CHAPTER 74 LYRA
LYRA
L yra looked from Rohan to Savannah to the clue in the sky. She barely even felt the rain or the cold.
“It happened, didn’t it?” Savannah said from the ground. “Just like I said it would. With Grayson.”
Lyra refused to answer that and focused only on the word in the sky. LIE. The clue seemed to be mocking her. How many times had Grayson Hawthorne lied to her? What exactly did his brothers know?
About the lily.
And the three.
And omega.
“Did Eve offer you a deal, Lyra?” Savannah rose to her feet, looking so much like Grayson that it hurt. “You should have taken it.”
Lyra needed someplace dry to think, but she couldn’t go back to the house, couldn’t risk running into Grayson. She had to work the puzzle. For Mile’s End. She had to keep playing. It was dark. She was wet. And there were a limited number of places that offered coverage.
She ended up in the boathouse—and not on the roof this time. Alone, she walked to the very edge of the dock and stared out at the blackened ocean.
Come and get me , she thought. But her body sent up no warnings. Every instinct she had said that no one was watching her right now.
The great stone arches above her only did so much to the block the rain blowing in off the ocean, but it was better than nothing. It was enough for Lyra to be able to rage and seethe and hurt and think .
LIE. She paused, breathing through every single emotion that wanted to come. An abbreviation? She hit a wall with that line of thinking quickly enough. An anagram? With an S , she could have made ISLE , but the word wasn’t LIES . It was LIE .
Unless it’s not a word. Lyra turned that thought over in her mind. A number? The letter E wasn’t a Roman numeral, so she discarded that possibility. L was the twelfth letter of the alphabet. I was the ninth. E was the fifth.
1295. Lyra tried as hard as she could to make sense of that number or any of its component parts, but she couldn’t.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to run until her muscles burned and her lungs threatened to combust, but even that had been ruined for her, because when Lyra thought about running, all she could think about was his body and hers, a synchrony like she’d never known.
The muscles in Lyra’s throat constricted. She’d known better than to trust Grayson Hawthorne, known better than to rely on him in any way.
When I told you to stop calling… Grayson’s voice echoed in her mind. I didn’t mean it.
He’d let her down before, and Lyra had hated him for it, hated him even though she’d had no right to expect anything from him back then. They’d been strangers.
They weren’t strangers anymore.
You don’t fall. I do.
The thing that hurt most was that Lyra knew Grayson hadn’t been lying—not about that. He’d manipulated her, and he’d lied to her, and maybe she should have been questioning whether any of it had ever been real, but she wasn’t. Her body knew, and so did she.
It had been real, and it had been beautiful , and now it was done.
I am forever pulling people back from cliffs.
I don’t want your protection.
You have it nonetheless.
Grayson Hawthorne was who he was. He’d been pulling her back from cliffs from the start. And I don’t have it in me to let him. He’d known that. She had as good as told him that.
Lyra paced the docks beneath the massive stone arches: one enormous slip perpendicular to two somewhat smaller ones, a large platform in between.
1295. Lyra tried, as she paced, to concentrate on that, on the clue. LIE. But her mind just wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let Grayson Hawthorne go.
You don’t fall. I do. His voice—even before these last few days, Lyra had never been able to forget Grayson Hawthorne’s voice.
Breathe for me, Lyra Catalina Kane.
Lyra couldn’t stop herself from remembering. She couldn’t stop walking up and down the dock. Water was streaming down her face—rain and tears.
I’ve got you. I am here, and I have got you, Lyra Kane.
It hurt Lyra that she couldn’t picture the way he had looked when he’d said it—not the lines of his face or the look in those unmatched blue-gray eyes. But her body remembered. Your hands on my face. Your fingers combing tangles from my hair.
Her body remembered: his lips and hers; strong arms holding her aloft, a chandelier overhead.
Pacing the docks, walking them again and again and again, Lyra desperately tried to turn her mind to something else—not the puzzle this time but the dream and the woman in the black cloak.
You should not be here. That voice— Alice’s voice? —rang in Lyra’s ears. But who is to say that you were? Lyra could feel herself running, running with bare and bloody feet, out into the night. She tried to remember more—if there was more.
And then she tried not to remember: A Hawthorne boy and a girl who had every reason to stay away from Hawthornes…
A brush of his hand at her temple.
Stepping out of time.
Her lips crashing into his.
Fingers trailed lightly along her jaw.
Their bodies, side by side in bed, floating off into nothing.
Lyra was nothing but memories, and all she could do was just keep walking—down the edges of the large dock and across. Up the platform, over to the smaller docks. And suddenly, she realized…
The docks.
Sometimes, words were words. Sometimes, letters were letters—but sometimes they were numbers. And sometimes, like an infinity symbol carved into a silver music box, letters or numbers were really just shapes .
Nearly all problems , Grayson’s voice rang in Lyra’s memory once more, are a matter of perspective .
Lyra walked backward until she was as far from the docks as she could get and still be beneath the roof of the boathouse. She reached for the ladder built into the stone wall, and then she climbed until the top of her head very nearly scraped the bottom of the roof.
She had a bird’s-eye view now, and this time, she did see something.
The shape of the docks.
Lyra couldn’t rotate the visual in her mind, but she could let go of the ladder with one hand and use it to trace the shape of the docks with her fingers. If you divided the platform between the slips in half, if you traced it twice…
Close. Lyra reversed the movements she’d just made, like she was teaching a dance class, standing in front of her pupils and mirroring the moves that they should make, going right for every left, her version of rotating the shape in her head.
And there it was, no space between the letters but clear as day.
LIE.