CHAPTER 69 LYRA
LYRA
T hey ended up in Grayson’s “room”—the ballroom with its mosaic floor and walls and ceiling and a single king-sized bed in the middle. Their longsword lay at the foot of it. Grayson picked it up, peeled back the comforter, and then looked at Lyra.
“You first,” she told him.
Grayson set the sword down on the mosaic floor, and then he rose again and climbed into the bed. A breath catching in her throat, Lyra climbed in beside him.
Grayson propped himself up with one arm and looked down at her. He brought a hand to her temple, to her hair. “May I?”
Lyra wasn’t entirely sure what he was asking, but she nodded anyway, and Grayson began slowly working his fingers through her thick tangle of hair, spreading it out on the pillow around her head.
When he finished, Grayson just stayed there, propped up, staring down at her for the longest time.
“You’re not going to fall asleep like that,” Lyra told him. And neither am I. “Lay back down.”
Grayson did as she bade him, his back on the mattress, his head still turned toward hers.
Lyra raised a hand to his temple. “Close your eyes,” she ordered.
“I’m the one,” Grayson told her, “who’s supposed to take care of you.”
“Oh really?” Lyra retorted. At this rate, neither one of them was going to be getting any sleep. “How many hours until nightfall?” Lyra asked.
Grayson didn’t even have to check his watch. “A little over six.”
They needed sleep. Lyra knew that. Her body decidedly did not. “How do you normally put yourself to sleep?” she asked Grayson, staring into his eyes, thinking about arctic ice and the silver of swords. “When you can, when you succeed—how do you turn it off?”
“The world?” Grayson said.
“Being Grayson Hawthorne,” Lyra replied.
His chest rose and fell, and her fingers ached to touch it in a way that might have proven impossible to deny if he hadn’t answered her question.
“I imagine myself floating on my back in a pool.”
Lyra flipped from her side to her back. There was maybe an inch between her shoulder and his. She closed her eyes. “Floating in a pool.” She could just almost feel it. “At night.”
“A moonless sky up above,” Grayson replied. She could tell just by the sound of his voice: His eyes were closed, too.
He breathed.
She breathed.
“Nothing but black,” Grayson continued.
“Deep breaths, lungs filling to keep you afloat.” Lyra could feel it now, her body and his, floating side by side. Silence.
And then, there really was nothing but black.
The calla lily.
The candy necklace.
“A Hawthorne did this.”
He has a gun. Lyra couldn’t breathe, but she didn’t wake up. She sank deeper into the dream, deeper and deeper and deeper until there was no shred of awareness that it was a dream left in her.
“What begins a bet? Not that.” She can hear the man, but she can’t see him. There’s silence, and then—a bang.
She presses her hands to her ears. She’s a big girl. Not gonna cry. She’s not.
Another bang.
Silence. She drops her hands from her ears. The flower falls to the floor. She twists and twists the elastic of the candy necklace around her fingers so tight it hurts, and then she hears something like the creaking of a door.
Suddenly, her feet are walking toward the stairs. Quiet , she thinks. She has to be quiet. She slips off her shoes.
Up the stairs. One step. Then another. Her foot sinks into something sticky and warm and red. It’s red, and it’s on her, and it’s dripping down the stairs.
The walls are red, too. You’re not supposed to draw on the walls.
A mewling sound. It’s her. She’s the one making the sound as she sees something at the top of the stairs.
Not some thing .
His face—he has no face. She can’t scream. Can’t move. Everything is red. Everything.
And then there is a voice behind her, a woman’s voice. “You poor thing.”
Lyra turns. At the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her, is a figure dressed entirely in black.
Black cloak.
Black hood.
Black veil.
Black boots, coming up the stairs.
Black gloves gently touching her face. “You are a quiet one.”
She can’t scream. Her body is shaking and shaking and—
“You should not be here, little one.”
Blood on her feet. The man doesn’t have a face. And she shouldn’t be here. She trembles harder.
“You should not be here.” A gloved finger brushes tears from her face. “But who is to say that you were?”
A rustling of fabric.
Something is pressed to her lips. Drinking. She’s drinking something.
And then—bare feet on pavement. She’s outside. She’s running. And she is alone.
Lyra woke frozen in her own body, like her bones and the blood in her veins and the breath in her lungs had all turned to razor-sharp ice. There was someone else there. Lyra tried to call to mind an image of the woman in black—tried and couldn’t , because her brain just didn’t work like that.
But she could hear the woman’s voice: You should not be here. But who is to say that you were?
