Epilogue
I have a secret,” I told the baby girl in my arms. She had Nash’s eyes and Libby’s cupid’s bow lips and the solemn air of an old, old soul.
“A secret?” Thea Calligaris said. “In Hawthorne House? Never.”
Eight months on, Thea was still a little salty about just how effectively the others had kept her and Rebecca in the dark when I’d been missing, even though Xander had come clean about everything once the danger was past—about Emily, about Eve, about all of it.
There was no danger in knowing the truth now.
“Also,” Thea continued with the air of an oracle getting ready to issue her finest prediction, “that baby is going to spit up all over that gown, Avery.”
I had to admit that holding a baby while trying on wedding gowns was rather like playing Hawthorne Russian Roulette.
“Actually,” Max chimed in, “smart money says that baby palindromes all over it instead.”
“Dare I ask?” Zara said. Between Oren’s near-death experience at Vantage, their subsequent romance, and the birth of Nash and Libby’s twins, Zara, for the first time since I’d known her, seemed to no longer be fighting battles of any sort with herself.
It also didn’t hurt that I’d already asked her to join me, join us in what we were doing.
“Starts with a p, ends with a p,” Libby told Zara with one of those the-things-I-have-seen-since-becoming-a-parent smiles of hers. “You fill in the rest.”
I stroked the baby’s silky-soft cheek. “You would never.” I smiled and looked up at my other niece, who was currently gnawing on the end of Rebecca’s hair like the family honor depended on her ability to gum it into submission.
“Your sister, on the other hand,” I said, “is plotting how she can do it from all the way over there.”
The twins had arrived in the world a little more than three months earlier, on April first. Everyone except Nash had thought Libby was playing a trick on us when she went into labor, but Nash had just kissed my sister long and hard and then brought her straight to the hospital, where their daughters had been delivered less than an hour later.
Identical from head to toe, one had the temperament of a sage and the other… took after her uncle Jameson.
If it was possible for a three-month-old to be fearless, that was Faith. She had the fiercer temper and the bigger smile. In contrast, even at three months old, Seren gave the impression of missing nothing.
Rebecca removed her hair from Faith’s mouth. “Don’t listen to them,” she told the baby. “Everyone knows it’s the quiet ones you really have to watch out for.”
Faith—named by her father—yowled, then gurgled in agreement.
Seren—a Welsh name that Libby had picked for its closeness to Sarah, the name by which she’d known my mother—blinked owlishly up at me. I was pretty sure the only reason Libby hadn’t named one of her daughters Hannah was that she was reserving that name for me.
“It’s always the quiet ones,” Thea agreed, staring at Rebecca holding that baby, a very un-Thea-like softness in her eyes.
Libby smiled and divested me of the quiet, snuggly baby in my arms. “Come to Mama, Seren, before Auntie Alisa gives Auntie Avery the please-don’t-cause-an-international-incident-over-your-wedding-gown speech. Again.”
“Avery can cause all the international incidents she wants,” Alisa replied, “if she’ll just choose a gown.”
I had no real interest in planning the wedding of the century, but as far as the press was concerned, I was still Cinderella, and the one thing the world loved more than a Cinderella story was a fairy-tale ending.
Even if my story, in reality, was a very different sort of fairy tale.
“I’m only trying on one more tonight,” I announced to the room at large. “The carnival awaits.”
Fourth of July at Hawthorne House had always been one of a kind.
“Try the one on the end of rack number five,” Libby advised me. “It came postmarked from London.”
From Zella, I translated. The Proprietor of the Devil’s Mercy and I had stayed in touch. I didn’t give her orders. I didn’t give anyone orders. But Zella knew quite well what I’d been working on, what Jameson and I had both been working on for almost eight months.
I hadn’t told anyone yet that we’d finally cracked it.
I have a secret, I thought, about a web that stretches across history, across continents.
I have a secret about a new day dawning.
The dress that Zella had sent was a simple one, no lace, no beadwork, no straps. It was floor-length but moved.
In Rebecca’s arms, Faith somehow contorted to reach for Lyra’s hair, tangling a wad of it in her first.
“I think she wants Cooper,” Libby opined.
“Cooper does like to be adored,” Lyra told Faith, gently freeing her hair, “but you’re going to have to pull him away from the catapult. No easy task.”
“The catapult?” Alisa repeated, her eyes narrowing.
