Glorious Rivals(16)

And you never let yourself want anything at all. Lyra crouched beside Grayson, picking up a golden domino and turning it over in her hand to reveal its face: five dots to one side of the line down the center and three on the other. Lyra flipped another domino and found the same combination. Five and three.

Lyra reached for her jacket pocket—and her glass dice. She rolled them and then looked meaningfully at Grayson. “Five and three.”

Grayson produced his own pair of dice, red to her white, and rolled them. “Six and two.” He turned over a domino to reveal the same combination of numbers.

Five and three. Six and two. “What does it mean?” Lyra asked, thinking out loud. “The fact that the numbers are the same.”

Grayson stood. “In my grandfather’s games, we called them echoes—details or motifs that repeated themselves from game to game or within games. Some echoes meant nothing. Some were the lynchpin, the single most significant thing in an entire puzzle sequence. You never know what kind of echo you’re dealing with—until you know.” Grayson glanced toward the Great Room door. “Shall we remove ourselves to somewhere with a bit more privacy?”

To work the puzzle, Lyra told herself. And that is all. She gathered her dice, her other hand holding the champagne flute from which she’d yet to take a single sip. “Where to?”

“My room.” Grayson pocketed his own dice, plucked his champagne flute off the table, and made his way to the edge of the Great Room and around to a place on the wall where they’d discovered a hidden door the day before. From the same pocket into which his dice had just disappeared, Grayson produced a bronze room key seemingly identical to Lyra’s own. He held his key flat against the wall, and the hidden door swung open, revealing the darkened staircase beyond.

“They couldn’t have just assigned you to one of the eliminated players’ bedrooms?” Lyra asked wryly.

“Hawthorne logic,” Grayson replied. “Making me find the room was half the fun.” Nodding toward the stairwell, he bowed at the waist and met her gaze. “After you.”

Chapter 14

GRAYSON

As Grayson descended the darkened staircase, listening for the sound of Lyra’s footfalls ahead of him, Jameson’s warning echoed through his mind. Lyra Kane is a threat, whether you see it or not. Grayson took the lead at the bottom of the stairs, trying to shift his focus to the present: the metal chamber, the theater, door after door, the feel of Lyra walking in his wake.

Be sure that she’s worth it, Gray. Make damn sure that she’s not Eve.

Grayson came to a stop at the threshold of the mosaic ballroom. In its center, there was now a single piece of furniture: a king-sized bed. Black frame. Black pillows. Black sheets. Grayson’s mask and tuxedo from the masquerade ball had been laid out across those sheets.

“This is your room?” Lyra asked.

“For the duration of the Grandest Game.” Grayson crossed the dark, glittering ballroom and knelt at the foot of the onyx bed. He set first his key, then the champagne flute and golden dart, on the floor, then withdrew a longsword from beneath the bed, placing it beside the other objects. “At the start of a game,” he told Lyra, “it helps to lay out all of the pieces of the puzzle that you’ve been given.” Grayson produced the glass dice he’d found zipped into the pocket of his jacket when he’d put on his outfit for phase two. He added them to the other objects and studied the entire collection.

“Your turn,” Grayson told Lyra.

With effortless grace, she sank to the floor, laying out her own objects, and then she flipped over her wrist. Grayson’s gaze landed on the pin she’d affixed to her sleeve.

He stopped her from removing it. “The pin isn’t a part of the game. We gave them to the top ten players last year, too.”

Once a player, always a player, Avery had said then. From the moment she’d conceived of the Grandest Game, Avery had wanted the players to feel like they were a part of something, like having played the game meant something, even if you didn’t win.

Grayson and his brothers had given Avery a pin once, too.

“I’ll take your word for it.” Lyra picked up Grayson’s room key and her own, comparing the two, rotating them in her fingers. Grayson saw what she saw: The same words were engraved—front and back—on both keys.

EVERY STORY HAS ITS BEGINNING… TAKE ONLY YOUR OWN KEY.

“An echo,” Grayson told Lyra. “The wording is nearly identical to that on the table upstairs.”

Lyra tilted her head slightly to one side and then she went for the opera glasses that hung over her hipbone. Lifting them to her face, she examined the words on the keys anew.

“Anything?” Grayson asked.

“No.” Lyra lowered the opera glasses and slid them back through her belt loop, and Grayson’s thoughts went to their original owner. Odette Morales. The old woman knew something—more than she’d told them—and Grayson had spent much of his childhood being taught how and where to apply pressure to get results. But for now…

“Your instincts were good.” Grayson nodded toward the opera glasses on Lyra’s hip. “Those will give us an advantage at some point in all of this.”

“All of this.” Lyra’s amber eyes gleamed with something like anticipation—or determination or both. “Clue to clue to clue.”