I locked my hand around the USB. As I pulled it out, my mind raced. The drive definitely hadn’t been sitting in a tomb for twenty years. It looked new.
“You know, Avery, I want to be surprised that you got here first, but I’m not.” Eve. I whipped my head up to see her standing in the chapel doorway beneath a stone arch. “Some people just have that magic touch,” she continued softly. She walked toward me, toward the altar. “What did you find in there?”
She sounded hesitant, vulnerable, but the second Oren stepped into her path, the matching expression on her face flickered like a light bulb a second before it burns out.
“There was supposed to be human remains in there,” Eve said calmly. Too calmly. “But there weren’t, were there?” She cocked her head to the side, her hair falling in gentle amber waves as her gaze landed on the USB in my hand. “I’m going to need you to give me that.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked. I didn’t notice her hands moving until it was too late.
She’s got a gun. Eve held her weapon the way that Nash had taught me to hold mine. Her gun is pointed straight at me. That thought shouldn’t have computed, but I had a knife in my boot. I’d spent all that time training. So when my body should have been panicking, an unnatural calm settled over me instead.
Oren drew his sidearm. “Put the weapon down,” he ordered.
It was like Eve didn’t even hear him, like the only person in this room she could see or hear was me.
“Where did you even get a gun?” I was stalling for time, assessing the situation. “There’s no way you made it onto the estate with one that first morning.” Even as I said the words, I thought about Eve bolting the moment she’d “discovered” Vincent Blake’s name.
“Put the gun down!” Oren repeated. “I guarantee you that I can get a shot off before you can, and I don’t miss.”
Eve took a step forward, utterly, beautifully unafraid. “Are you really going to let your bodyguard shoot me, Avery?”
This was a different Eve. Gone were the layers of self-protection, the vulnerability, the raw emotion—all of it.
“You helped Blake abduct Toby, didn’t you?” I said, certainty washing over me like a wave of heat.
“I wouldn’t have had to,” Eve replied, her tone smooth and hard, “if Toby had opened up. If he’d just agreed to bring me here. But he wouldn’t.”
“This is the last time that I’m going to tell you to put the gun down!” Oren boomed.
“I’m still Toby’s daughter,” Eve said, adopting a familiar, wide-eyed expression, her gun unwavering. “And honestly, Avery, how do you think Gray will feel if Oren shoots me? What do you think will happen if that beautiful, broken boy walks in here to find me bleeding out on the floor?”
At her mention of Grayson, I instinctively looked for him, but he wasn’t there. My body shaking with pent-up rage, I turned to Oren. “Put the gun down,” I told him.
My head of security stepped directly in front of me. “She puts hers down first.”
A haughty expression on her face, Eve lowered her weapon. Oren was on her in an instant, taking her to the ground, pinning her down.
Eve looked up at me from the chapel floor and smiled. “You want Toby back, and I want whatever you found in that tomb.”
She’d called it a tomb. She’d said earlier that there were supposed to be remains in there. I wondered how she’d come to that conclusion, and then I remembered where I’d left her—and with whom. “Mallory,” I said.
“She admitted that Liam didn’t leave. I believe her exact words were There was so much blood.” Eve’s gaze went to the altar. “So where’s the body?”
“Is that really all you care about?” I asked her. From the very beginning, she’d told me that there was only one thing that mattered to her. I was starting to think that wasn’t a lie—it was just that her single-minded purpose had nothing to do with Toby.
It had never been about Toby.
“Caring is a recipe for getting hurt, and I haven’t let anyone hurt me in a very long time.” Eve smiled again, like she was the one who had the upper hand, not the one pinned to the ground. “In all fairness, I did warn you, Avery. I told you that if I were you, I wouldn’t trust me, either. I told you that I am a person who will do anything—anything—to get what I want. I told you that invisible is the one thing that I will never be.”
“And Toby,” I said, staring at her, sick understanding coming over me, “wanted you to hide.”
“Blake wants me by his side,” Eve said, zeal in her voice. “I just have to prove myself first.”
“You don’t have one of the seals yet, do you?” I asked. I thought about Nan saying that Vincent Blake didn’t give anyone—not even family—a free ride.
“I’m going to get one,” Eve told me, her voice burning with the fury of purpose. “Give me that USB, and maybe you can get what you want, too.” She paused, then hit a nail right through my heart. “Toby.”
