The Brothers Hawthorne (The Inheritance Games Book 4)
The Brothers Hawthorne: Chapter 31

Nash rocked casually back on his heels as Grayson approached.

“What are you doing here?” Grayson asked flatly.

“I could ask you the same thing, little brother.” Nash liked to perpetually remind Grayson who the older brother was in their relationship—and who was the kid.

“Xander told you where I was and what I’m doing,” Grayson concluded.

Nash neither confirmed nor denied that statement. “You’re playing with fire, Gray.”

“Be that as it may, I do not recall asking for backup.” Grayson gave Nash a hard look. His older brother offered him a knowing one in return. “Where’s your fiancée?” Grayson asked pointedly. Libby needs you, Nash. I don’t.

“Back at Hawthorne House getting ready for Cupcake-a-Palooza,” Nash replied, his tone as casual as his posture. “Where’s your brain at, Grayson?”

Grayson made a mental note to throttle Xander. “I have everything under control.”

Nash cocked a brow at him. “If that was true, you would have noticed me tailing you on the way here.”

Grayson hadn’t noticed a damn thing. “I don’t need your help,” he gritted out.

Nash removed his cowboy hat and took a step toward him. “Then why haven’t you noticed I’m not your only tail?”

Damn you, Nash. Grayson pulled the Spider onto the highway and let his gaze flick to the rearview mirror just in time to see another car do the same. The vehicle was black, nondescript. The driver knew how to hang back. But now that Nash had tipped him off, Grayson recognized that the driver always hung back by exactly two cars.

The black car was two cars behind him on the highway.

When Grayson pulled off, the car pulled off but managed to fall back. Two cars.

Grayson took three rights in a row, and by the time the car had taken the third after him, Grayson had already pulled the Ferrari onto the shoulder of the road. There was sufficient light here, a gas station ahead. Grayson told himself that confronting and identifying his tail was a strategy, but on some level, he knew that he was spoiling for a fight—the fight he hadn’t gotten from Nash, the fight he’d very nearly picked with the boy who’d dared to tell Savannah to be nice.

The black car drove past. Grayson got a picture of its plates just before the car turned right again. A moment later, Nash pulled into the gas station down the road, but Grayson refused to let himself be distracted by backup he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. Instead, he focused on his quarry. Let’s see if you come back.

Three minutes later, the black car did. This time, it pulled onto the shoulder of the road next to him. Down the street at the gas station, Nash got out of his car. Grayson noticed but ignored him.

I have everything under control, he’d told his brother. I don’t need your help.

The driver’s-side door of the black car opened. A lone figure stepped out, clothed in shadow. The other three car doors remained closed. Just one threat to contend with, Grayson thought. Good. There was a certain satisfaction in taking care of threats.

His pursuer—now his target—advanced from the shadows into light, pace unhurried, steps silent. Grayson took stock of what the light showed: a male, at least six foot two, long and lean with dark blond hair that hung over one eye all the way down to his cheekbone. He wore a threadbare gray T-shirt that did nothing to mask the sinewy muscles underneath, and Grayson knew, just from the way his opponent moved, that he was armed.

“And who might you be?” Grayson asked.

Stillness, sudden and absolute. “Who I am is less important than who I work for.”

Young. Utterly unafraid. That was Grayson’s immediate impression. Probably fast.

“Trowbridge?” Grayson said, looking to his opponent’s face, to eyes like midnight beneath thick, angled brows, one of them slashed through with a small white scar.

“Not Trowbridge.” The guy took a series of slow steps, circling Grayson. Young. Unafraid. Probably fast. Grayson added two more descriptors: Dangerous. Hard. Dark eyes glittered as the guy came to a sudden stop. “Guess again.”

Grayson bared his teeth in a smile full of warning. “I don’t guess.” Power and control. It always came down to power and control—who had them, who didn’t, who would lose them first.

“She wasn’t kidding,” his opponent replied, the words cutting through the night air like a butcher knife, “when she said you were arrogant.”

Grayson took a single step forward. “She?”

The guy smiled and began to circle him once more. “I work for Eve.”