoughts jumped to the night before. To the solarium, the files, and Eve with her phone. “What if ‘Don’t trust anyone,’” I said slowly, “really means ‘Don’t trust her’?”
Until I said the words, I hadn’t realized how much I’d let my guard down.
“If the old man had intended for you to be wary only of Eve, the message wouldn’t have said don’t trust anyone. It would have said don’t trust her.” Grayson spoke like someone who couldn’t possibly be anything less than correct, let alone wrong.
But I thought about Eve asking to be left alone in Toby’s wing. The way she’d looked at the clothes in my closet. How quickly she’d gotten Grayson on her side.
If Eve hadn’t looked so much like Emily, would he be defending her now?
“Anyone includes Eve by definition,” I pointed out. “It has to. If she’s a threat—”
“She. Is. Not. A. Threat.” Grayson’s vocal cords tensed against his throat. In my mind’s eye, I could still see him on his knees in front of me.
“You don’t want her to be one,” I said, careful not to let myself feel too much.
“Do you, Heiress?” Jameson asked suddenly, his eyes searching mine. “Do you want her to be a threat? Because Gray’s right. The message wasn’t ‘Don’t trust her.’”
Jameson was the one who’d mistrusted Eve from the start! I’m not jealous. That’s not what this is. “Last night,” I said, my voice hitching, “I caught Eve taking pictures of the files in the solarium. She had an excuse. It sounded plausible. But we don’t know her.”
You don’t know her, Grayson.
“And your grandfather never brought her here,” I continued. “Why?” I brought my eyes back toward Jameson, willing him to latch on to the question. “What did he know about Eve that we don’t?”
“Avery.” Oren saying my name from the doorway was the only warning I got.
Eve walked into the Tea Room, her hair damp, wearing the white dress she’d worn the day she arrived. “He knew about me?” She looked from me to Grayson, a portrait of devastation. “Tobias Hawthorne knew about me?”
I was a good poker player, in large part because I could spot a bluff, and this—her chin trembling, her voice hardening, the aching look in her eyes, the set of her mouth, like she wouldn’t let her lips turn down—didn’t feel like a bluff.
But a voice in the back of my head said three words. Don’t trust anyone.
The next thing I knew, Eve was walking toward me. Oren moved to stand between us, and Eve’s eyes angled upward, like she was taking a moment to steel herself. Trying not to cry.
She held out her phone. “Take it,” Eve spat out. “Passcode three eight four five.”
I didn’t move.
“Go ahead,” Eve told me, and this time, her voice sounded deeper, rougher. “Look at the photos. Look at anything you want, Avery.”
I felt a stab of guilt, and I glanced at Jameson. He was watching me intently. I didn’t let myself react—at all—when Grayson came to stand beside Eve.
Looking down, wondering if I’d made a mistake, I plugged the passcode Eve had given me into her phone. It unlocked the screen, and I navigated to her photo roll. She hadn’t deleted the one I’d seen her taking, and this time, I identified which file she’d photographed.
“Sheffield Grayson.” I brought my eyes back up to Eve’s, but she wouldn’t even look at me.
“I’m sorry,” she told Grayson, her voice quiet. “But he’s the wealthiest person in any of those files. He has motive. He has means. I know you said it wasn’t him, but—”
“Evie.” Grayson gave her a look, the kind of Grayson Hawthorne look that burned itself into your memory because it said everything he wouldn’t. “It’s not him.”
Sheffield Grayson was dead, but Eve didn’t know that. And she was right: He had come after Toby. Just not now.
“If it’s not Sheffield Grayson,” Eve said, her voice cracking, “then we have nothing.”
I knew that feeling: the desperation, the fury, the frustration, the sudden loss of hope. But I still looked back down at Eve’s phone and scrolled backward through her photo reel. Don’t trust anyone. There were three more photos of Sheffield Grayson’s file and a few of Toby’s room, and that was it. If she’d taken photos of any other files—or anything else—they’d been deleted. I scrolled back further and found a picture of Eve and Toby. He looked like he was trying to swat the camera away, but he was smiling—and so was she.
There were more pictures of the two of them, going back months. Just like she’d said.
If the old man had intended for you to be wary only of Eve, the message wouldn’t have said don’t trust anyone. It would have said don’t trust her.
Doubt shot through me, but I pulled up her call log. There were a lot of incoming calls, but she hadn’t picked up a single one. She hadn’t placed any, either. I went to her texts and quickly realized why she’d been getting so many calls. The story. The press. When I’d been in a similar situation, I’d had to get a new phone. I kept clicking through texts, needing to know if there was more, and then I came to one that said simply: We have to meet.
I looked up. “Who’s this from?” I asked, angling the phone toward her.
“Mallory Laughlin,” Eve shot back. “She left voicemails, too. You can verify the number.” She looked down. “I guess she’s seen the pictures of me. Rebecca must have given her my number. I turned my phone off once the story broke so I could concentrate on Toby, but look at all the good that did.” Eve drew in a ragged breath. “I am done with this sick bastard’s twisted little games.” Her chin came up, and her emerald eyes went diamond hard. “And I am not going to stay where I’m not wanted. I can’t.”
I could feel this entire situation getting away from me, like sand slipping through my fingers.
“Don’t go,” Grayson told Eve, the words soft. And then he turned to me, and that softness fell away. “Tell her not to go.” This was the tone he’d used with me right after I’d inherited, the one made for warnings and threats. “I mean it, Avery.” Grayson looked at me. I expected his eyes to be icy or blazing, but they were neither. “I have never asked for anything from you.”
It was palpable in his voice: the many, many things he had never asked for.
I could feel Jameson watching me, and I had no idea what he wanted or expected me to do. All I knew was that if Eve left, if she walked out of Hawthorne House and past the gates, into the line of fire, and something happened to her, Grayson Hawthorne would never forgive me.
“Don’t go,” I told Eve. “I’m sorry.”
I was, and I wasn’t. Because those words just wouldn’t leave me alone: Don’t trust anyone.
“I want to meet Mallory.” Eve lifted her chin. “She’s my grandmother. And at least she didn’t know about me.”
“I’ll take you to see her,” Grayson said quietly, but Eve shook her head.
“Either Avery takes me,” she said, equal parts challenge and injury in her tone, “or I walk.”