CHAPTER 88 LYRA
LYRA
It took three minutes after that phone call for Lyra to hit the point where she needed to dance.
Not because of a man who’d never cared about her.
Not because her biological father had proved to be yet another dead end.
Not even because every question she’d spent the past three years obsessing about had been answered.
Because her phone wasn’t ringing. Because no one else’s was either. Because Lyra didn’t think she could stand another second of waiting, another second of hope warring with dread, of thinking that Grayson had to be okay.
Has to. Has to. Has to.
Fortunately, Hawthorne House, being Hawthorne House, had its own theater, complete with a stage. As she climbed the steps up to it, Lyra had a morbid flash of premonition that said that if Grayson didn’t come back, she’d dance to feel him.
Every day.
No good-byes, Lyra reminded herself, rising into an arabesque and holding it.
Her mind conjured up the feeling of Grayson’s hand on her waist. Slowly, painfully, that feeling faded, and Lyra came out of the arabesque and began to spin.
There was an art to spotting, to fixing your gaze on one place and holding your head just so, whipping it around only once per turn to stave off dizziness.
Lyra turned. And turned. And turned—until a figure crossed into her field of vision. Alisa. The lawyer held something in her hand. Another file.
Lyra stopped dancing.
“I eavesdropped on your calls,” Alisa admitted fully without shame. “And then I felt compelled to check up on one last Hail Mary attempt I’d made at getting the hospital records regarding the death of Katalin Aquila Reyes.”
“At this point, what does it matter?” Lyra asked, her voice coming out low and raw.
“It matters,” Alisa said quietly, “because of the cause of death—and the date.”
Lyra climbed down from the stage, took the file from Alisa’s outstretched hand, and read. “Complications from a C-section.” Lyra’s gaze flitted up to Alisa’s. “Did she fake a pregnancy, too?” Alisa said nothing, and that was when Lyra saw the date.
Nineteen years earlier. They’d all already known there was a Crucible nineteen years earlier, but the day of Katalin’s supposedly fatal C-section—
“My birthday,” Lyra said, and then she thought back to her call with that con man who shared her blood.
You were never really mine, princess. You were always hers, your mother’s—Lyra squeezed her eyes shut, but that did nothing against the onslaught of thoughts.
My mother’s.
And when Lyra had told Tom that she didn’t need him to tell her about her mom, he’d smiled that wry little smile and shaken his head. It’s funny—you look so much like my little sister…
“Just like her,” Lyra whispered. “I look just like her.”
You were never really mine, princess. You were always hers.
My sister bought a blanket for you before you were ever born. Darby might even still have it.
He’d said Darby. Darcy first, then Darby, but never once had he referred to Lyra’s mom as her mother.
Not once.
The date on that death certificate stared back at Lyra, and her thoughts went to Keith Kane, the only Daddy she’d ever known, and to what he’d said on the phone, the very last thing he’d said before she had to hang up on him.
You’re my girl. You know that, right? You’re our girl, Lyra, your mom’s and mine. But there’s something I need to—
“Tell me,” Lyra finished out loud. “There was something he needed to tell me.”
You’re our girl, Lyra, your mom’s and mine. But…
Somehow, Lyra’s hand managed to find its way to her phone. She called her dad back, and even though it was the middle of the night, he answered, because for Lyra, he always answered. Always had and always would.
“Tell me,” Lyra said, her throat tightening around the words.
“Let me wake your mom.”
Lyra’s dad had said, on their last call, that her mom was tying herself in knots. Not about a plot hole. Not about the paparazzi.
“Hey, baby.” The sound of her mom’s voice was a familiar comfort to Lyra, one that threatened to tear her apart.
“I spoke to Tomás.” There were so many other things Lyra wanted to say, answers she wanted to demand, but those four words were all she managed.
“How?” her mom said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lyra said, thinking about the fact that her whole life, people had said that she didn’t look like her mom.
“He doesn’t matter.” That much, at least, was true.
“My whole life, you told me you left him when I was three days old, and then when I found that picture, you told me that actually, he was the one who left. Left and came back. Left and came back. You said the two of you were together almost a year, but pregnancy takes time, Mom, and that picture of the three of us together—I wasn’t a newborn in that picture.
How old does a baby have to be to clap? Six months?
Seven? And Tomás—he’s Tom now, by the way… ” Lyra swallowed. “He said…”
Lyra trailed off. She felt like she was a hundred feet in the air, looking down at a field, taking in the whole picture, seeing all the things she hadn’t been able to see up close.
“I can explain, Lyra.”
That wasn’t an answer, but it also was. “You always said he could charm anyone into anything.” Lyra wanted to stop there, but she didn’t. “Did he charm you into being my mom?”
“He didn’t have to, baby girl. I fell in love with you all on my own.”
“Did he lie and tell you I was his?” Lyra asked. “Because I wasn’t. I was his sister’s baby. He was my uncle. Did you really think he was my father, or was that a lie, too?”
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line and then: “Tomás never said a word about a sister. And I never wanted to lie to you, Lyra. About anything.”
“Then why did you?”
“I couldn’t risk anyone taking you away.
One day, Tomás was there, and the next he was gone, and this time, he didn’t come back.
More and more time passed, and he didn’t come back, and then I opened the mail one day, and there was a birth certificate, listing me as your mother.
And by that point—I was, Lyra. I was your mom.
You were tiny when I met him—not even three weeks old.
His wife had just died—or that was what he said.
I wasn’t lying when I told you he left and came back, left and came back.
He needed me. You needed me, and I fell in love, completely head over heels in love.
A little with him—but mostly with you. And by the time he disappeared for good, by the time he sent me that birth certificate and I realized he really and truly wasn’t coming back…
I was so afraid of losing you, so afraid of telling anyone. ”
“Even me,” Lyra said quietly.
“Even you.”
Without another word, Lyra hung up the phone. “Don’t be afraid, Lyra Catalina,” she whispered, her eyes finding their way to Alisa’s. “She will come for you. Edgar Aquila Reyes was sure that his sister would come for me, because she was my…”
Lyra couldn’t say the word. She thought about that note Katalin had sent her.
“I made my choice. It wasn’t you.” Lyra swallowed. “She wasn’t just talking about her choice of Candidate for the Crucible. Nineteen years ago, Hannah refused to leave her daughter. She turned down the Gilded Blade. But my… Katalin… She said yes.”
I made my choice. It wasn’t you.
Lyra thought suddenly about Tom telling her that his sister had killed a frat boy who deserved it, less than a year before she died. And when Lyra had asked why the guy had deserved it, she’d been told that she didn’t want to know.
Because he was my father? Because he—
The Gilded Blade existed to keep a certain kind of man in check. Would-be kings. Men who abused their power. And men who abuse women. And Katalin Aquila Reyes, she was a true believer—in action.
“This doesn’t change anything about the calculus of our current situation,” Alisa told Lyra. “But I wasn’t about to lie to you.”
Katalin Aquila Reyes is my mother.
The Omega is my biological mother.
And she might be killing Grayson as we speak.
“Screw the calculus,” Lyra told Alisa. “And get me a plane.”