Glorious Rivals(54)

“Look.” Lyra rolled the ball and spun the wheel. “It lands on eight every time.”

She was trying to distract him. Grayson just wasn’t sure why.

“What did your brothers and Avery say about the lily in the music box?”

Grayson had been trained from a young age to never hesitate and never show weakness. “Jameson said that roses are overdone, sunflowers and daisies are, and I quote, the flower equivalents of a golden retriever on uppers, and that tulips remind him of the reason he was banned from Amsterdam.” Grayson, like all Hawthornes, was an excellent liar. He picked up the ball and spun the roulette wheel again. “Hence, the lily.”

“A calla.” Lyra clearly wasn’t inclined to let this go. The mask she wore should have dimmed the hold her amber eyes had on Grayson, but it did not.

“Xander,” Grayson deadpanned, “says that callas taste better than normal lilies.”

“Taste better?” Lyra repeated. “Does your brother just go around taking bites out of flowers?”

“He did for a few weeks when he was seven,” Grayson confirmed. “For science. It did not end well.” That was true.

Lyra snorted. “Weirdly enough, that tracks.”

Of course it did. The secret to being an excellent liar was to selectively wield the truth. “None of us remembers anything about a calla lily in any of the old man’s games.” Also true. “That’s not a guarantee that there wasn’t one.”

“But it is a dead end.” Lyra was quiet for a moment. She looked away, and Grayson was hit with the sense that there were layers to this moment: The moment she was having. His. Theirs. He decided to live in the simplest of those—the one where nothing was a lie. The one where they really could focus on the game.

“What do we make,” he asked Lyra, “of the number eight?”

Slowly, Lyra turned her face back toward his. Her diamond-studded mask served only to draw his attention to her lips. She opened her mouth, and Grayson was suddenly hit with the feeling that whatever she asked of him in that moment, he would not be able to deny her—no matter how dangerous it was.

So he didn’t let her ask.

“Lyra.” Grayson put a certain intensity in his voice. “Infinity. Eight.” Grayson didn’t have the answer, but making her think he’d had a breakthrough would buy him some time—not much, a minute or less, but Hawthornes had taken on worse odds.

Lyra was far too competitive not to take the bait. “What?” she demanded.

Grayson needed to stall her long enough to figure out a revelation of some sort to share. “One of the most frequent echoes in my grandfather’s game was the use of keys.” Another truth. “There was one puzzle in particular that was a rite of passage in our household. We were given a massive ring of keys, each more elaborate and ornate than the last. The heads of those keys bore different designs. The challenge was simple. One and only one of those keys opened the front door of Hawthorne House. The old man timed how long it took each of us to find the right key.”

“And?” Lyra crossed to his side of the table. He’d succeeded in making her think he’d had some kind of breakthrough, and now he needed to deliver. He allowed his mind to work the way the old man’s had—thinking in four dimensions—even as he continued stalling.

“And the trick was,” Grayson continued, “that although the heads of the keys differed, the portion that went into the lock was the same on all of the keys but one.”

“And that was the key that opened the lock,” Lyra concluded, waiting for him to get to the point. It was clear just from the look on her face that her mind was churning, looking for the very answer that Grayson had himself yet to obtain.

Infinity. Eight.

“The old man liked to embed lessons in his games,” Grayson said, aware that his distraction would soon lose its hold on her. “The lesson of the keys was twofold. First, that two things—or people—who looked very different on the surface could be exactly the same underneath.”

Lyra looked down, and Grayson wondered if she was thinking about the two of them. Her breath hitched slightly, and Grayson felt that lone hitch of her breath in every single hollow place.

“And second,” he continued, his hand making its way to her hair, as he finally gave in to the impulse to let his fingers begin to untangle it, “that nearly all problems are a matter of perspective.”

Touching her felt right. Even when it was just his hand and her hair. Even when he couldn’t feel the softness of her skin. It felt right—and it bought him just a little more time.

Grayson knew that he was a bastard for doing this to her, the very asshole that she had accused him of being multiple times. But Lyra was, in her own way, fearless, and she was dogged in pursuit of truth, and she wouldn’t care that Alice Hawthorne was dangerous.

He cared. About her. About Avery and his brothers. About Libby and the babies.

Grayson Hawthorne had always—always—cared too damn much.

“A matter of perspective,” Lyra repeated, then suddenly, she looked down at the roulette wheel—and then back up again. “Are you saying that maybe the symbol isn’t infinity or eight?”

Keep her focused on the game. Grayson took Lyra’s hand in his, and he drew the symbol on her palm: one loop, then another.