CHAPTER 87 LYRA
LYRA
Little Lyra, all grown up.”
Lyra stared at the screen on her phone. At the man responsible for half her DNA, who, unlike his brother, pronounced her name the right way—but also didn’t put any more emphasis on it than he would on any other word.
Her father hadn’t aged nearly as much as he should have.
Even at first glance, he reminded Lyra of the kind of actor who got more roles at forty than at twenty, the kind whose charm aged like wine.
Lyra wasn’t charmed. “You agreed to help with the cover-up? Agreed to disappear so they could pretend you were the one who’d died?”
“I’m the agreeable sort.” He’d introduced himself as Tom. Just Tom.
“And I’m your daughter,” Lyra said tautly, her voice coming out lower than she’d meant for it to.
“You were never really mine, princess. You were always hers, your mother’s, and she was always so—”
“I don’t need you to tell me a damn thing about my mother,” Lyra cut in. “I don’t need you to tell me that she’s a thousand times the person you are.” Lyra was almost incredulous. Princess? He was the kind of man who had a term of endearment for everyone, and he’d gone with princess for her?
“It’s funny.” He punctuated the words with a wry, sly shake of his head. “You look so much like my little sister, but that—that steel, that passion, that tilt to your chin—it’s all Darcy.”
Lyra stared at him. Was he kidding? “Darby,” she said, and just like that, she realized that there was almost nothing else she needed to know about this man.
“There’s a lot of my mom in me,” Lyra said slowly, “but if it’s any consolation, I’m also a hell of a lot like my dad, my real dad, the man who raised me—and nothing like you. ”
And there it was again, that wry, infuriating, oh-so-charming shake of his head.
“Tell me about Katalin.” Lyra cut to the only thing she wanted from this man, the only thing she would ever want from him. “Give me something. Anything.”
Anything that might help me help Grayson.
“She’s dead.” He shrugged, and con man or not, Lyra’s gut said he believed that. “Beyond that? Kat was pretty quiet growing up. Killed a frat boy once, though, less than a year before she died. The guy deserved it. I helped her cover it up.”
Lyra wondered if that was why an Ascendant of the Gilded Blade had chosen Katalin—not just that she had the blood, but that she’d shown that kind of promise. “What did he do to deserve it?” Lyra asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
Lyra thought about Alice’s poem. About Nan’s fingers. About Eve and that teacher of hers. “Maybe I do.”
“You asked for something. I gave you something.” For a moment, Lyra thought he was going to try to get something from her in return. He didn’t. “I’ll give you this, too. My sister bought a blanket for you before you were ever born. Darby might even still have it.”
At least he’d gotten her mom’s name right this time.
As if he could feel Lyra’s judgment, her father’s brown eyes grew a little more intent.
“For all my flaws,” he said, “I loved my sister. My brother, too. As much as I am capable of loving anyone, I loved them. But I’m not big on mourning, and I also truly love the easy life.
” He turned the phone in his hand and Lyra was able to make out a beach, the ocean, the sunrise.
He turned the phone back around. “I love this life.”
But not me. Never me. “And that’s it?” Lyra clarified the question before he could take it the wrong way. “Katalin killed a man who deserved it. She bought a blanket for your unborn daughter. And that’s it. That’s all you have to tell me?”
“My brother was the obsessive one, the one who could never let anything go. Look where that got him. And look at me, princess.”
This is a waste of time. Lyra didn’t want that to be true, but it was. Grayson was still out there. He still might not come back. And nothing this man had to say would change that.
Look at me, princess.
Lyra let it all come, every last emotion. She let it all go. And then, she told Luiz Aquila Reyes, the man of a hundred names, the truth. “I don’t see anything worth looking at.”