CHAPTER 28 LYRA
LYRA
Alisa Ortega clearly had a death wish.
“What,” Grayson said, once they’d pulled past the gates and onto the Hawthorne estate, “was that?”
Lyra’s heart thudded in her chest as she took in the massive mansion in the distance.
“That,” Alisa said, rolling the windows back up, “was us controlling the story.”
As Hawthorne House drew closer and closer, Lyra tried to process the obvious: The paparazzi had gotten their shot.
Of Grayson. And me. Of Grayson Hawthorne and me.
But that thought was drowned out by the physical reality of the House, capital H, by the dawning realization that Grayson’s home was no mere mansion.
How many turrets could one manor have? Castle, Lyra realized. The proper word was castle, a reminder for Lyra that Grayson and his brothers and Avery were nothing less than American royalty.
“The press knows this year’s Grandest Game was underway,” Alisa continued remorselessly.
“The paparazzi have been camped out at the gates for days. We’ve been avoiding giving them anything until now, but sooner or later, people are going to start asking questions, and we need for those questions to be about something other than where Avery is.
If we try to announce a winner without her, the press will have a field day with that, so our best and only option is to present the tabloids and social media sleuths of the world with a very tantalizing distraction.
Something else to speculate about. Someone. ”
“Me,” Lyra realized, as Nash pulled the SUV around the side of the House. “You gave them me.” Eve’s words rang in Lyra’s mind: I give it a matter of days before the press discovers that Grayson Hawthorne has a girlfriend.
“The press loves a mystery girl,” Alisa told Lyra. “And Grayson is widely considered the most eligible Hawthorne. With a little luck, the two of you should keep them busy long enough to buy us—and Avery—some time.”
Grayson was not pleased. “You could have asked.”
“We would have said yes,” Lyra pointed out, as the SUV came to a stop in what was very clearly not an ordinary garage. For Avery, Grayson would have said yes to almost anything, and Lyra wasn’t one to back down from a challenge.
Screw the paparazzi.
As she stepped out of the SUV onto a sparkling, epoxy-coated floor, Lyra resisted the urge to count the cars. It would have taken more than two hands to do so, and most of them looked like they belonged on a racetrack—or in a museum.
Grayson closed his car door, spared one last glare at Alisa, then made use of one of the phone numbers she’d given him, then the other.
Clearly, neither of his sisters picked up.
Lyra watched as Nash strolled over to a silver box on the wall. There seemed to be some kind of puzzle-based locking mechanism on that box, and Nash worked it like he’d been born working puzzles, earning himself the right to return the car key in his hand to a peg he’d just revealed.
One of dozens.
And all Lyra could think, as Grayson led her into Hawthorne House, as he led her down corridor after corridor and up two sprawling staircases, was that this place was about as far from Mile’s End as you could possibly get.
And even wearing her dad’s flannel shirt and jeans, Grayson fit here.
He stopped in front of a mahogany door with an elaborate, bronze doorknob. Grayson twisted the knob.
“My room,” he told Lyra. It was neat, almost pathologically so. The bed, comforter, and sheets were all black. Thick mahogany moldings ringed the ceiling. On a nightstand carved from matching wood, there was a single visible object: a river rock, small and smooth.
Grayson slipped the rock into the pocket of his jeans and opened the drawer to the nightstand. From inside it, he withdrew a file folder, then held that folder out to Lyra.
She took it, knowing exactly what it was. “Your grandfather’s file on my father.”
The file looked so ordinary compared to its surroundings, compared to this place, compared to Grayson, who had always and would always belong here.
American royalty, disinherited or not.
Lyra flipped open the file. A mostly blank page stared back at her.
There was a name at the top: THOMAS, THOMAS—all capital letters, the last name the same as the first. Beneath the name, there was a date: Lyra’s fourth birthday.
And below that, written in left-handed cursive, there were a grand total of three sentences.
Three sentences. That’s it? Lyra read them out loud. “Suicide—two bullets. A tragedy in three acts. Minority stake in patent purchased ninety days earlier.”
The numbers jumped out at her: two, three, and ninety. Lyra flipped the page to find a receipt. The word RESTITUTION was written across the top. Scanning the receipt confirmed that it was for an online order for flowers, sent to a funeral home in Delaware.
The flowers in question? Forty white calla lilies.
Another number. Forty. Lyra stared at the receipt, looking for anything else that could hold meaning.
The funeral home was Ascension Heritage Chapel, located at 118 Main Street.
Tobias Hawthorne had paid $175 for the flowers, inclusive of delivery.
The last four digits of the credit card he’d used to make the purchase were 2921.
And that was it. There was nothing else in the file.
“What about the patent?” Lyra said.
“There was no such purchase,” Grayson replied.
“My grandfather owned thousands of patents, some in whole, some in part, some purchased, some of his own design. I searched them all. When that turned up nothing, I called the phone number for the flower store. It’s still in business, but unsurprisingly, they had no records of a random purchase made fifteen years ago.
The funeral home to which the flowers were delivered is indeed a funeral home, though I could find no record of the funeral in question ever being held there. ”
Lyra’s father had died in Kansas, not Delaware. Dead ends. Lies. Code. “Ascension Heritage,” Lyra murmured, and then she zeroed in on the initials. “A. H.”
“Alice Hawthorne.” It was clear from Grayson’s tone that he’d never made that connection before, but why would he have? Before the Grandest Game, before he’d met Lyra, he hadn’t even realized that Alice was alive.
“There has to be something else,” Lyra said.
“There is.” Grayson reached back into the drawer and withdrew a single, folded piece of paper. As he did, Lyra’s gaze went to the only other object in the drawer.
A ring box.
Grayson unfolded the page and closed the drawer.
“In addition to doing a patent search,” he told Lyra, “I also executed a manual search of all of my grandfather’s filing cabinets and hidden drawers.
The old man was forever sketching out ideas.
I’d estimate that at least two-thirds of them eventually yielded patents.
I went through all the ones that didn’t, and this was the only one that jumped out to me.
It’s marked with a patent number that clearly isn’t a patent number—too many digits. ”
With no further ado, Grayson handed over the page.
“How long did it take you to go through all of your grandfather’s filing cabinets?” Lyra asked.
Silvery blue eyes met hers. “Months.”
Months, Lyra thought. And all that time, what Grayson had really been looking for was her.
Five days. They’d only really known each other for five days, but they’d loomed larger than life in each other’s minds much longer than that.
Setting that thought aside, Lyra looked down at the page Grayson had given her.
On it, Tobias Hawthorne had sketched out design specs for what looked like a knife—an elaborate knife made of steel and plated with gold, fashioned to look like a rose.
Per the specs, if you twisted the handle, the petals on the rose opened, and the blade was thrust downward.
Lyra stared at the knife, and her heart skipped a beat as she realized—
“There has to be some meaning to the number,” Grayson was saying beside her. “One-three-one-two-five-nine-six-three-seven-five. I tried countless variations on an alphabetic cipher, but—”
“Grayson.” Lyra touched the tips of her fingers to the drawing—to the rose handle, to the tip of the knife. “Tell me what this is.”
The group you’re after, Odette had said. All I can tell you is that they believe that some situations require a gently guiding hand and others…
“That,” Grayson said, his eyes locking on to Lyra’s as he realized what he was looking at, what his grandfather had drawn, “is a gilded blade.”