CHAPTER 34 LYRA
LYRA
Lyra stared at the drawing of the rose-handled knife.
It looked like something out of a fairy tale.
It looked like it belonged at Hawthorne House every bit as much as Grayson belonged here.
He and Lyra were currently ensconced in a circular library that made the one on Hawthorne Island seem like nothing but the palest of imitations.
Lyra had no idea how many thousands of books, or tens of thousands, ringed the massive room, with its four wrought iron staircases spiraling upward toward a second story and a high, vaulted ceiling.
Lyra and Grayson stood, as they had for hours, in the very center of the room over a desk made of a tree trunk ten feet in diameter. Dozens of sheets of paper littered the top of the desk, filled with Lyra’s handwriting and Grayson’s, the work of two people who didn’t even know the word quit.
“Is that it?” Lyra raised her gaze to Grayson’s face. “Every permutation we can derive based on all the numbers in the file?”
The fake patent number. The price of the flowers and the number ordered. The last four digits of the credit card that had been used to place the order. The address of the funeral home. The three numbers listed in Tobias Hawthorne’s cryptic notes: two, three, and ninety.
“Every permutation of those numbers plus all the obvious alpha-numeric ciphers that can be derived from them,” Grayson confirmed, reaching yet again for his phone.
“Your sisters are avoiding your calls,” Lyra told him.
“Which is precisely why I will continue calling. Some battles are battles of will.”
Lyra was starting to appreciate the fact that her only sibling was four. Most Cooper Kane battles of will involved the type of animals that did and did not make appropriate pets, the number of sticks one person really needed at any given time, and the height from which it was mostly safe to jump.
Grayson’s call must have gone to voicemail yet again, because he hung up the phone—just as the door to the library swung inward.
Lyra startled, half expecting to see a cloaked figure standing there.
Instead, she saw a girl around her age whose black hair had been pulled back into messy buns on either side of her head and who appeared to be accompanied by…
“A droid?” Lyra blinked.
“Xander has hobbies,” Grayson explained, like the strangest thing in this equation was that anyone might have a hobby, let alone more than one, and not the fact that one of said hobbies was apparently building robots. “How’s Libby?” Grayson asked the girl.
“Well, she isn’t wearing flannel, so that’s something.” The girl and the droid stopped just short of the desk. “I’m Max, by the way,” she told Lyra. “Maxine Liu. Avery’s best friend, Xander’s better half, purveyor of common sense in these hallowed halls.”
Lyra’s gaze was drawn to Max’s shirt, which had a picture of a fax machine on it, with the words YOU FIRST, MOTHER-FAXER emblazoned underneath.
“You must be Lyra,” Max continued. “Welcome to Hawthorne House, where the scones never stop scone-ing and the abs are ridiculously well-defined.”
Grayson laid a hand on Max’s shoulder and looked at her in a way that made Lyra think that what he was really seeing was Avery. “We’re doing everything we can to get her back, Max,” Grayson said quietly. “I swear it.”
“Spoken like a mother-faxing Hawthorne,” Max replied with a shake of her head.
“I have no idea where Avery is, what she meant by that note, if it was written under duress, or what my best friend’s plan is here, but if there is one thing I do know, it’s that Avery Kylie Grambs is never the damsel in distress.
It’s always one of you.” Max glanced at Lyra. “It’s always one of them.”
The robot beeped. Lyra wasn’t sure why.
Max looked down at the spread of papers on the desk. “Catch me up to speed, scruffy,” she told Grayson, poking fun at his stubble. “Knowledge is power. Puzzles are knowledge. And… go.”
For the first time since Lyra had stepped out of the SUV into a garage that held an eye-watering number of cars, she felt almost normal, like maybe it was possible to be normal in this capital-H House.
Like normal was in the eye of the beholder.
Grayson read Max in—on the file, on the patent that didn’t exist, on the drawing of the gilded blade and the fake patent number that went along with it, not to mention all of the other numbers from the file.
“Two, three, ninety, forty, one-hundred-eighteen, one-hundred-seventy-five, two, nine, two, and one,” Max rattled off. “Plus the quote-unquote patent number.”
