CHAPTER 84 GRAYSON
GRAYSON
A very. Completely off the grid. No sign of foul play—but missing. That was all Grayson had been able to extract from Oren’s men. Now those men were searching the island for Brady Daniels, and Grayson and the rest of the players were en route to the yacht.
Grayson zeroed in on the helicopter pilot—also one of Oren’s—and attempted to extract more information, but the pilot didn’t know more .
Because , Grayson thought, Oren’s men don’t know about Alice .
Grayson wanted to believe that he was getting ahead of himself, that Avery’s sudden disappearance might have nothing to do with Alice , but then Grayson thought about Prague—ash on Jameson’s skin, cuts on his neck.
Threats were issued.
Grayson didn’t even wait for the helicopter to touch down on the yacht before he leapt out of it.
Two seconds later, Lyra landed a foot behind him, the result of her own leap from the chopper.
It took everything Grayson had not to shut down and shut her out, but he knew from experience that he wouldn’t do anyone any good like that—that he wouldn’t do Avery any good like that.
This time, I will not freeze. Worst-case scenarios flashed through his mind, and Grayson let them come.
“We need to find Jameson,” he told Lyra. “Or John Oren, Avery’s head of security.” Behind them, the helicopter had finished landing. Rohan and Savannah were climbing out of it.
And there’s no one here to meet us. Grayson held Lyra’s gaze for a fraction of a second, and then he took off, tearing through the yacht, knowing damn well that Lyra could and would match his pace.
Jameson and Avery’s suite was empty. Grayson wasn’t certain where on the yacht security was being headquartered, so he went for the next best thing.
Alisa’s office.
Grayson didn’t bother knocking before throwing open the door. Inside, Alisa and Jameson stood huddled over Alisa’s phone.
“And that’s all?” Jameson was saying, his voice unrecognizable, his eyes locked on the phone like it was the only thing that mattered in the world. “That is, word for word, everything the Woman in Red said?”
The Woman in Red. Grayson filed that phrase away as the voice on the other end of the call replied: “Yes.”
Grayson knew that voice. “Gigi.”
Alisa glanced up at him. “Knox has her. She’s safe and on her way here.”
Gigi was safe, but Grayson knew just by looking at Jameson: Avery isn’t.
Grayson went to his brother but addressed his next words to Alisa’s phone: “Gigi. It’s me. What do you know?”
Grayson’s sister was fully capable of talking ten thousand miles an hour. A veritable avalanche of information poured out of Gigi. A woman in red, Calla Thorp. Another woman, Zella.
Eve telling the former that Lyra knew something about calla lilies, Alice Hawthorne, and omega.
A warning from the latter that if Gigi was asked a certain question, no matter how coercively it was phrased, she could say no.
And then there was the phrase that Gigi said most frequently—over and over and over again. The time for watching is done.
Before Grayson could reply to the onslaught of information, Jameson reached forward and ended the call.
Without even looking at Grayson, Jameson brought his eyes to Alisa’s.
“ Do something ,” Jameson told her, practically vibrating with intensity, like at any moment his earthly body might fail to physically contain the storm brewing inside.
“ Now . You heard Gigi. Calla Thorp. Calls herself the Watcher. Wears a red cloak.”
“Brady’s Calla?” Lyra, who’d been silent up until now, looked to Grayson. “A cloak, Grayson.”
Grayson heard exactly what she was saying. “Your dream. Alice. You said she wore a black cloak.”
“ Alice ,” Jameson repeated, his voice dangerously low. “I told you to stop saying that name, but you wouldn’t.” Jameson’s head swiveled slowly, the motion more animal than human, his gaze coming to rest on Lyra. “You did this,” Jameson told her.
Grayson put himself in front of Lyra. “What happened?” he asked. To Avery. Grayson didn’t need to say that part out loud. Avery was the center of Jameson’s universe, his everything in every way that mattered.
Jameson looked past Grayson and addressed his reply directly to Lyra. “You did.” Jameson’s eyes were wild and charged, his entire body like a live wire. “ You happened, Lyra. Eve happened—and now Avery is gone .”
“Details,” Grayson said, his voice every bit as low as his brother’s and shot through with the kind of intensity meant to rattle bones. “Now. Est unus ex nobis, Jamie.” She is one of us.
From very nearly the beginning, Avery had been one of them.
Jameson’s head bent downward until his chin almost touched his collarbone, so much tension visible in his neck that the cords of muscle looked like they might snap.
