CHAPTER 58 LYRA
LYRA
W hen Lyra thought about the forest on Hawthorne Island, she thought of soaring evergreen trees, some living, some charred from that long-ago fire, but she couldn’t picture them, and the other trees in the forest, the ones with leaves instead of dark green needles—Lyra didn’t remember much about those at all.
Maybe that was why the massive trees on the north edge of the forest, each with dozens of limbs sticking out from thick trunks like bicycle spokes, light shining through their branches, had an almost physical effect on her, as she and Grayson crossed into the woods.
“We could be looking for a particular tree,” Grayson noted. “Something hanging from a branch or carved into bark.”
“Or…” Lyra looked toward the canopy. “Something that can only be seen from a bird’s-eye view?” Echoes. She turned to the nearest tree, fully ready to climb it and glad they’d changed back into their armor.
“Wait.” Grayson looked down at an object he’d just retrieved from his jacket pocket. The compass. As Lyra watched, he opened it. “Nonfunctional,” Grayson confirmed. “For now.”
His thumb skimmed every inch of the bronze surface of the compass in a systematic search. And then, he pressed—hard—on its face. There was a click, and the needle began to spin, pointing not back at the house, but farther into the woods.
“That’s not north,” Lyra commented.
“No,” Grayson replied, his gaze flicking back up to hers. “It’s not.”
The arrow on the compass pointed the way—deep into the living forest, skirting the edge of the line that marked where the fire had been stopped.
There. The handholds on the tree were a dead giveaway. They looked like they belonged on a rock-climbing wall. Lyra reached for one and placed her foot on another. Looping around to the other side of the soaring Douglas fir, Grayson did the same.
It was at least twenty feet up to the lowest branch.
Wordlessly, they climbed. The handholds stopped before they reached the branches, and for a moment, so did Lyra and Grayson.
“No ledger,” Lyra noted. “And nothing that could be the next clue.” She tilted her head back and her eyes up. “Do we keep climbing?”
Grayson went very still. “Give it a moment.”
A moment to consider. A moment to take it all in. There was just enough adrenaline crashing through Lyra’s veins to heighten her senses as she absorbed the view: the forest and the trees, sun-kissed… and not exactly empty.
Rohan and Savannah were maybe a hundred yards out on the other side of the divide, Savannah’s white armor highly visible against the blackened trees. Lyra felt Grayson register his sister’s presence.
“You’re hurting.” Lyra wasn’t about to start pulling her punches with him now. “Whatever secret you were trying to protect your sister from—just stop .”
“Stop what?” Grayson clipped the words. “I’ve already failed. Eve saw to that.”
No matter how much Grayson Hawthorne might have practiced making mistakes, this one—whatever it was—clearly wasn’t the kind of mistake he could accept from himself.
“Stop,” Lyra said again, “trying to protect her.” Lyra had the sense that she might as well have been lecturing rain not to fall, but she continued anyway.
“I don’t know what Eve told Savannah or what either one of them is up to now, but I do know what it’s like to find out that you’ve been lied to in a way that rips the rug right out from underneath your entire existence.
” Lyra’s parents had doubtlessly thought they were protecting her, too.
“I can understand why my mom and dad did it—let memories I’d repressed stay repressed.
I know that they were trying to give me a chance to grow up free of that trauma, but… ”
“The piper has to be paid either way,” Grayson said quietly. “The human brain is a miraculous thing, but it can’t keep anything caged forever. You’ll still pay the cost. Repressing something, pushing it down, refusing to feel it just means that you have to pay that cost again and again and again.”
A ball of emotion rose in Lyra’s throat as Rohan and Savannah drew closer to them. “Ask me how protected I felt when I found out the truth.”
Grayson took an audible breath. “Our father is a murderer, Savannah’s and Gigi’s and mine.
” Lyra hadn’t asked for his secrets, but there he was, offering them up like penance.
“That’s what I was trying to protect Savannah from.
Do you remember seeing anything in the news a few years ago about a bomb on one of Avery’s jets? ”
That story had been everywhere. Lyra remembered. “You don’t have to tell me this.” Her voice, as quiet and low as it was, echoed through the trees.
“My father planted that bomb. He lost someone in the Hawthorne Island fire, years ago. He held my uncle Toby responsible for that, and he believed Avery was Toby’s daughter.
It was all very an eye for an eye .” The muscles in Grayson’s jaw tensed.
“Avery ended up in a coma, but she survived the explosion. Two of the men on her security detail did not.”
Lyra tightened her right hand around the handhold she was gripping, then let her left snake slowly around the trunk toward Grayson. “You didn’t have to tell me that.”
“I wanted to.” His hand made its way toward hers. “I think sometimes,” he continued, in a voice that was just a little more detached, “about what I might have inherited from my father. Do I have his perverted sense of justice? His ability to just shut morality off in pursuit of his own ends?”
“You’re nothing like him.” Lyra’s words came out fiercer than she’d meant for them to.
“You’re probably right. Of all of my brothers, I was always the one who was a Hawthorne through and through.” Grayson paused. “I wonder sometimes about what that means about me, too.”
Lyra could feel his mind churning again, and she knew— knew —that there wasn’t a thing she could say to stop it.
“There’s nothing up here,” Grayson declared finally. “And we’re about to have company.”
Rohan and Savannah weren’t more than twenty yards away now, compasses in hand, but as Lyra and Grayson began the climb back down the tree, Lyra caught sight of movement in the shadow of the closest, massive tree, and she realized: We already have company.
As Lyra’s feet hit the ground, Brady Daniels met her gaze from the shadows. And then—slowly, deliberately—he angled his gaze down to the ground, to the base of the tree.
Lyra ran her foot over grass and dirt, and she realized that something had been buried there, in the forest floor.
Can’t see the forest for the trees. Lyra didn’t start digging immediately, not with Rohan and Savannah incoming, but she couldn’t help thinking that Grayson had been right about what he’d said before, when he’d talked about paying the piper.
Nothing stayed buried forever.