Glorious Rivals(31)

One of Grayson’s brothers—or Avery.

“It’s just a music box.” Grayson placed a light hand on her shoulder. “Just a stone flower. Just a clue in a game that you are going to win.”

“It’s a calla lily,” Lyra countered, putting a hand on Grayson’s chest and pushing him lightly back. She didn’t need comfort right now. She needed answers. “They know something—your brothers or Avery. At least one of them knows something.”

Grayson let his hand fall to his side and looked down at Lyra’s on his chest. “What precisely do you think they know?” he asked gently. “I never told any of them about our phone calls, Lyra—about you.” The angles of Grayson’s face were made for intensity. His was an odd sort of calm. “I told Xander the gist of your father’s death but not why I was looking for him. I told Jameson about the riddle but not where I’d heard it.” Grayson paused. “I told no one about you. For over a year, you were my secret and mine alone.”

There was something about the way Grayson Hawthorne said mine that made a part of Lyra want to say yes—but she didn’t. “There’s a difference between failing to mention something and keeping it a secret,” she told him.

“A secret, you think about.” Grayson’s lips rarely parted into a true smile; his angular face spoke only the language of slightest curves. “Even if you try to bury it deep, some secrets live with you, day in, day out.”

Lyra thought about the way Grayson had reacted when he’d heard her voice the day before, when he’d realized who she was. Beneath her hand, she could feel the muscles in his chest. She could feel his heart beating. It would have been easy to just go along with what he was saying, to take it all at face value.

I was your secret and yours alone, day in, day out. Lyra let her hand drop. “Some secrets are carved into your bones,” she told Grayson. Lyra had lived with that kind of secret. For years. It had divided her life into a before and an after.

And someone involved in this game knew something.

Lyra stared at the music box, at the marble flower. “Odette drew a calla lily last night. I never mentioned to her that my father gave me one, but after I remembered the omega symbol, after she heard me say A Hawthorne did this, she drew a calla lily. An anonymous party left one for me at the helipad. And now there’s one in our current clue. That’s no coincidence. It can’t be, Grayson.” She shifted her blazing gaze to him. “Do you even believe in coincidences?”

Pale silvery-blue eyes absorbed her fire whole. “I am starting to believe in a lot of things that I didn’t believe in two days ago.” So damn steady. So damn sure. “And I am asking you to believe me when I say that my brothers and Avery would never intentionally play with you like this.”

Hawthorne games are not cruel. Lyra looked back to the marble calla, and suddenly, it was all too much, including Grayson Hawthorne and whatever it was that he was starting to believe in.

Day in, day out.

You were my secret and mine alone.

“You’re about three seconds away from taking off on a late-night run,” Grayson noted.

He wasn’t wrong. “Going to try to tell me that’s a bad idea?” Lyra challenged.

“Sometimes pushing yourself physically is the only way to push it all down,” Grayson said instead. “But you only run because you will not allow yourself to dance. And I cannot help noticing that we are in a ballroom.”

Lyra’s mind went to the night before, to dancing with him at the masquerade ball. She could practically feel the heat of his body, feel his palm on hers, but in the silver music box, the calla lily turned and turned.

“It doesn’t have to be with me,” Grayson told her. “I’ll give you the room and keep working the puzzle myself. You do whatever you need to do.” There was no undertone to those words, no judgment. “Some of us need to be alone sometimes.”

Some of us. He said that like the two of them were the same. Like there was nothing wrong with wanting to be alone.

Like she wasn’t the least bit broken.

“I’ll be in the Great Room.” Grayson left it at that, and Lyra did her best not to watch him go.

Some of us need to be alone sometimes. And now she was. She was alone in a ballroom, and her body remembered—would probably always remember—what it felt like to turn and leap and defy gravity in every way that mattered. But dancing—really dancing, the way she used to—meant losing herself to the music, to the movements.

For Lyra, ballet meant letting go.

Instead, she paced the room like a lioness caged, the sound of the notes from the music box fading into the background until all Lyra could hear was an unintelligible whisper in her memory: a woman’s voice, words Lyra couldn’t decipher no matter how hard she tried.

On and on, the music played, and the marble calla lily turned.

It can’t be a coincidence. None of this can. The flower she’d found by the helipad, the flower in the box, the one Odette had drawn—it meant something. All of it meant something. Me being here. Calla lilies. Omega. Alice Hawthorne. Lyra couldn’t shake the feeling that if she could just figure out what it all meant, figure out why that night had happened, why her father had killed himself the way he had, why he’d brought her there, maybe she wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.