CHAPTER 39 LYRA
LYRA
I have to tell him , Lyra thought. Avery and the other players had taken their leave. It was just Lyra and Grayson left on the lowermost deck now.
“There,” Grayson said. “Two decks up.”
Tell him. Lyra’s internal monologue was stubborn as hell, but she ignored it—not forever. Just for now. She wanted, maybe even needed , one more moment, one more memory of this before .
She looked up, following Grayson’s gaze. “What do you see?”
His lips curved. “Can you climb in that dress?”
Lyra pretended that there was no tightness in her stomach, no ball of anxiety in her throat. “I can do anything in this dress.”
There was nothing on the third-story deck, but just off it, in the interior of the yacht, there was a lounge. The room was large and round, lined with arched doors. The carpet was deep red and plush, and set up all around the room there were game tables.
Poker.
Craps.
Roulette.
Grayson strode toward the poker table. Sitting on top of it was a stack of poker chips unlike any Lyra had ever seen.
“Made from a meteorite.” Grayson picked up one of the chips. “Lined with Burmese rubies and Sri Lankan sapphires.”
“Let me guess,” Lyra said dryly. “The corresponding deck of cards is made of solid platinum and inlaid with fragments of Cleopatra’s tomb.”
“Sarcasm suits you.” Grayson laid the chip down. “Though I feel compelled to point out that there are no cards on this table—or any other.”
The only thing on the poker table besides chips was a trio of masquerade masks—one turquoise, one purple, one black, all divine. Lyra looked to the other gaming tables and saw more masks. Options, she supposed, for anyone who wished to trade.
Crossing from the poker table to the roulette wheel, Lyra picked up the mask that sat beside it. “Sarcasm might suit me, but this mask…” She trailed her finger across the surface of it. “Suits you.”
The mask in question was a duller kind of gold, the metal of a royal knight’s breastplate, battered and cracked. Smooth bronze arcs marked the mask over both eye holes, the balance of the markings uneven, the asymmetry of the mask somehow eerie and inviting all at once.
In a smooth motion, Grayson took off his black mask and picked up the asymmetrical one. “Roulette,” he commented, donning the new mask, “is the only game in this entire room that we could actually play.”
He reached for the small, silver ball, and Lyra instinctively spun the roulette wheel, pushing down all other thoughts that wanted to come.
Somehow, she wasn’t surprised when the ball landed on the number eight.
“Did you see the lemniscates on Avery’s dress?” Lyra said, and then she cursed herself silently, because it had been obvious to her from the beginning—from before she’d even ever even met Grayson—that he saw everything where Avery Grambs was concerned.
“Ask me,” Grayson said in that low, even voice of his.
“Ask you what?” Lyra replied. “What the symbol means? What we’re missing?”
“Ask me,” Grayson told her quietly, “about Avery.”
Lyra shook her head. “It’s none of my business.”
“I disagree.” Grayson reached for the roulette ball, and, as Lyra watched, slowly rolled it around the palm of his hand.
“My grandfather had a collection of watches,” he said.
“Extraordinary ones, clockwork marvels, each like a puzzle in and of itself. There was one watch in particular among his collection that my brothers and I all coveted. The clock face featured a tiny, mechanical roulette wheel encased beneath a crystal dome.”
There was a long, weighty pause as Grayson leaned forward to roll the ball and turn the roulette wheel once more. The ball landed—again—on the number eight.
Grayson stared at the wheel for a second or two, and then, behind that cracked-gold mask, he flicked his eyes back up toward hers. “The old man didn’t leave that watch to any of us. The entire collection, along with everything else, went to a stranger.”
“To Avery,” Lyra said. She swallowed. “But you welcomed her. You and your brothers—”
“I was not that welcoming,” Grayson said wryly, “at first.” After another pregnant pause, he spoke again.
“My brothers and I were raised almost exclusively by the old man. Our mother was less than reliable. Our fathers were uninvolved, most of them by choice. My father, for instance, paid a private investigator to take photographs of me, starting the day I was born. He could not have been more aware of my existence, but my entire life, he never tried to know me, never even showed the least bit of desire to meet me.” Grayson’s voice was horribly even, unnaturally steady.
“I cannot fully explain to you what Avery is to my brothers and to me, but I have confidence that I don’t need to explain to you that family isn’t just blood.
” Grayson’s voice went a little lower, soft in volume and rougher in tone.
“ Family means you’d die for the person, and that you know damn well that they’d die for you.
It means that no matter how lost you feel, no matter how dark things get, on some level, you know that there is a place and people with whom you belong. ”
Lyra felt those words like an ache in her soul. “Avery is your family.” Lyra could understand that, and just saying the words out loud made Savannah’s warning matter that much less. Life wasn’t a competition about being loved more.
Love didn’t work that way.
Grayson looked at Lyra through his new mask. “And speaking of my family,” he said, reaching to touch her face, “I made you a promise. I have brothers to track down, and you have a hint to look for.”
Tell him.
Back at the boathouse, when Lyra had kissed Grayson, it hadn’t been because she’d let go and given in to this thing between them. Kissing him, in that moment, had been about reclaiming control, about proving to herself that Eve had chosen the wrong pawn.
But right here, right now, in the last moments of before , Lyra wanted more than that. She wanted something real. She wanted to let go, even if it was only for a moment.
She wanted him , even if it didn’t last.
“Grayson?” His name felt familiar on her lips. “Before you go… It’s a little cold.” Lyra raised her chin and looked at him—just looked at him. “Give me your jacket?”
There was that smile again, bringing the world to its knees. Grayson undid his tuxedo jacket. He slipped it off and put it over her shoulders.
It smelled like him. Cedar and fallen leaves.
Grayson raised a hand to the side of Lyra’s face, and Lyra let herself lean into it, let herself look at him and only him.
“May I kiss you, Lyra Kane?” That question. That voice. Grayson Hawthorne.
“Kiss me,” Lyra said, “one last time.”
“I assure you,” Grayson replied, “it will not be.” He brought his lips slowly down to hers, and this time, when they kissed, it wasn’t timeless.
It wasn’t desperate or a revelation or an attempt to prove anything.
This kiss was raw and long, aching and brutal, and every bone in Lyra’s body said the same thing.
This wasn’t a mistake.
And when it was over, when their lips finally parted, Lyra didn’t even hesitate. “There’s something I have to tell you.” With a before like that, she could just almost believe in a different kind of after . “I know who put me in the game.”