Lyra might not have been able to see a damn thing in her mind, but she could remember: a cloak, a hood, boots. All black. Breathing hurt. Somehow, Lyra managed to roll onto her side.
Grayson was there, inches from her, and he was beautiful—far more beautiful in sleep than any man had a right to be. Long lashes. Sharp cheekbones. Full lips. There was hair in his face—not just one strand or two but enough for her to run her hands through.
She did, her touch light. He didn’t stir. Lyra almost hated to wake him, but she had to.
You poor thing. Lyra could hear the voice so vividly now. “Grayson.” Her voice came out quieter than she meant for it to. “Grayson, wake up.”
He slept like the dead.
“I need you.”
And just like that, Grayson’s eyes were open and locked on to her face.
“The dream?” He understood that much immediately.
He sat up, pulling her toward him. Lyra wanted nothing more in the world than to lay her head on his shoulder and breathe in the smell of him.
Cedar and falling leaves. But she didn’t.
She couldn’t.
“Not just the dream.” The words felt like barbed wire in her throat.
“It went further this time.” Saying that out loud set her heart to pounding like a hammer driving in nails—or railroad spikes.
“I saw more.” She closed her eyes, knowing it was useless.
“I saw it , and I can’t see anything anymore, but I remember her voice.
” Lyra’s throat hurt. “I remember what she said.”
“What who said?”
Lyra opened her eyes to stare straight into Grayson Hawthorne’s.
“I never knew how they found me—the police or my parents or whoever it was that took me out of that house.” She’d never been able to ask, not without admitting to her family what she had remembered.
“I was alone with my father’s body. I had blood on my feet— blood on my feet, and I was alone .
” Lyra sucked in a breath. “And then I wasn’t. ”
Grayson’s hands made their way to the sides of Lyra’s face. He cupped her jaw, cradling her head, his fingers gently massaging the back of her neck. Small movements, steady. He was there, and he wasn’t asking a damn thing from her.
That, more than anything else, let Lyra continue.
“She wore a black cloak, the hood pulled up.” Lyra pressed her lips together.
“Her face was veiled. She said I shouldn’t be there.
And then—it was like she was covering for me, for the fact that I was there.
She fed me some kind of liquid, poured it down my throat. ”
“I’ve got you.” He was still only touching her face and neck, but Lyra could feel Grayson’s presence in every inch of her body, anchoring her like silver and steel. “I am here, and I have got you, Lyra Kane.”
“Alice.” Lyra said the name out loud. It was the only thing that made sense. A Hawthorne did this —and then, the woman in black was there.
“Breathe,” Grayson murmured. He breathed, and so did she, and it was like running beside him all over again, a duet of sorts.
I am not alone. Lyra leaned in to one of Grayson hands, feeling the warmth of his skin on her cheek, and then there was a buzz at his wrist. His watch.
Grayson pulled back. He didn’t blink, and from his eyes alone, she wouldn’t have even thought he felt it—but he pulled back .
Grayson Hawthorne didn’t pull back. Not when she needed him. Not like this. Lyra’s fingers locked around his wrist, her hand too small to make it more than halfway around the circumference. But she was strong enough to hold his arm in place, if only because he let her.
“That was your watch,” Lyra said.
Grayson stroked the thumb of his free hand over her cheek. “My watch doesn’t matter right now.”
Lyra wanted to believe that. But… “My body knows yours.” Better than it should.
Better than it has any right to. She swallowed.
“You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Grayson. There’s tension in your muscles all the time, but there’s a difference between tension and tensing .
” The tension that lived in Grayson’s body was the tension of a bow with an arrow notched and at the ready.
He was always ready. “You only tense for a reason.”
Slowly, Lyra turned his arm over. She pressed her thumb to the inside of his wrist, knowing her technique was lacking but not willing to risk loosening her grip.
“What are you doing?”
Lyra would have thought that was obvious. “Taking your pulse.” He looked so calm, so steady, but his heart—it was racing. “If I turn your wrist back over,” Lyra whispered, “if I look at your watch, what am I going to see?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She tried to turn his wrist back over, and Grayson’s free hand caught hers. For the longest time, the two of them stayed there in the bed, in a silent standoff, her hand on his arm and his on hers, neither one of them saying a word.
“Don’t look.” Grayson broke first—and so did his voice. “I am asking you not to look,” he said, his entire body taut now, “the way that I asked Emily not to jump.”
Lyra’s heart twisted, but in the back of her mind, all she could hear was Savannah and her warning, a warning Lyra had set aside, a warning that hadn’t come back to her even once since the yacht.
When all is said and done, when it matters most…
Lyra bowed her head to look.