“Xander,” Max, Thea, and Rebecca said, all at once.
There wasn’t really any further explanation needed, but as I ducked behind a screen to try on the dress Zella had sent, I couldn’t help myself. “Ah yes,” I said. “The traditional Fourth of July human and/or firework catapult.”
“I can assure you,” Zara said, “there is no such tradition.”
“There is now,” I said, stepping out from behind the screen. Libby handed Seren off to Zara, who took the baby like it was the most natural thing in the world, and then my sister zipped me up.
I knew before I even turned to look at the mirror that this gown was the one. Zella really knew how to pick them. Before I could say as much, though, the door to my bedroom flew inward and Gigi bounded in, her dark waves bouncing and her eyes dancing in a way that I found highly concerning.
“Three things!” Gigi said. “First, that’s definitely the dress. Second, I finished phase one. Worship at the altar of Gigi, for she is a most devious computer goddess.”
After everything that had happened with the last Grandest Game—and my own experiences in the Crucible—I’d decided the Grandest Game needed some reinvention. We were going digital: all the challenge, none of the danger, open to anyone, anywhere.
“You said three things,” I reminded Gigi.
“About that third thing…” Gigi gave us a sheepish smile almost as concerning as those dancing eyes of hers.
“It’s Ferris Wheel Leapfrog Death Match, isn’t it?” Max said seriously.
“They’re all playing,” Gigi said solemnly. “All of them.”
Not just Xander, Grayson, Jameson, and Nash—but Rohan and Slate, too. “Even Knox?” I glanced at Alisa, whose lawyerly poker face stayed perfectly intact.
“Even Knox,” Gigi replied.
“And Ferris Wheel Leapfrog Death Match,” I deadpanned, “never ends well.”
“You, you, you, you, and you,” Alisa rattled off, pointing at Gigi, Libby, Max, Rebecca, and Thea. “With me, before someone breaks a leg.”
Zara followed the six of them out, Seren asleep in her arms, leaving me alone with Lyra, which my sixth sense said wasn’t an accident. I didn’t know why Alisa wanted the two of us clocking one-on-one time, but as it happened, I did have something to tell Lyra.
I have a secret…
“There’s something I want to show you,” I told her. The book Jameson and I had finally decoded didn’t just include the current members of the Blade. It was a record. A historical record, and one name had jumped out at me right way. “Just let me get changed.”
Lyra stepped between me and the rack. “You aren’t ready to take that dress off.” Sometimes, Lyra was nothing like Grayson, and sometimes, they were almost too much alike.
In this case, she wasn’t wrong.
Enjoying the feel of the gown more than I wanted to admit, I walked over to my nightstand, opened the drawer, and withdrew a small charcoal sketch, yellowed with age. It had been in a museum when we’d decoded the book.
Less than twenty-four hours later, it was part of my private collection.
“Her name was Eloísa,” I told Lyra, handing her the sketch.
“But in the Crucible, she was Aquila.” The date on that sketch was 1695.
“As best we can tell, the Aquila line was thought to have ended in the mid-eighteen hundreds. In reality, one surviving daughter moved from Spain to Brazil. Nineteen years ago, one of the Ascendants discovered Katalin. Based on your name, I’m betting that same someone read Katalin in on the family history while she was still pregnant. ”
Lyra stared at the sketch and looked up at me. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re about to ask me something?”
I was about to issue an invitation. It had always been our plan, Eve’s and Nora’s and mine, to not just decode the book and uncover the web, but to extend it.
Power in numbers, women helping women, and the art of the cascade.
It didn’t matter to me that Lyra was part of the Aquila line.
It only mattered to me that she was Lyra.
“Things are different in the Blade now,” I told her. “Very different.”
Lyra looked back down at that sketch of her ancestor. “Why do you think,” she said slowly, “that Alice went to such trouble to hide the fact that I was there the night Edgar Aquila Reyes died? The cover-up, falsifying his identity, making sure no one ever connected his death to my kidnapping—why?”
“My best guess?” I’d already mulled this puzzle over—more than once.
“I think Alice didn’t want Katalin to know or wonder what you’d been told.
If Katalin or the Judge back then had known you were there, I’m betting they wouldn’t have signed off on Alice returning you to your family.
I don’t know where they would have sent you. Maybe the Kyrie.”
Without Alice, Lyra might have had a very different life.
