CHAPTER 45 LYRA
LYRA
Lyra woke up to find Grayson already sitting up in bed.
At least he’d slept. She’d made sure of it.
She’d stayed awake the night before until he was out, listening as his breathing slowed, her head on his chest. Lyra had felt it the minute his body had finally given in.
That had been at three in the morning, but still, Grayson had gotten at least a few hours of sleep, assuming he hadn’t been sitting up in bed, staring down at the massive ring of keys in his lap, since dawn.
The keys.
Grayson had fetched them right after they’d talked to Nan and right before they’d caught the others up on what the old woman had said. In retrospect, the solution to the false patent puzzle—and its meaning—had been elegant and startlingly clear.
The Gilded Blade take away Alice, March 5, 1967.
Decades before Grayson’s grandmother had faked her own death and become the Watcher, she’d already had a run-in with the Gilded Blade.
Alice had disappeared. Alice had returned, and when she had, a young Tobias Hawthorne had taken her back and told her that he didn’t need to know her secrets.
He’d given her a box in which to lock away those secrets.
Lyra and Grayson needed that box, but all they had were the old billionaire’s keys.
There were a hundred and seven of them on the ring—elaborate, bespoke keys, each bearing a unique design.
Some were gold. Some were copper, bronze, or silver.
White or black iron. Rose gold. Platinum.
There were keys that looked rusted and keys that shone like they’d been polished just hours before, keys that boasted embedded jewels and keys that looked plain in comparison.
There were keys for each letter of the alphabet, keys that bore numbers or complicated shapes. There was an apple key and one depicting a pair of cherries. A harp key and another with a violin. An eagle. A scorpion. A snake.
The old man told me once, Grayson had said the night before, that the story of his life was in these keys. I should have realized he meant that literally.
And that meant somewhere on that key ring, there could be one or more keys that told the story of Alice’s death, of Tobias’s realization that she was alive—the story of the Gilded Blade.
But there was no key bearing a lily, no key depicting a hand, not a monoceros or a unicorn in sight, though two other mythical creatures, a mermaid and a dragon, each made an appearance.
“I’ve started trying to identify all of the keys whose meaning I can decipher as parts of my grandfather’s life story that I recognize.” Grayson didn’t have to so much as turn his head to know that Lyra was awake.
She sat up. “If you got less than four hours of sleep,” she told Grayson, “I feel pretty confident Nash is going to start the day by kicking your ass.”
“He can try.” Grayson didn’t even blink. He just looked down at the palm of his left hand. In it, Lyra could make out a rock, a smooth, plain stone.
Seeing the direction of Lyra’s gaze, Grayson uncurled his fingers a bit, revealing words carved into the stone’s surface: IT GOES BOTH WAYS.
“The other side has a Latin phrase,” Grayson told Lyra. “One Avery heard me say when my brothers and I had known her for only a very brief time.”
“Latin for family?” Lyra guessed.
“She is one of us. We protect her.” Grayson translated the phrase, then set the stone gingerly down on the nightstand and returned his attention to the keys.
“These four keys,” he told Lyra, pulling a sequence of keys out one by one, “all depict eyes. Look at the jewels the old man chose for the pupils: a tiger’s eye, a brown diamond, an emerald, and a tourmaline. ”
The last of the four gemstones was a pale grayish blue. The emerald was a vivid green, the other two distinct shades of brown.
“It’s the four of you,” Lyra realized. “You and your brothers—the stones are the colors of your eyes.”
“One key for each of us,” Grayson said quietly.
“I wonder how long the old man waited after we were born to make them. Long enough for our eyes to settle on a color, I suppose. There are other keys I’ve deciphered as well.
I know the exact moment the violin key refers to.
The snake almost certainly corresponds to a tale of misplaced daring on Jameson’s part when he was seven.
The tree on this one?” Grayson pulled another key. “That story involves Xander and Nash.”
“How many keys have you identified?” Lyra asked.
“Thirty-one.”
That left seventy-six keys whose meaning was up in the air. “Who would know more of your grandfather’s life story, the parts of it you don’t know?”
“Zara,” Grayson answered immediately “Nan. Oren, who was the old man’s head of security before he was Avery’s. And each of my brothers likely knows at least a few stories that I do not.”
If there was information about the Gilded Blade in Tobias Hawthorne’s key ring, it would be a lot easier to find it if they could narrow in on a small number of keys whose meaning was unknown.
“What about Alice’s box?” Lyra moved onto the next item on her mental list. “Where do we start if we want to find it?”
“Hawthorne House has nearly two dozen secret passages,” Grayson replied, “and those are just the ones we know about. Add in hidden compartments, drawers, and chambers, and that number easily quadruples. The House stands at roughly forty thousand square feet, and that’s not even touching on the grounds or the tunnels that run beneath the estate. ”
Forty thousand square feet. That number didn’t even compute for Lyra.
“Proverbial needle in a haystack,” Lyra summarized.
In reply, Grayson swung his feet over the side of the bed, then stood. Lyra went to follow him, then realized he was heading for his suite’s massive bathroom. She stopped dead in her tracks.
“I need to shave.” That was all the explanation Grayson offered, but he left the door to the bathroom open.
Lyra gave him space, right up to the point that she decided that space was the last thing Grayson needed right now.
By the time she stepped through the open door, Grayson had already applied a thin layer of shaving cream to his face and neck.
A blade—the old-fashioned kind, not a modern razor—gleamed in his hand.
It figured that Grayson Hawthorne was the kind of guy who shaved in a way that left zero margin for error.
“What’s your grandfather saying in your head right now?” Lyra asked, coming up behind Grayson in the mirror.
“That there’s no such thing as a needle in a haystack.
” Grayson slid the blade over and down his skin with military precision.
“There are just people who know where and how to look and people who don’t.
” He rinsed the blade in the sink, then brought it back to his face once more.
“Your turn,” he told Lyra, after his next pass.
“To shave?” For a split second, Lyra could imagine the weight of the old-fashioned razor in her hand, imagine herself shaving him.
“To feel it,” Grayson told her, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
“It?” The word caught in Lyra’s throat.
“All of it.”
Lyra’s thoughts went back to that sketch, to a man who wasn’t her father but looked just like her—and then further back, to the sound of gunshots, to blood on the stairs and blood on her feet, to being small and terrified and alone.
And then, not alone.
“I thought I knew what happened,” Lyra managed to say.
“What I lived through, what I saw. I thought my parents knew and that they lied to me, that they just swept it under the rug. When the dreams started, when the first memories of that night came back to me—I felt like my whole life was a lie. I’d look at myself in the mirror and feel no connection whatsoever to the person looking back.
I could force my lips to smile, but I didn’t feel it.
I couldn’t. All I could do was pretend.”
“And now?” Grayson said, taking another pass with the blade, over his jaw and down his neck.
Lyra met her own eyes in the mirror. “I’m not pretending anymore.
” She wasn’t the person she’d been at sixteen.
She’d never be that girl again, but for the first time in a long time, Lyra didn’t want to be that person, because that Lyra wouldn’t have taken the razor from Grayson Hawthorne’s hand.
The old Lyra wouldn’t have looked Grayson straight in the eye, finished the job for him, and said, “We’re going to find that box.
We just need to decide where to look—and how. ”