CHAPTER 80 GRAYSON
GRAYSON
G rayson did not think, did not hesitate. He removed his jacket. Then shirt. Moving rapidly backward like a blade through the night, he calculated the exact trajectory needed and the exponentially small margin of error within which he would need to hit it.
And then he ran—straight for the edge of the patio, the edge of the cliff. His body anticipated the moment of liftoff, the way he would arc through the air to dive into the water a hundred feet below, narrowly skirting the rocks.
Then Lyra threw herself sideways—directly into his path.
Abort. Grayson couldn’t manage a full stop, so he flung his arms around her and twisted, redirecting his momentum as best he could and praying that it would be enough.
They landed hard, all of an inch from the edge.
“Have you lost your mind?” Lyra was not one for raising her voice, but she was yelling now. She was also on top of him.
“Let me up,” Grayson commanded.
Even at night, Lyra blazed. “What the hell, Hawthorne?”
“Let me up,” Grayson repeated, but she pinned him down instead. “Let me do this for you, Lyra.”
“Asshole.” She was straddling him now, her hands locked on his wrists.
“Do you really think that I am going to let you dive off this cliff and just hope that you manage to avoid the rocks?” Her chest heaved.
“Do you really think that you’re the only one who would do anything to protect the people who matter to you? ”
Her voice broke on the word matter , and Grayson knew in that instant that he was going nowhere.
I matter. To you. This matters.
“I have spent years lying to my family because I knew that if they knew I was suffering, they would suffer, too,” Lyra continued, the timbre of her voice powerful and deep.
“And maybe lying to protect them and expecting something different from you makes me a hypocrite. Maybe I am every bit as much of a liar as you are, Grayson Hawthorne. But in this much…”
Grayson sat up, shifting her lower on his thighs, his hands making their way back to hers, his fingers interweaving with hers.
“ In this much ,” Lyra said again, “we are the same.” Her grip on his hands tightened, like she didn’t trust him to stay put, like she’d put him right back down again if she had to.
We are the same. Grayson let those words roll over him. He committed them—and this moment—to memory, in case it was one of their last. But reality was a wolf at the door. “There’s someone out there. I saw what you saw, Lyra.”
Grayson’s mind went to the letter A .
Lyra let loose of him and slid off his thighs, standing and orienting her body toward the water. “I don’t feel anything anymore. Whoever’s responsible for those flowers—they’re gone.”
Grayson was not sure which defied logic more: her certainty or his predisposition to believe it. He climbed to his feet. “I’ll let my brothers know.”
The image of calla lilies on the water, illuminated for less than a second by a lightning strike, was emblazoned on Grayson’s mind. It felt, to him, like a warning.
A declaration of war.
He typed and sent the message, then looked back up at Lyra, who beat him to speaking.
“There is only one way that this is going to work,” she said.
This. Grayson lingered on the word. This. This. This.
“I get to pull you back from cliffs, too.”
Grayson felt the rise and fall of his own Adam’s apple, then a tightening of the muscles in his throat and a loosening of the ones between his shoulder blades. This. “I accept your premise,” he said, a Hawthorne striking a deal, “but I do not like it.”
“Join the club,” Lyra told him. “And no more lies. If there’s something you can’t tell me, just say that. You’re entitled to secrets, Grayson. You are entitled to put your family first, to protect them, but if you ever lie to me or try to manipulate me again, this—us—we’re done.”
“No more lies.” Grayson could agree to that much at least—for her. Differently. Better. “To that end, there is something that you need to know. You said that I would not choose you.”
“I’m not asking you to—”
“You were wrong. I would choose you, Lyra—not over my family but as a part of it.” Grayson thought about Nash saying that he’d known immediately with Libby, about the old man and his propensity for talking about the way that Hawthorne men loved.
“You can’t mean that,” Lyra replied. “It’s only been three days.”
“Try telling me again,” Grayson suggested silkily, “what I can and cannot mean.”
Before she could say a word, his watch buzzed. Grayson looked down at it, expecting a return message in response to the warning he’d sent, but instead, an image had taken over the face of the watch.
A diamond.
After three or four seconds, the diamond dissolved, only to be replaced with words. A PLAYER HAS REACHED THE FINAL PUZZLE.
“A player,” Lyra said out loud, having received the same message. “A Diamond—Rohan or Savannah.”
Grayson looked back out at the ocean. They could try taking the long way down, try to track a threat that was probably already long gone—or they could see this through, make one last attempt to give Lyra the ability to save Mile’s End, one last attempt to save Grayson’s sister from herself.
“Emily Dickinson,” Lyra said, as intense and intent as any Hawthorne. “We’re headed back to the house—to the library.”