Glorious Rivals(79)
“You left.” Gigi’s mind was reeling. “That’s what Knox said. You ran away, and you warned him not to follow.” Gigi brought her right hand to the base of her own neck, just above her collarbone. “He has a scar right here. And Brady… Brady loves you.”
For Brady, there had never been anyone but Calla.
“Brady Daniels loves a memory. He loves a dream.” Calla-not-Calla reached a gloved hand out for Gigi’s chin. “I assure you, Juliet Grayson, I am quite real. And I am no one.”
No one, by design. Gigi swallowed again. “You’re the Watcher. You’re the Lily. Calla.” Gigi’s eyes widened. “You left that flower for me.”
The Woman in Red did not deny it. “There is an order to things. There are rules. Warnings must sometimes be delivered when a person of a certain sort is being watched.”
“What sort?” Eve demanded. “And what do you mean, warnings?”
“I am not,” Calla, who was no one, told Eve, “talking to you.”
“Maybe you should be.” Eve stepped in front of Gigi once more, shielding her. “Omega.” Eve let that word—that one word—hang in the air. “Calla lilies.” Eve paused again. “Alice Hawthorne. Lyra Kane asked me about all of those things.”
Calla went silent for a moment, and Gigi had the oddest, eeriest sense that behind the veil, the Woman in Red was smiling. “Evelyn Blake—or do you prefer Laughlin? Shane? Hawthorne?” The Woman cocked her head to the side. “Regardless, Eve, you do not disappoint.”
With that, the Woman in Red—Calla, not-Calla, the Lily, the Watcher—turned to walk away, like Eve had given her what she wanted, what she’d been trying to get from Gigi.
“You can’t just leave us here,” Eve called.
“I can do many things. Mine is a higher law.”
Gigi managed to free her vocal cords. “Calla—”
“Calla,” the Woman in Red replied in that frightfully even tone of hers, “was a naive, sheltered seventeen-year-old girl in love. She was also the only great-granddaughter of Helena Thorp, and that mattered a great deal, so much so in fact that it did not matter to Helena that Calla, among all of her great-grandchildren, was the only one that had no Thorp blood at all. Calla did not know, growing up, that her father was not, in fact, her father—but Orion Thorp knew from the day she was born. Calla’s eyes made her true paternity quite obvious to him, you see. For a man like Orion, an insult like that, a betrayal like that, was unforgivable—but giving his family the first daughter in three generations made Orion the Thorp heir. And that mattered more than any insult or betrayal.”
Gigi felt dizzy just trying to follow that—all of it, any of it.
“After all,” not-Calla continued, “it was not as if Calla’s so-called father did not have a biological child of his own.”
“I don’t understand,” Gigi said.
“You are not meant not to.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Eve asked.
“I am not Calla Thorp. There is no Calla Thorp anymore.” The wall parted. “And thanks to dear, dear Eve, the time for watching is done.”
Chapter 68
LYRA
It’s not a riddle. It’s a code. A very simple code. It took Lyra long enough to figure it out, to look at the letters in the poem as letters instead of as part of a whole. Once she stopped looking for meaning in the words of the inscription, once she forced herself to look for the simplest answer, there it was.
OFTEN
NEVER
LITTLE LATE
YOU
AND TWO
TOO MUCH, TOO GREAT
NEVER, EVER
I TRAP YOU NOT
GO NOW
HOW
TO SHOOT YOUR SHOT
The first letters in each of those lines—they spelled out a message, an explanation for why she and Grayson hadn’t been able to find the ledger at the tree. The trick was right there.
ONLY AT NIGHT
“Right place,” Lyra said, “wrong time. We can only move on—only find the ledger and the next clue—at night.” She looked from Grayson to the bed between them, a beautiful antique setup in a damp and shallow cavern that would probably be overrun with water as soon as the tide rose. “Hence the bed.”
Night. Bed.
“We’re all running on fumes,” Grayson commented. “And thus, the game includes a programmed break.”
Lyra’s brain raced. “After a night on that yacht—”
“That ensured that all players encountered the tree during the day,” Grayson finished.
We were on the music box. Brady was one puzzle ahead—the compass. He must not have solved it before midnight.
“The tide will come in again.” Grayson rested a hand on the wrought-iron headboard. “This bed is just for show.”
“But we do need to sleep,” Lyra said, looking at the bed, drawn to it—and to him. She tilted her eyes up to catch his. “We need sleep, and we need food.”
They were only human.
“We need,” Grayson said, his voice echoing through the cavern, “to go back to the house.”
Back at the house, they found food and ate their fill.
“And now,” Grayson said, “we sleep.”