CHAPTER 70 LYRA
LYRA
Zara was alone in the tower when they arrived, but in a matter of seconds, the room was full.
Everyone had followed, except for Brady and Oren, who’d stayed back to keep an eye on Brady.
Lyra scanned the keys on the floor—first the larger group and then the smaller one.
She found the eagle first and then the harp.
“Lyra, the harp,” Lyra said. “Aquila, the eagle.” She scanned the rest of the keys. “Are any of the rest of these constellations?”
Knox pulled the scorpion key. “Scorpious.” He reached for the dragon. “Draco.”
Draco. Lyra’s heart skipped a beat. Per Eve’s file, the surnames that Lyra’s father had used most frequently had been Aquila, Reyes, and Drakos.
“Everything okay in here?” Nash said from the doorway.
“More of the same,” Libby told him. “Constellations.”
More of the same. Lyra could feel herself reaching a turning point. Something has to change.
“The edges!” Gigi popped up next to Lyra from who knows where.
“Forget the designs on the heads of the keys and look only at the flourishes around them. If you focus on the borders…” Gigi confiscated Lyra’s keys, then went for Knox’s, and then she gathered all the letter keys and began going through them one by one.
Slate’s lips curved very, very slightly. “She’s pulling the matches—one letter for each of those keys.”
Four letters. Lyra took them in. A, J, K, and Q.
“Avery and Jameson?” Libby guessed for the first two. “Or the A could be for Alice.”
Another puzzle. Another game. More of the same.
Lyra could feel a pressure building in her chest. Something had to change.
She’d promised Grayson that she would stay at Hawthorne House, safe and sound, protected by all of Oren’s security measures.
But Lyra wasn’t sure how many more puzzles or dead ends or questions she could take.
“I need some air.” She stood. “I’ll check with Oren to see what perimeter I need to stay within, but I’m going for a run.”
Even inside the security perimeter, the Hawthorne estate offered plenty of terrain for Lyra to conquer. With only the light of the moon overhead, she pushed herself harder and farther and faster, and all the while, she just kept thinking that nothing would change unless she changed it.
Unless she took a risk.
But every time she even considered it, she remembered her promise—and everything else. Pulling each other back from cliffs. Knowing Grayson and being known by him. The way he’d looked in the woods at Mile’s End and the way it had felt to shave his face.
Seven days. It had only been seven days. Just one week, and Lyra couldn’t break her promise to him, but something had to change. She ended up in the forest—as far out as she could go with Oren’s blessing. It took her longer than it should have to realize she had a shadow.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Lyra called back.
“Clearly not.” Nash didn’t even have to work to catch up to her now that his cover was blown. “You don’t need a babysitter,” he said, pulling even with her. “You need to run.”
“You don’t have to keep me company,” Lyra told him. “I’m fine.”
She could practically hear Grayson: You don’t have to be fine.
“Gray swims to calm his mind,” Nash said steadily.
“Or he used to, anyway. He’d swim until every muscle in his body was screaming, until he could barely keep himself afloat.
For Jamie, it’s always been either going too fast or being up too high.
Xander tends more toward eating scones and playing with explosives.
We all have our ways of processing things. ”
“What about you?” Lyra asked, coming to a stop to catch her breath. Better to talk about him than me.
“I like the feel of the wind,” Nash told her.
“The smell of grass and dirt. When I was younger, it was motorcycles—refurbishing them, salvaging parts, proving to myself that there was no such thing as a lost cause.” Nash looked to the horizon, like it wasn’t nighttime and already dark, like he was looking into a Texas sunset instead.
“You’re new to all of this, to us. But for the record, Lyra?
If any part of you is considering taking this run a little farther, pushing beyond Oren’s airtight security perimeter? Ain’t gonna happen, kid.”
He’s bluffing, Lyra thought.
“Not bluffin’,” Nash informed her, like she’s spoken out loud.
“You strike me as a fellow first-born, so this bit might be new to you, but I’ve been riding herd on my brothers their entire lives and Avery since she got here.
You’re welcome to try to push this. Wouldn’t go well for you.
No grand acts of self-sacrifice allowed. No playing bait.”
Nash reached for Lyra’s hand then and pressed something into it. A velvet box. Alice’s ring. “Gray told me to ask you to hold on to this for him. He mentioned the two of you have an agreement of sorts, ’bout cliffs.”
Lyra stared at that ring box. “He told you to keep an eye on me.” Of course he did. “Asshole,” Lyra muttered—or maybe murmured.
“Yeah,” Nash replied, “but he’s our asshole.”
The muscles in Lyra’s throat and abdomen constricted, because it couldn’t have been clearer that Nash was including her in that our.
The same way that Libby and Max had acted like all three of them were somehow the same.
And that just made Lyra even more desperate to do something, because all of them needed for Avery to be okay.
“There has to be something we can do,” Lyra said.
“I might be able to help with that,” a voice called.
Alisa. It was another few seconds before the lawyer was close enough for Lyra to make out her silhouette in the moonlight.
“Credit goes to your wife for this one,” Alisa told Nash.
“Libby was the one who pointed out that there are four people in that photograph of Lyra’s father’s family—not three. ”
Four…
“The baby,” Lyra said. “In the blanket—the worn blue blanket.” Worn enough, Lyra realized, to be a hand-me-down.
Lyra swallowed. “When I asked my mom if Tomás had a brother, she said that his answer always varied. Sometimes he had two brothers, and sometimes they were sisters, and sometimes he was the youngest of seven.”
“Raises a question, doesn’t it?” Nash said.
“What if,” Lyra replied, “the baby in that blue blanket was a girl?”
How old would she be now? Lyra thought. And more importantly, how old would she have been during the Crucible that happened nineteen years ago?
“The timing could work,” Lyra said, doing the math, “for the Omega. If there was a family history with the Gilded Blade, if the Aquila line had fallen out of power, that could have put a daughter on the Judge’s radar.”
“I’ll have my guys do some digging,” Alisa said. “We’ll know more about her—if that baby is a girl—soon.”
Her, Lyra thought. She.
“Don’t be afraid, Lyra Catalina,” Lyra said out loud. “She will come for you. What if my uncle wasn’t talking about Alice? Alice was the one who showed up, but what if he was trying to lure out someone else, expecting someone else?”
What if he was expecting his sister?
“Don’t go thinkin’ this changes things,” Nash told Lyra. “Regarding that conversation you and I just had.”
“I’m sorry,” Lyra said. “You can tell Grayson that I’m sorry, but if this is my aunt we’re talking about here—”
“Still no.” Nash didn’t even have the decency to get heated about it.
“I can save you both some back and forth,” Alisa interjected.
“I didn’t come out here just to tell you Libby’s theory about the baby, Lyra.
I came out here to tell both of you that an envelope was delivered to Hawthorne House ten minutes ago.
Oren still has it in forensics, but I took some pictures to show you. ”
Alisa held her phone out to Lyra. On its screen, there was a photograph of a plain white envelope bearing Lyra’s name.
LYRA CATALINA.
Lyra’s eyes darted up to Alisa’s.
“Scroll,” the lawyer said.
Lyra scrolled to the next photo, to a single page with a message written on it in the same hand:
I MADE MY CHOICE. IT WASN’T YOU.