1312596375. By this point, Lyra knew it by heart.
“There are far too many digits for all of them to hold significance,” Grayson summarized.
“Thus, we’ve been working off the theory that one or more of the numbers in the file might be the means of decoding the false patent number.
Unfortunately, there’s no spacing on the patent number, so we don’t know if it’s ten single digits or if they need to be grouped, and if so, how.
Combine that with the number of potential ciphers and… ”
Max let out a low whistle.
Grayson reached for his phone and called his sisters yet again—but this time, the call must have gone through. Grayson’s posture changed in an instant.
“Rohan.” Grayson issued that name as an accusation as he turned away from Lyra and Max, holding his body utterly erect as he allowed the person on the other end of the line a brief reply. “Define fine.”
Rohan answered Savannah’s phone, Lyra registered. And Savannah definitely isn’t fine.
“What happened?” Grayson had a way of turning questions into orders: You will tell me what happened. A few seconds later, his voice went dangerously low. “Put my sister on.”
Hell had no fury like an overprotective Hawthorne.
“This is going to be good,” Max whispered to Lyra.
“Savannah.” Grayson’s shoulders visibly loosened. Relief. “Are you alright?” There was a pause. “Whether or not you need me, Savannah, you have me. Say the word, and I am there.”
Grayson’s love for his sisters was steady and solid and fierce in a way that Lyra recognized all too well. She took the fact that he wasn’t threatening to haul Savannah home, whether she liked it or not, as character growth.
Say the word, and I am there.
“Oh wow,” Max whispered to Lyra, studying Grayson’s expression as he listened to Savannah’s reply. “I think she might be threatening him. Bold move.”
“Put Gigi on,” Grayson ordered, and then a full minute passed before he spoke again. “Gigi, slow down. All I got from that was coffee, knife, and drugged.”
Max circled around to stand next to Lyra. “And the plot thickens.”
Gigi must have started her explanation over, because Grayson was quiet for even longer this time. When he did speak again, he started with: “No. Absolutely not.” There was a pause. “Do not hang up on me, Juliet.” Grayson kneaded his forehead. “Gigi?”
Three more seconds passed, and Grayson hung up the phone. “Nash has it easy,” he muttered.
“Sisters.” Max made a show of commiserating, but Lyra had the general sense that Max might very well not have any sisters herself. “Am I right?”
“Sisters can be a handful,” a voice said from the doorway.
Lyra turned to see Libby Hawthorne, formerly Grambs.
Libby was famous for being Avery’s sister, for marrying a Hawthorne, and for her gothic fashion sense, but today, she was wearing gray sweatpants.
Her hair, dyed black at the roots and a vivid rainbow of neon colors lower down, was uncombed.
“Libby.” Grayson took a step toward his sister-in-law. “Are you… Should you…”
“Pregnant women can indeed stand,” Libby told Grayson. “Walk, even,” she continued. In sweats, Libby didn’t look pregnant, at least, not obviously so, until she laid a protective hand on her stomach. “Thing One and Thing Two like being on the move.”
Twins, Lyra remembered.
“I think that’s Grayson’s cue to catch us up on the sister drama,” Max declared.
“Where’s Nash?” Grayson asked.
“Right here.” Nash stepped into the library, carrying an oversized tray of cupcakes, and closed the door behind him.
“Gigi and Savannah are fine.” Grayson clearly wasn’t feeling chatty. “Rohan got them out.”
“Out of where?” Nash asked in a dangerously pleasant tone as he set down the cupcakes.
“Long story very short,” Grayson said, “Gigi declined an invitation from the Woman in Red and managed to glean that what she was being invited to was to some sort of test. Candidates are chosen. It’s unclear exactly what happens if they say yes.”
Lyra’s mind went immediately to Avery and that note.
“What else?” Lyra asked. She knew Grayson. She knew just by looking at him that there was something else.
“Apparently,” Grayson said, “the group we’re after is called the Gilded Blade.”
Lyra’s gaze went back to the drawing, to the rose-handled knife, and she stated the obvious: “We have to decode this.”
Opposite Grayson, Nash removed his cowboy hat. “What are you waiting for, little brother? Deal us in.”