Identify your assumptions. Question them. Negate them. As I stepped out of the chapel, I felt like a shell over my brain had been cracked wide open, and now possibilities were streaming in from every side.
What would I have done from the very beginning if I’d assumed that Toby had been taken as revenge for something that his father had done? I thought about Eve talking about Hawthorne secrets—dark secrets, maybe even dangerous ones—and then about Nan and her talk of empires and dirty hands.
What had Tobias Hawthorne done on his way to the top? Once he’d amassed all that money and all that power, what had he used it to do? And to whom?
My brain sorting through possible next moves at warp speed, I turned to Oren. “You tracked threats against Tobias Hawthorne, back when you were his head of security. He had a List, like mine.”
List, capital L, threats. People who required watching.
“Mr. Hawthorne had a List,” Oren confirmed. “But it was a bit different than yours.”
My List was heavy on strangers. From the moment I’d been named Tobias Hawthorne’s heir, I’d been thrust into the kind of worldwide spotlight that automatically came with online death threats and would-be stalkers, people who wanted to be me and people who wanted to hurt me.
It was always worse right after a new story broke. Like now.
“Would my grandfather’s List happen to be a list of people he screwed over?” Jameson asked Oren.
He saw what I did: If Toby’s captor was telling a story about envy, revenge, and triumphing over an old enemy, Tobias Hawthorne’s List was a hell of a place to start.
Jameson and I caught the others up to speed, and Oren had the List delivered to the solarium. The room had glass walls and a glass ceiling, so no matter where you stood, you could feel the sun on your skin. After our near all-nighter, the seven of us were going to need all the help staying awake that we could get.
Especially because this was going to take a while.
Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t just had a list of names. He’d had file folders like the one he’d assembled on me, but for hundreds of people. Hundreds of threats.
“You tracked all these people?” I asked Oren, staring at the stack and stacks of files.
“It wasn’t a matter of actively tracking so much as knowing what they looked like, knowing their names, keeping an eye out.” Oren’s expression was smooth, unreadable, professional. “The files were Mr. Hawthorne’s doing, not mine. I was only allowed to look at them if the person started popping up.”
Right now, we didn’t have a face. We didn’t have a name, so I focused on what we did have. “We’re looking for an older man,” I told the others quietly. “Someone who was bested and betrayed by Tobias Hawthorne.” I wanted there to be more than that for us to go on. “There might be a family connection or a family-like connection or maybe even just a story focused on three people.”
“Three men,” Eve said, seeming to have recovered her voice, her grit, and her poise. “In the parable, they’re all men. And this guy took Toby, not Zara or Skye. He took the son.”
She’d clearly been thinking about this. I stole a look at Grayson, and the way he was looking at Eve made me think that she hadn’t been thinking alone.
“Well,” Xander said, in an attempt at cheer. “That’s not nothing to go on!”
I turned my attention back to the folders—stacks and stacks of them that left a heavy feeling in my stomach. “Whoever this man is,” I said, “whatever his history with Tobias Hawthorne, whatever he lost—he’s wealthy, powerful, and connected now.”
