CHAPTER 28 LYRA
LYRA
I n the music box, a marble flower turned and turned. Another calla lily. Lyra stared at it, and soon, she couldn’t hear the music, couldn’t see the mosaic ballroom where she and Grayson had gone to dissect the clue.
Happy birthday, Lyra. The memory of her father’s voice threatened to drag her under.
Lie-ra.
Lie-ra.
Lyra fought to stay in the here and now, the way she’d somehow managed to back at the helipad, but this time, the undertow of memory would not be denied, locking its jaws around her, pulling her down—and back to being four years old.
Back to being given a flower and a candy necklace.
Back to the gunshot.
Back to the blood.
Bare feet on pavement. Running.
“Breathe.” Grayson’s voice wrapped itself around Lyra, keeping her from falling into a full-on flashback, but still, the sounds of that day—
Happy birthday, Lyra.
Lie-ra.
Lie-ra.
“Breathe for me, Lyra Catalina Kane.” Grayson said her name exactly right. In true Grayson Hawthorne style, he said it like an order—or maybe a prayer.
“I’m breathing,” Lyra said, but she still couldn’t look away from the marble flower spinning slowly in the box.
“You’re breathing,” Grayson confirmed, as his chest rose and fell with hers.
Lyra managed to close her eyes, just for a second. “A calla lily , Grayson.” Her mind echoed with a sound like roaring, screaming wind, and she gritted her teeth. “Still think the other one wasn’t a part of the game?”
That question came out sounding like an accusation. Lyra hadn’t fully meant for it to, but old habits died hard.
“Were the calla at the helipad a part of the game, I assure you the delivery of said flower would have been far more systematic.” It was both one of Grayson’s best qualities and one of his worst that he was always so damn steady, so certain.
“Hawthorne games are not haphazard. There is an unassailable logic to them, and they are not cruel.”
Cruel. Lyra’s gaze returned to the calla lily in the shining, silver music box.
She lifted a finger to touch the marble flower.
“But this was them. The game makers.” Lyra had thought before that maybe someone was trying to make her remember.
She had to at least consider the possibility: What if it was one of them?
One of Grayson’s brothers—or Avery.
“It’s just a music box.” Grayson placed a light hand on her shoulder. “Just a stone flower. Just a clue in a game that you are going to win.”
“It’s a calla lily,” Lyra countered, putting a hand on Grayson’s chest and pushing him lightly back. She didn’t need comfort right now. She needed answers. “They know something—your brothers or Avery. At least one of them knows something.”
Grayson let his hand fall to his side and looked down at Lyra’s on his chest. “What precisely do you think they know?” he asked gently.
“I never told any of them about our phone calls, Lyra—about you .” The angles of Grayson’s face were made for intensity.
His was an odd sort of calm. “I told Xander the gist of your father’s death but not why I was looking for him.
I told Jameson about the riddle but not where I’d heard it.
” Grayson paused. “I told no one about you. For over a year, you were my secret and mine alone.”
There was something about the way Grayson Hawthorne said mine that made a part of Lyra want to say yes —but she didn’t. “There’s a difference between failing to mention something and keeping it a secret,” she told him.
“A secret, you think about.” Grayson’s lips rarely parted into a true smile; his angular face spoke only the language of slightest curves. “Even if you try to bury it deep, some secrets live with you, day in, day out.”
Lyra thought about the way Grayson had reacted when he’d heard her voice the day before, when he’d realized who she was.
Beneath her hand, she could feel the muscles in his chest. She could feel his heart beating.
It would have been easy to just go along with what he was saying, to take it all at face value.
I was your secret and yours alone, day in, day out. Lyra let her hand drop. “Some secrets are carved into your bones,” she told Grayson. Lyra had lived with that kind of secret. For years. It had divided her life into a before and an after.
And someone involved in this game knew something .
Lyra stared at the music box, at the marble flower.
“Odette drew a calla lily last night. I never mentioned to her that my father gave me one, but after I remembered the omega symbol, after she heard me say A Hawthorne did this , she drew a calla lily . An anonymous party left one for me at the helipad. And now there’s one in our current clue.
