Glorious Rivals(28)

“What if Brady and I have the same sponsor? What if that person is trying to make me remember the night my father died?”

Grayson thought about the way Lyra had referred to herself as a weapon—a bomb. Given the intensity of Jameson’s reaction to the mere mention of Alice, it seemed clear enough that there were secrets to be detonated here.

Dangerous ones.

“The Grandest Game.” Grayson turned his head and caught Lyra’s eyes. “Do you still want to win?” He felt like the lowest of the low for asking that question, for redirecting her, but he told himself that it didn’t count as manipulation if he put the ball in her court.

All he’d done is ask if she wanted to win.

“Have I told you about my dad?” Lyra was still staring at the clock. “Not my father—my real dad, the one who raised me.” Lyra’s voice was even—too even. “He’s great. I have always, for as long as I can remember, been a daddy’s girl. And my dad—he never took me out of preschool and to a strange house, never told me happy birthday and then made me his witness to things a child should never have to see.” Lyra’s voice wasn’t quite so even anymore. “My dad has always been there for me. My mom, too. And I have always—always—known that I was loved.”

Grayson had never had parents—not really, not like that, and the old man’s love had been a different kind of beast. Still, Grayson knew what family was, what it meant. Thanks to his brothers, he had always known, and Lyra had never been more beautiful to him than she was right now, talking about hers.

“I have a little brother—much younger,” Lyra continued, and Grayson could hear the steel in her tone, see it in the tilt of her chin. “And we have a huge extended family on Dad’s side. I’ve always been a Kane to them. From day one, from the moment they met Mom and me, we were theirs.” She paused. “And so is Mile’s End. It’s been in the Kane family for generations. My family.”

“So, yes,” Grayson summarized. “We’re still playing. You still want to win.”

Lyra let the calla lily in her hand drop to the floor. “The Roman numerals seem to be firmly attached. We could try moving the hands on the clock?” The look of concentration on her face intensified “To eight-fifty.”

Grayson saw her logic immediately: VIII, L. He lifted his hand, and together, they moved the massive minute and hour hands on the clock—to no effect.

“We’re close,” Grayson told Lyra. “I can feel it.” He did his best to redirect his own mind to the game—and only the game.

“Close isn’t enough.” Lyra tilted her upper body sideways, raising one leg as she did until it and her torso were parallel to the floor.

“A change in perspective?” Grayson moved his hands to her waist to support her, like they were dancing—like the chandelier all over again.

“The shape of the hands,” Lyra said, and if he’d thought her voice was intense before, that was nothing compared to the strength in it now. “Make it an L.”

Sometimes, a letter was a number—and sometimes, it was a shape.

Lyra righted herself and swung the minute hand on the clock around, until it formed an upside-down L, the hour hand still on the eight.

VIII, L.

There was a sound like a bolt being thrown, and the face of the massive clock swung out from the wall, revealing two rows of metal drawers.

Sitting on top of the uppermost drawer on the righthand side, there was a ledger.

Grayson picked it up and opened it. Two names stared back at him, the first players to solve this particular puzzle.

The players who’d beaten them here.

“Rohan and Savannah,” Lyra said. She cheated her gaze toward Grayson’s. “Not Brady.”

Brady Daniels had known where to go after the helipad. So where was he? Grayson thought again about the girl in Brady’s photograph, the one the scholar had clearly—one way or another—lost. Calla. Briefly, Grayson’s thoughts went to another girl, one whom he had lost, the first cut but no longer the deepest.

He really was getting better at letting it all come.

Beside him, Lyra pressed her smartwatch to the page. Her name appeared in elaborate scrawl on the ledger, third in line. Grayson went next. Two of the metal drawers popped open. Inside each, there was a silver box—and, on top of each box, a charm in the shape of a clock.

Clue after clue after clue. Grayson met Lyra’s gaze. “Onward.”

Chapter 26

ROHAN

Rohan wasted no time making himself comfortable on the bed. It was not, strictly speaking, his bed—or Savannah’s, for that matter.

“Need I point out that we could do this in your room?” Savannah said crisply. “Or mine.”

She stood with her back to Brady’s door, above it all—or so she would have had Rohan believe.

He leaned back against Brady’s headboard. “Where’s the fun in that?”

Part of controlling the board was positioning yourself just so—sometimes literally. Brady Daniels and Lyra Kane might both have been keeping secrets, but Brady did not have a Hawthorne running interference on his behalf, and when it came to thinning the herd, the wise man always started with the most vulnerable target.

Hence, their current location.

Turning his attention to their next clue, Rohan laid the object—a silver music box—on his lap, his long legs stretched out toward the end of the bed. Savannah held a matching silver box. The two of them had already been over the music boxes and their contents out in the hall, but in games such as these, everything merited a second look.