CHAPTER 54 LYRA
LYRA
L yra couldn’t hear a thing through the marble door.
She had no idea what Rohan and Savannah were doing on the other side of it.
All she knew was that Grayson had been different from the moment he stepped off the helicopter.
There was a look he got when he was deep in a certain kind of thought—features smooth as glass, eyes fixed straight ahead.
The smaller his pupils were, the bluer and less gray his irises looked.
“You’ve been quiet,” Lyra commented. “Is it something your uncle said?”
“I rarely even think of him that way,” Grayson told her. “As my uncle . Toby spent most of my life presumed dead.”
Lyra couldn’t help her response: “Like mother, like son.” She wondered if Hawthornes ever stayed dead. “He obviously said something to you.”
Grayson ran his right hand around the edges of the vault door, looking for a weakness. Lyra thought for a moment that he was going to ignore her prodding, but he didn’t.
“Toby is Eve’s father,” Grayson said finally. “He’s also the closest thing that Avery has to one herself.”
Lyra thought back to the mystery that had captivated the world: billionaire Tobias Hawthorne leaving his entire fortune to a seemingly random teenage girl from Connecticut.
“Let me guess,” Lyra said. “It’s complicated?”
“In some families, complications are par for the course.”
There was a rumbling sound from behind the marble vault door then, followed by the audible flipping of a bolt. Lyra beat Grayson to the vault dial by a fraction of a second.
This time, when they entered the combination, the vault door opened.
Rohan was holding the ledger. Lyra stared him down. Just try messing with me again.
Rohan held out the ledger and shot her a roguish smile. Ignoring it, Lyra took the book from him, then scanned the rest of the room.
“We need to talk,” Grayson told Savannah.
“I’ll see if I can pencil you in after I win this.” Savannah started to stalk past him. To Lyra’s surprise, Grayson caught his sister by the elbow.
“I said we need to talk , Savannah.”
“I would suggest you remove your hand from her arm.” Rohan smiled. “With haste.”
Grayson ignored the warning, and so did Savannah, as she wrapped her fingers around Grayson’s wrist. “I have better things to be doing right now,” she said tartly, “than indulging your desire to play big brother.”
Grayson let go of Savannah, and though the expression on his carved-from-granite face changed very little, Lyra couldn’t shake the feeling that beneath the surface, he was hurting.
“When have I ever given you the impression,” Grayson asked his sister, “that I was playing ?”
Savannah looked away first and left without another word to Grayson. Rohan followed, pausing only to cast one last knowing glance at Lyra.
“Talked his way out of it, did he?” Rohan said. “Hawthornes do have silver tongues, I suppose.”
And then Rohan was gone, too.
Grayson followed as far as the marble door, then he braced both hands against it and pushed it shut, the muscles beneath his silk shirt rippling in a way that told Lyra he had pushed harder than necessary. Grayson threw the deadbolt, and a timer appeared on the ceiling.
Five minutes, counting down. Lyra opened the ledger.
As expected, they were the last two to sign, which meant there was no game-based reason for Grayson to have bolted that door.
As she pressed her watch to the ledger, a wall behind them parted, revealing a hidden section of the room that Rohan and Savannah had already doubtlessly explored.
As she crossed the room, Lyra pieced together Grayson’s interaction with his sister, the tension in his muscles now, the way he’d gone quiet and intent after his conversation with Toby. With Eve’s father. And just like that—just like another puzzle or riddle or code falling into place—Lyra saw it.
“Why does Eve want Savannah to win the Grandest Game?” she asked. In the silence of the vault, Lyra could hear Grayson breathing in and out, and her breaths fell into his rhythm. “Grayson?”
“You are frightening, Lyra Kane.”
She passed the ledger to him. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Grayson pressed his watch to the page. “No Hawthorne has ever fallen for a woman who did not, on occasion, terrify him.”
Words rang in Lyra’s memory. You don’t fall. I do.
“I’m not wrong, am I?” Lyra said. “About Savannah.” The most logical reason for Eve to want Lyra to lose the game was to increase another player’s odds of winning.
“Maybe, if I’d been as antagonistic to the Hawthorne family as Eve had hoped I would be, she would have tasked me with aiding your sister, but—”
“It is possible,” Grayson allowed, “that I have been keeping a secret from Savannah, one I’d hoped to spare her from. One that left her vulnerable to Eve.”
And that, Lyra realized almost immediately, was all that Grayson was going to say on the topic.
She thought about what he’d said earlier—about Eve, about Avery.
It’s complicated. From that and from the way Grayson had spoken to his sister, Lyra assumed that Savannah Grayson’s motives for playing the Grandest Game weren’t exactly pure.
She has a plan.
“Grayson?” Lyra’s low voice echoed through the marble room. “Do you need your sister to lose this game?”
“That would be ideal.”
“In that case…” Lyra reached for the shelf with her name on it and claimed the objects on top. From inside the leather pouch, she slid out an antique compass—bronze, just like the key to her room. She opened the compass and found an inscription inside—their next clue.
DON’T LOOK.
DON’T JUDGE.
CAN’T SEE.
WHAT YOU WANT IS NUMBER THREE.
DON’T PUT.
DON’T COUNT.
NOT WITHIN
BUT WITHOUT.
The words rang in Lyra’s mind. Before, she’d been playing this game for herself, for Mile’s End. Now, she was playing it for Grayson, too. The only way to ensure that Savannah lost this game was to win it.
As Grayson claimed his own compass, Lyra turned, taking in the whole of the empty room, and the oddest feeling settled over her body—part anticipation, part uncanny certainty, almost like déjà vu, like she knew what was going to happen before a single conscious thought had formed.
She took off Grayson’s tuxedo jacket and tossed it to him, and then Lyra reached for the opera glasses threaded through the chain on her bag.