That’s no coincidence . It can’t be, Grayson.
” She shifted her blazing gaze to him. “Do you even believe in coincidences?”
Pale silvery-blue eyes absorbed her fire whole. “I am starting to believe in a lot of things that I didn’t believe in two days ago.” So damn steady. So damn sure. “And I am asking you to believe me when I say that my brothers and Avery would never intentionally play with you like this.”
Hawthorne games are not cruel. Lyra looked back to the marble calla, and suddenly, it was all too much, including Grayson Hawthorne and whatever it was that he was starting to believe in.
Day in, day out.
You were my secret and mine alone.
“You’re about three seconds away from taking off on a late-night run,” Grayson noted.
He wasn’t wrong. “Going to try to tell me that’s a bad idea?” Lyra challenged.
“Sometimes pushing yourself physically is the only way to push it all down,” Grayson said instead. “But you only run because you will not allow yourself to dance. And I cannot help noticing that we are in a ballroom.”
Lyra’s mind went to the night before, to dancing with him at the masquerade ball. She could practically feel the heat of his body, feel his palm on hers, but in the silver music box, the calla lily turned and turned.
“It doesn’t have to be with me,” Grayson told her. “I’ll give you the room and keep working the puzzle myself. You do whatever you need to do.” There was no undertone to those words, no judgment. “Some of us need to be alone sometimes.”
Some of us. He said that like the two of them were the same. Like there was nothing wrong with wanting to be alone.
Like she wasn’t the least bit broken.
“I’ll be in the Great Room.” Grayson left it at that, and Lyra did her best not to watch him go.
Some of us need to be alone sometimes. And now she was.
She was alone in a ballroom , and her body remembered—would probably always remember—what it felt like to turn and leap and defy gravity in every way that mattered.
But dancing—really dancing, the way she used to—meant losing herself to the music, to the movements.
For Lyra, ballet meant letting go.
Instead, she paced the room like a lioness caged, the sound of the notes from the music box fading into the background until all Lyra could hear was an unintelligible whisper in her memory: a woman’s voice, words Lyra couldn’t decipher no matter how hard she tried.
On and on, the music played, and the marble calla lily turned.
It can’t be a coincidence. None of this can.
The flower she’d found by the helipad, the flower in the box, the one Odette had drawn—it meant something.
All of it meant something. Me being here.
Calla lilies. Omega. Alice Hawthorne. Lyra couldn’t shake the feeling that if she could just figure out what it all meant, figure out why that night had happened, why her father had killed himself the way he had, why he’d brought her there , maybe she wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.
Maybe she could finally stop pushing people away.
Maybe she could dance.
Refusing to hold on to that thought any longer, Lyra stopped pacing and made her way to the bed in the middle of the ballroom. She climbed onto it and looked up at the dark rainbow of tiles on the mosaic ceiling. She reached for a pillow—and felt something else.
A piece of paper. Lyra realized what it was a second too late, a second after she’d already taken it in her hands and begun to unfold it. The night before, to earn a hint in the game, Grayson had been tasked with drawing her. He’d kept the drawing. Put it under his pillow.
Lyra finished unfolding it and sucked in a breath.
It wasn’t just the way he’d captured her otherworldly ballgown, the lines of her neck, the curves of her body.
Not hidden. Not downplayed. It wasn’t the fullness of her lips or the way he’d drawn her hair loose and a little wild, like she was staring down the wind.
It was the look in her eyes. It was the muscles he’d drawn, along with the curves.
It was the way that he’d drawn her like she was on the verge of saying something, like she was a person with something to say.
It was bad enough that Grayson had made her beautiful, but he’d also drawn her strong .
And somehow, that made Lyra feel—for the first time in three years —like maybe she didn’t have to be.
I am not fine. Lyra let that be true. Just for a moment, she let it be true. She stopped fighting back the memory of a calla lily and gunshots and blood. She thought about being alone, as a child in that house with a dead body and now.
She let it hurt, and she breathed. She shuddered, and this time, when she heard a distant whisper in her mind—that memory she couldn’t quite grasp—it wasn’t quite as unintelligible.
She made out a single word in a woman’s voice: You…