Glorious Rivals(3)

A spade.

In phase one of the game, the players had been divided into teams: Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs. Grayson’s mind made quick work of this fourth symbol. Spades—for the people behind the scenes. From the beginning, Grayson had been able to feel his brothers’ and Avery’s touches in every detail of the Grandest Game—including the fact that they’d made him a player. Grayson had fully intended to have a conversation with all four of them about that, but now there were more important conversations to be had.

Grayson tapped the spade. A text box and keyboard popped up, a way to send a message to the game makers. Grayson chose his words with care, a simple anagram that Avery and his brothers would recognize as a Hawthorne request—meaning that it really was not a request at all.

ZEN DROVE US.

Grayson waited for a reply, and eventually, he got one. NORTHERN SHORE.

Grayson knew from experience that, when it came to his brothers, a rendezvous could take a variety of forms. Some involved explosions. Some involved helicopters. Sword fights, mud wrestling, karaoke, and fisticuffs were all on the table. But the brother who joined Grayson on the northern shore of Hawthorne Island wasn’t prone to most of those.

“Nash.” Grayson kept his gaze trained on the ocean and greeted his eldest brother moments before Nash stepped into his peripheral vision.

“Thinkin’ about a swim?” The oldest of the four Hawthorne brothers nodded his head toward the waves.

“A bit cold for that,” Grayson replied.

“Never stopped you before.”

“Assignment from my therapist,” Grayson said evenly. “Apparently, I swim as an exercise in punishing perfectionism with the goal of exhausting myself to the point where I cannot feel. It is, supposedly, healthier to let the thoughts and the feelings come.”

Thoughts like: Some mistakes are worth making.

Thoughts like: Why not me? With her, right now—why not me?

But Grayson hadn’t called for a rendezvous to discuss his feelings. “There’s a threat,” he told Nash. “Or at the very least, the potential for one. Lyra Kane received her ticket to the Grandest Game from an anonymous third party. Someone sent her here.”

Nash chewed on that. “Now why would an anonymous third party do that?”

Exactly. “As it happens, our family was implicated in Lyra’s father’s death.” Grayson’s voice sounded, to his own ears, far more measured than he felt. “Suicide. She was four. She was there.” Just thinking about what the memory of that night did to Lyra made Grayson want to wage war on behalf of the child she’d been—and that wasn’t even touching on the woman she was now.

In his entire life, Grayson had kissed four people, counting Lyra. And when he’d kissed her, for the first time in his life, he’d let the feelings come. All of them.

Lyra Kane kissed the way she moved: with heightened bodily awareness, with grace, like kissing was a matter of whole-body coordination.

“How big a threat is she?” Nash asked, his tone casual. Grayson wasn’t fooled. A threat to one of them was a threat to all of them, and Nash was a man who defended what he loved.

“Lyra is not the threat.” Grayson hadn’t meant to issue that statement as a warning, but there it was.

Nash cocked his head. “Exactly how far gone are you, little brother?”

“It’s only been one day,” Grayson replied, the answer automatic.

Nash rocked back on the heels of his boots. “I knew almost immediately with Lib.”

Libby Grambs—Libby Hawthorne, now—was Nash’s wife. Grayson lips quirked upward just thinking about his sister-in-law and the babies she was carrying. “How is Libby?”

“Full of cravings. A little cranky.” Nash grinned. “Wholly incandescent.” He turned his head to shoot Grayson a knowing look. “I’m going to ask again, Gray: How far gone are you with this girl who’s not a threat?”

Grayson fixed his eyes back on the horizon. Let it all come. “Far enough.”

Nash let out a low whistle. “Jamie was right. This is gonna be fun.”

“Delighted to amuse,” Grayson said dryly. “But I didn’t call you here for fun. What do we know about the blackout last night?”

During phase one, the power had gone off—generator and backup generator both.

“Xander says the culprits appear to be squirrels,” Nash replied. “The collective noun of which he insists is also squirrel.”

“A squirrel of squirrels?” Grayson tone made it clear: His skepticism was not limited to Xander’s linguistic assertion.

“Island’s locked down tight,” Nash said.

“Either it’s not locked down as tight as you think or Lyra’s sponsor has another player in the game.” With characteristic efficiency, Grayson proceeded to tell Nash about the notes someone had left for Lyra in the burned forest, bearing her dead father’s names—his aliases. “You’ll also want to have someone keep tabs on Odette Morales now that she’s exited the game. She knows something.”

“What kind of something?”

Grayson saw no reason to dissemble. “The kind that involves our grandmother not being nearly as dead as advertised.”

Nash responded to that bombshell with trademark calm, removing his worn cowboy hat and running his thumb slowly over its edge. He’d done the exact same thing the one and only time Grayson had ever taken a swing at him.