She chewed on that for a moment. “All of this,” Lyra said finally, “it’s your game, Avery. Not mine. Alice gave me an ordinary life. After everything, I’m partial to ordinary.”
In Hawthorne world, ordinary was relative. “Grayson told me the two of you are going back to college in the fall,” I said. The edges of my lips ticked upward. “He also told me he no longer intends to major in business. Apparently, he’s undeclared.”
“We’re both undecided,” Lyra replied.
The fact that Grayson had gotten to the point where he could let himself go forward without a plan—that was a testament to how much things had changed. But college aside, everyone knew there was nothing undecided about Grayson and Lyra.
When a person loved like Hawthornes loved, there was no going back.
Outside the window, there was a loud bang and then another one. Fireworks flew as they exploded against the night sky.
“That’s a lot of momentum,” Lyra commented, coming to stand beside me at the window.
“It’s a big catapult,” I said.
Lyra grinned. “What would you say is the collective noun for Hawthornes?” she asked. “A pack, like wolves? A den, like thieves?”
“Trouble,” I murmured. All of us were trouble.
“Chaos,” Lyra suggested, as we waited for the next explosion. “A chaos of Hawthornes.” Purple fireworks lit up the sky—and then some.
“And that,” Lyra said, “is my cue.”
“Your cue?” I said.
Lyra took off running. One thing about Lyra Kane: She could run.
One thing about me: I was good at keeping up—even in a gown. Lyra slowed as we neared the carnival: the Ferris wheel, the catapult, and… the dance floor.
I stopped. The dance floor? Hundreds of delicate strings of lights crisscrossed overhead. A four-string quartet played. Rose petals had been scattered over the dance floor. And the ice sculptures…
Every last one of them was carved as a lemniscate.
Déjà vu hit me. The Ferris wheel. The dance floor. The musicians. “The introvert’s ball,” I murmured. For my eighteenth birthday, Alisa had been intent on planning an elaborate affair, but Jameson had wrested control away from her and planned a far more intimate one.
“I hate to break it to you,” Lyra told me, “but I’m pretty sure this is an introvert’s wedding.”
He wouldn’t… I thought. But I knew: Jameson Hawthorne absolutely would.
As one, our guests moved onto the dance floor, some from the right side of it, some from the left, leaving an aisle in the middle. Jameson took his position at the end of that aisle.
Oren stepped up beside me and cleared his throat. “You did say,” my head of security told me, “that you wanted me to walk you down the aisle.”
I felt a pang then, for Toby. For my mother. For both of them. But I knew, wherever they were, they were together—dancing, probably, the way my mom had every night, challenging each other in game after game, watching me and Eve.
Watching Oren walk me down a makeshift aisle.
As I walked, I looked at the people around me.
Gigi and Savannah with Slate and Rohan. Acacia.
Lyra and her parents and Cooper, who was on his stomach on the dance floor playing with Seren and Faith.
Thea, Rebecca, and Max. Alisa. Knox. Zara.
Xander’s father, Isaiah, was there, as were Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin and Jameson’s uncle Branford.
And Nan appeared to have brought a date.
Oren came to a stop, and it took me a moment to realize that he was handing me off—to Xander. “I made a second, smaller catapult,” Xander informed me archly. “For your bouquet.”
“I don’t have a—”
Libby made a catch, stepped forward, and pressed a bouquet into my hands. Blue roses. I breathed in the smell of them as Xander stepped back from escorting me and Nash stepped in.
I looked up at him.
“Breathe, Avery.”
I breathed, and I just kept breathing until Nash handed me off to Grayson. “For old time’s sake,” he told me, “how about I call you Ms. Grambs one last time?”
Oh, Grayson. Some people were simply meant to be—in a way that transcended romance, in a way most people probably couldn’t even describe.
“It goes both ways, Ms. Grambs,” Grayson said, and then suddenly, I was standing right next to Jameson.
Avery Kylie Grambs. A very risky gamble.
We still hadn’t come up with a good anagram for Avery Kylie Hawthorne or Avery Kylie Grambs Hawthorne or Avery Grambs Hawthorne or whatever name I decided to take on next.
But I’d hated wedding planning, and I didn’t want the wedding of the century. I wanted this.
“You,” I told Jameson, “are in so much trouble.”
“Always,” Jameson murmured.
Always trouble. Always… this. Always… us. All of us.
“A chaos of Hawthornes,” I murmured back, “indeed.”