I hated even hearing her say his name. “How could you do this?” I said, thinking of the picture Blake had sent, the bruises on his face—and then of the pictures of Toby and Eve on Eve’s camera roll. “He trusted you.”
“It’s easy to make people trust you,” Eve commented softly, “if you let them see you bleed.” I thought about the bruises she’d shown up here sporting and wondered if she’d told someone to hit her. “You can spend your whole life trying not to hurt,” Eve continued, her voice high and clear, “but making people hurt for you? That’s real power.”
I thought of Toby telling me that he had two daughters.
“Give me the USB,” Eve said again, her eyes still blazing, “and you won’t ever have to see me again, Avery. I’ll earn my seal, and you can have this place and those boys all to yourself. Win-win.”
She was delusional. Oren had her pinned. She’d come at me with a gun. She was in no position to negotiate. “I’m not giving you anything,” I said.
A flash of movement. I whipped my head toward the chapel door. Grayson stood there, backlit, his eyes locked on Oren, who was still restraining Eve.
“Let her go,” Grayson ordered.
“She’s a threat.” Oren clipped the words. “She pulled a gun on Avery. The only place I am letting her go is far, far away from all of you.”
“Grayson.” I felt sick. “This isn’t what it looks like—”
“Help me,” Eve begged him. “Get the USB that Avery has. Don’t let them take this from me, too.”
Grayson stared at her a moment longer, then walked slowly toward me. He took the USB from my hand. I just stood there. Feeling like my insides had been hollowed out, I watched as he turned back to Eve. “I can’t let you have this,” Grayson said softly.
“Grayson—” Eve and I said his name in unison.
“I heard.”
Eve was unabashed. “Whatever you heard, you know that I am not the villain here, Grayson. Your grandfather—he owed me better. He owed you better, and you and your family owe Avery nothing.”
Grayson’s eyes met mine. “I owe her more than she realizes.”
A dam broke inside me, and all of the hurt I hadn’t let myself feel came flooding out, and with it, everything else I felt—and had ever felt—for Grayson Hawthorne.
“You’re as bad as your grandfather was,” Eve tried. “Look at me, Grayson. Look at me.”
He did.
“If you let Oren kick me out of here or call the police, if you try to force me to go back to Vincent Blake empty-handed, I swear to you, I will find a cliff to jump off of.” There was something fierce and mad and savage in Eve’s voice—something that sold that threat completely. “Emily’s blood is on your hands. Do you really want mine there, too?”
Grayson stared at her. I could see him reliving the moment he’d found Emily. I could see the effect that Eve’s specific threat—a cliff—had on him. I could see Grayson Davenport Hawthorne drowning, fighting the undertow in vain. And then I saw him stop fighting and let the memories and the grief and the truth wash over him.
And then Grayson took a breath. “You’re a big girl,” he told Eve. “You make your own choices. Whatever you do after Oren sends you packing—that’s on you.”
I wondered if he really meant that. If he believed it.
“This is your chance,” Eve said, fighting Oren’s grip. “This is redemption, Grayson. I’m yours, and you could be mine. It’s your fault Emily’s dead. You could have stopped her—”
Grayson took a single step toward her. “I shouldn’t have had to.” He looked down at the USB in his hand. “And this would be useless to you.”
“You can’t know that.” Eve was a wild thing now, fighting Oren with everything she had.
“Assuming this USB is my grandfather’s handiwork,” Grayson told her, “you would need a decoder to make sense of any of the files. A Hawthorne never leaves any knowledge of value unprotected.”
“So I’ll break the encryption,” Eve said dismissively.
Grayson arched an eyebrow at her. “Not without a second drive.”
A second drive.
“You can’t do this to me, Grayson. We’re the same, you and I.” There was something in the way Eve said that, something in her voice that made me think she believed it.
Grayson didn’t blink. “Not anymore.”
An instant later, Oren’s men came crashing through the door.
Oren turned to me. “How do you want to handle this, Avery?”
Eve had pointed a gun at me. That, at least, was a crime. Lying to us wasn’t. Manipulating us wasn’t. I couldn’t prove anything else. And she wasn’t the real enemy here.
The real threat.
“Have your men escort Eve off the estate,” I told Oren. “We’ll deal directly with Vincent Blake from now on.”
Eve didn’t make them drag her. “You haven’t won,” she told me. “He’ll keep coming—and sooner or later, all of you will wish to God that this had ended with me.”
