The Inheritance Games: TikTok Made Me Buy It

I’d known that things would go faster with an extra set of hands, but I hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like to be shut in a room with two Hawthornes—particularly these two. As we worked, Grayson behind me and Jameson above, I wondered if they’d always been like oil and water, if Grayson had always taken himself too seriously, if Jameson had always made a game of taking nothing seriously at all. I wondered if the two of them had grown up slotted into the roles of heir and spare once Nash had made it clear he would abdicate the Hawthorne throne.

I wondered if they’d gotten along before Emily.

“There’s nothing here.” Grayson punctuated that statement by placing a book back on the shelf a little too hard.

“Coincidentally,” Jameson commented up above, “you also don’t have to be here.”

“If she’s here, I’m here.”

“Avery doesn’t bite.” For once, Jameson referred to me by my actual name. “Frankly, now that the issue of relatedness has been settled in the negative, I’d be game if she did.”

I choked on my own spit and seriously considered throttling him. He was baiting Grayson—and using me to do it.

“Jamie?” Grayson sounded almost too calm. “Shut up and keep looking.”

I did exactly that. Book off, cover off, cover on, book reshelved. The hours ticked by. Grayson and I worked our way toward each other. When he was close enough that I could see him out of the corner of my eye, he spoke, his voice barely audible to me—and not audible to Jameson at all.

“My brother’s grieving for our grandfather. Surely, you can understand that.”

I could, and I did. I said nothing.

“He’s a sensation seeker. Pain. Fear. Joy. It doesn’t matter.” Grayson had my full attention now, and he knew it. “He’s hurting, and he needs the rush of the game. He needs for this to mean something.”

This as in his grandfather’s letter? The will? Me?

“And you don’t think it does,” I said, keeping my own voice low. Grayson didn’t think I was special, didn’t believe this was the kind of puzzle worth solving.

“I don’t think that you have to be the villain of this story to be a threat to this family.”

If I hadn’t already met Nash, I would have pegged Grayson as the oldest brother.

“You keep talking about the rest of the family,” I said. “But this isn’t just about them. I’m a threat to you.”

I’d inherited his fortune. I was living in his house. His grandfather had chosen me.

Grayson was right beside me now. “I am not threatened.” He wasn’t imposing physically. I had never seen him lose control. But the closer he came to me, the more my body threw itself into high alert.

“Heiress?”

I startled when Jameson spoke. Reflexively, I stepped away from his brother. “Yes?”

“I think I found something.”

I pushed past Grayson to make my way to the stairs. Jameson had found something. A book that doesn’t match its cover. That was an assumption on my part, but the instant I hit the second story and saw the smile on Jameson Hawthorne’s lips, I knew that I was right.

He held up a hardcover book.

I read the title. “Sail Away.”

“And on the inside…” Jameson was a showman at heart. He removed the cover with a flourish and tossed me the book. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

“Faust,” I said.

“The devil you know,” Jameson replied. “Or the devil you don’t.”

It could have been a coincidence. We could have been reading meaning where there was none, like people trying to intuit the future in the shape of clouds. But that didn’t stop the hairs on my arms from rising. It didn’t stop my heart from racing.

Everything is something in Hawthorne House.

That thought beat in my pulse as I opened the copy of Faust in my hands. There, taped to the inside cover, was a translucent red square.

“Jameson.” I jerked my eyes up from the book. “There’s something here.”

Grayson must have been listening to us down below, but he said nothing. Jameson was beside me in an instant. He brought his fingers to the red square. It was thin, made of some kind of plastic film, maybe four inches long on each side.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Jameson took the book gingerly from my hands and carefully removed the square from the book. He held it up to the light.

“Filter paper.” That came from down below. Grayson stood in the center of the room, looking up at us. “Red acetate. A favorite of our grandfather’s, particularly useful for revealing hidden messages. I don’t suppose the text of that book is written in red?”

I flipped to the first page. “Black ink,” I said. I kept flipping. The color of the ink never changed, but a few pages in, I found a word that had been circled in pencil. A rush of adrenaline shot through my veins. “Did your grandfather have a habit of writing in books?” I asked.

“In a first edition of Faust?” Jameson snorted. I had no idea how much money this book was worth, or how much of its value had been squandered with that one little circle on the page—but I knew in my bones that we were onto something.

“Where,” I read the word out loud. Neither brother provided any commentary, so I flipped another page and then another. It was fifty or more before I hit another circled word.

“A…” I kept turning the pages. The circled words were coming quicker now, sometimes in pairs. “There is…”

Jameson grabbed a pen off a nearby shelf. He didn’t have any paper, so he started writing the words on the back of his left hand. “Keep going.”

I did. “A again…” I said. “There is again.” I was almost to the end of the book. “Way,” I said finally. I turned the pages more slowly now. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Finally, I looked up “That’s it.”

I closed the book. Jameson held his hand up in front of his body, and I stepped closer to get a better look. I brought my hand to his, reading the words he’d written there. Where. A. There is. A. There is. Way.

What were we supposed to do with that?

“Change the order of the words?” I asked. It was a common enough type of word puzzle.

Jameson’s eyes lit up. “Where there is a…”

I picked up where he’d left off. “There is a way.”

Jameson’s lips curved upward. “We’re missing a word,” he murmured. “Will. Another proverb. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” He flicked the red acetate in his hand, back and forth, as he thought out loud. “When you look through a colored filter, lines of that color disappear. It’s one way of writing hidden messages. You layer the text in different colors. The book is written in black ink, so the acetate isn’t meant to be used on the book.” Jameson was talking faster now, the energy in his voice contagious.

Grayson spoke up from the room’s epicenter. “Hence the message in the book, directing us where to make use of the film.”

They were used to playing their grandfather’s games. They’d been trained to from the time they were young. I hadn’t, but their back-and-forth had given me just enough to connect the dots. The acetate was meant to reveal secret writing, but not in the book. Instead, the book, like the letter before it, contained a clue—in this case, a phrase with a single missing word.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

“What do you think the chances are,” I said slowly, turning the puzzle over in my mind, “that somewhere, there’s a copy of your grandfather’s will written in red ink?”