CHAPTER 21 LYRA
LYRA
The dream started the way it always did—with the flower. But this time, Lyra just stood there, frozen, like her entire body had turned to ice, watching as the calla lily slowly disintegrated to nothing in her hand.
She woke up in her childhood bed with her four-year-old brother sitting on her stomach.
“You’re home!” Cooper gave Lyra’s cheek a gentle pat, then bounced exuberantly on her belly. “And you brought a friend. He does magic tricks! And he’s much faster than you are.”
“High praise,” Lyra groaned as Cooper bounced again. Her little brother prided himself on his speed, and it was the top metric by which he judged others—or at least, it had been, the last time Lyra had seen Cooper.
It had been months.
I’m not ready for this, Lyra thought, but no one was ever really ready for Cooper Kane. Lyra had missed him—fiercely. She swung her brother onto her hip as she climbed out of bed. Belatedly, she thought to ask: “Magic tricks?”
Grayson Hawthorne did magic tricks?
“Good ones,” Cooper confirmed. “Also, Grayson said that when you woke up, I should tell you he went for a run.”
Lyra wondered if Grayson had managed to clock more than a couple hours of sleep. With Avery missing, Lyra was betting the answer was no, and she felt twin stabs of guilt that her parents had cloistered Grayson in the spare room and that she’d slept so long.
She hadn’t dreamed all night, until the end.
Not wanting to waste any more time and not wanting to leave Grayson alone any longer, she made her way to her closet to scavenge from the clothes she’d left behind when she went to college.
“Are you and Grayson going to kiss?” Cooper demanded as she sat him down. “Because that’s disgusting, even if he is very fast.”
Lyra had always loved the house she grew up in, but Mile’s End had never just been the house.
It was also the land—the trees and the creek and the smell of grass and dirt.
Lyra tracked Grayson easily enough and caught up to him in a clearing near the creek.
It took a moment for it to hit her that he wasn’t wearing a suit.
It appeared he’d borrowed clothes from her dad.
The sight of Grayson Hawthorne in jeans and flannel was really something.
“I didn’t mean to sleep so long,” Lyra called. The sun had to have been up for a couple of hours at least.
“You needed it.” There was no judgment in Grayson’s tone.
“What are you doing out here?” Lyra asked, no judgment on her part, either.
“Trying not to fall back into old habits.” Grayson’s chest rose and fell with each breath.
“I’m forcing myself to feel it all, to resist the urge to give in to the voice in my head that says that if I were what I was raised to be, Avery would be fine, the voice that says that when I’m weak, the people I love get hurt. ”
This was Grayson, raw and real, not hiding from the pain, not suppressing it, treating it as neither enemy nor friend.
“Avery might be fine,” Lyra said softly. They had no way of knowing if the heiress was in acute danger or how much. They didn’t know what Avery had agreed to, if she’d truly agreed to anything at all.
There was too damn much they didn’t know.
“I’m sure Avery has a plan,” Grayson said, fixing his gaze on the horizon. “She usually does, but Avery’s plans sometimes involve a certain degree of risk to herself. It wouldn’t be the first time she walked straight into a lion’s den for one of us. For me.”
He closed his eyes. His eyelashes cast shadows on a face that suddenly looked all cheekbones, all angles. Lyra made her way toward him. Wanting to comfort him and not sure how, she lifted her hand to his face. Her own eyes closed as she felt the stubble on his jaw.
It suited Grayson more than it should have—the stubble and the flannel, standing in the woods at Mile’s End, letting the pain come, as real as anyone Lyra had ever met.
He leaned into her touch. “I checked back in with Alisa.” Lyra opened her eyes to find that Grayson had already done the same. “Odette, it seems,” he continued, “has made herself very difficult to find. Sooner or later, they’ll track her down, but in the meantime…”
The muscles in Grayson’s jaw ripple beneath Lyra’s touch. Whatever he was about to say was going to cost him.
“I have to ask you to do something,” Grayson said, lifting his hand to her face, “that I really do not want to have to ask you to do.”
“Does it have something to do with the local sheriff’s department’s records?” Lyra guessed.
Grayson breathed. In and out. “I wish it did. Alisa has someone working on getting the file on your kidnapping. It could be a few hours, and the information won’t be legally obtained, but the gentleman’s efforts shouldn’t be detected—by anyone.”
Not by the sheriff’s department. Not by the Watcher, the Hand, or the Judge. Just thinking those words, just thinking about what they were up against, Lyra suddenly knew what their next move needed to be, what it was that Grayson didn’t want to ask her to do.
“Nine-four-seven Onomo Crescent,” Lyra said. Before reading Eve’s file, Lyra hadn’t known where the house was, only that she’d been there, only that a man who’d claimed to be her father had taken her there, shot himself there.
“Your memory of that night, it’s been coming to you in pieces.” Grayson’s voice went uncharacteristically hoarse. “But memory is a physical thing for you, Lyra. Back on Hawthorne Island, any time you wanted to commit something to memory, you’d close your eyes. You’d feel your surroundings.”
Right now, Lyra could feel Grayson’s hand on her face and hers on his.
“You need me to go back there.” Lyra didn’t just understand Grayson’s logic. She felt it, proving his point, because her body was already anticipating the way it would feel to revisit the scene of the crime.
“The last thing I want to ask you to do is to go back there and try to relive the most terrible, traumatic, soul-rending experience of your life.” Grayson’s voice was struck through with all that pain he’d come out here to feel, and Lyra knew: He didn’t want to ask, but he would.
He had to—for Avery. If there was even a chance Lyra might remember something…
“What makes you think you even need to ask?” Lyra said. “Asshole.” The word, the closest thing to a nickname she had for him, came out more tender than she’d meant for it to. “You couldn’t hold me back from doing what needs to be done if you tried.”