The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games Book 3)

By the time we’d each made it through three or four folders, even the sunlight streaming in from all sides couldn’t banish the dark pall that had settled over the room.

This was what I’d known before reading the files: Tobias Hawthorne had filed his first patents in the late sixties and early seventies. At least one had turned out to be valuable, and he’d used the profits from that to fund the land acquisitions that had made him a major player in Texas oil. He’d eventually sold his oil company for upward of a hundred million dollars, and after that, he’d diversified with a Midas touch for turning millions to billions.

All of that was public information. The information in these files told the parts of the story that the myth of Tobias Hawthorne glossed over. Hostile takeovers. Competitors run out of business. Lawsuits filed for the sole purpose of bankrupting the other party. The ruthless billionaire had a habit of zeroing in on a market opportunity and moving into that space with no mercy, buying up patents and smaller corporations, hiring the best and the brightest and using them to destroy the competition—only to pivot to a new industry, a new challenge.

He paid his employees well, but when the wind changed or the profits dried up, he laid them off without mercy.

Tobias Hawthorne was never in the business of making friends. I’d asked Nan exactly what her son-in-law had done that he wasn’t proud of. The answer was all around us, and it was impossible to ignore the details in any of the files just because they didn’t match what we were looking for.

I stared down at the folder in my hand: Seaton, Tyler. It appeared that Mr. Seaton, a brilliant biomedical engineer, had been caught up in one of Tobias Hawthorne’s pivots after seven years of loyal—and lucrative—service. Seaton was downsized. Like all Hawthorne employees, he’d been given a generous severance package, including an extension of his company insurance. But eventually, that extension had run out, and a noncompete clause in the fine print of his contract had made it nearly impossible for him to find other employment.

And insurance.

Swallowing, I forced myself to stare at the pictures in this file folder. Pictures of a little girl. Mariah Seaton. She’d been diagnosed with cancer at age nine, just before her father lost his job.

She was dead by twelve.

Feeling sick to my stomach, I forced myself to continue paging through the file. The final sheet contained financial information about a transaction—a generous donation the Hawthorne Foundation had made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

This was Tobias Hawthorne, billionaire, balancing his ledger. That’s not balance.

“Did you know about this?” Grayson said, his voice low, his silver eyes targeting Nash.

“Which ‘this’ might we be talkin’ about, little brother?”

“How about buying patents from a grieving widow for one one-hundredth of what they were worth?” Grayson threw down the file, then picked up another one. “Or posing as an angel investor when what he really wanted was to incrementally acquire enough of the company to be able to shut it down to clear the way for another of his investments?”

“I’ll take boilerplate contracts that give him control of his employees’ IP for two thousand, Alex.” Jameson paused. “Whether that IP was created on the clock or not.”

Across the room, Xander swallowed. “You really don’t want to read about his foray into pharmaceuticals.”

“Did you know?” Grayson asked Nash again. “Is that why you always had one foot out the door? Why you couldn’t stand to be under the old man’s roof?”

“Why you save people,” Libby said quietly. She wasn’t looking at Nash. She was looking at her wrists.

“I knew who he was.” Nash didn’t say more than that, but I could see tension beneath the rough stubble on his jaw. He angled his head down, the rim of his cowboy hat obscuring his face.

“Do you remember the bag of glass?” Jameson asked his brothers suddenly, an ache in his tone. “It was the puzzle with the knife. We had to break a glass ballerina to find three diamonds inside. The prompt was Tell me what’s real, and Nash won because the rest of us focused on the diamonds—”

“And I handed the old man a real bag of shattered glass,” Nash finished. There was something in his voice that made Libby stop looking at her wrists and walk to put one hand silently on his arm.

“The shattered glass,” Grayson said, a wave of tension rippling through his body. “That lecture he gave us about how, to do what he had done, sacrifices had to be made. Things got broken. And if you didn’t clean up the shards…”

Xander finished the sentence, his Adam’s apple bobbing, “People got hurt.”