I’m right here, Jamie. Just tell me.
“We were being watched ,” Jameson said, his voice uncharacteristically dull as he parroted what Gigi had told them. “And now, the time for watching is over. You just had to push, Gray. You just had to keep right on saying that name.”
None of them said it now. Alice.
“And you.” Jameson raised his head again, locking feral eyes on Lyra’s. “You opened your big mouth to Eve, and now—” Jameson cut off. Without warning, he put his entire body behind a punch delivered straight to Grayson’s jaw.
Grayson went down, and the next thing he knew, Lyra had put herself directly between them, shielding his body with her own.
“Jameson.” Alisa’s voice cut through the air. “I need you to pull it together.”
“This is me,” Jameson told Alisa, staring down at Grayson on the floor, “pulling it together.”
“I understand,” Alisa told him. “Believe me, Jameson, I do. But keep acting like a liability, and I will have a discussion with Oren, and you will find yourself waking up locked in a storage unit somewhere with no way out while the grown-ups do whatever is necessary to get Avery back.”
“Get her back.” Grayson forced himself to say the words out loud. “From them .”
“Odette said there are always three.” Lyra’s voice shook slightly—very slightly—as she addressed those words to Jameson and Alisa.
“Alice Hawthorne was there the night my father died. She was wearing a cloak. Black. All black.” Grayson could practically hear Lyra’s mind churning. “And Calla’s was red…”
Grayson knew that Lyra was thinking about the twisted game her father had laid out for her the night he’d killed herself. Three pieces of candy on a candy necklace. A calla lily. A Hawthorne. And omega.
“This is the last time that I am asking for details.” His jaw still aching from Jameson’s punch, Grayson climbed slowly to his feet.
Alisa preempted any reply that Jameson might have given.
“Less than an hour ago,” she told Grayson, “Avery shut down the cameras on the yacht, all of them, for a period of less than three minutes. She saw to it that Oren and his team were otherwise occupied. Based on the footage we do have, she was alone when she did it and gone by the time the cameras came back up. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of anyone else with her at the time. And she left a note.”
Alisa plucked it off her desk and handed it to Grayson—purple ink, scrawled over the back of one of her mother’s old postcards.
I’m not missing. Don’t look for me.
The press cannot find out that I am gone.
“How long ago did you find this?” Grayson asked Jameson, knowing instinctively that Jameson was the one who had.
Jameson didn’t answer.
“Thirty-three minutes,” Alisa told Grayson.
“Approximately fifteen minutes after the security outages. In that time, Oren and I have been completely read in. Multiple teams have been dispatched. Xander is trying to get ahold of Nash and Libby. Every shred of security footage we have is being gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Right before we talked to Gigi, I put in a call in with a very discreet contact at the Coast Guard.”
Discreet. The muscles in Grayson’s throat tightened as he looked back to Avery’s note. The press cannot find out that I am gone. Grayson would have recognized Avery’s handwriting anywhere. “What do we make of the lemniscate?” he asked.
“ We don’t make anything of it.” Jameson’s voice was like a beast uncaged. “Avery is none of your concern.” He said Avery’s name like it had been torn from his soul, and Grayson felt Jameson’s statement like a sword through his heart.
Avery was family , and family had always been Grayson’s concern.
“I want Odette’s location,” Grayson told Alisa. Hurting or not, his brain sorted through next moves at warp speed. “She knows something. And where’s Toby?”
“He’s been out looking for Eve for the last couple of hours,” Alisa replied.
“What does he know?” Grayson asked Jameson. “About Alice.”
“Nothing he’s felt like sharing,” Jameson replied, voice taut, jaw hard, eyes hollow. “And he’s not answering our calls. But like I said, brother , this is none of your concern.” Jameson looked from Grayson to Lyra and back again. “You have other concerns now.”
It couldn’t have been more obvious: He blames Lyra for this. He blames me.
“Blame me all you want,” Grayson told his brother. “But est unus ex nobis. Nos defendat eius.” Grayson said the full phrase this time. “Avery is one of us, Jamie. We protect her. We will find her.” Grayson felt the force of that vow in every inch of his body.
“ I will find her,” Jameson replied. “Oren and Alisa and their teams will. Nash will. Toby will. But you?” Jameson turned back and looked Grayson dead in the eye. “As far as I’m concerned, you and Lyra can go to hell.”