Glorious Rivals(92)

They. “There are always three.” Lyra couldn’t coax her mouth into saying anything else. All she could do was stand there and wait for his response.

Grayson’s full lips parted, more words spilling out, a confession in full. “Jameson’s memory of what transpired is full of holes, very likely for the same reason that your memory of your father’s death is. But I’ve never seen him scared before, Lyra. Of anything.”

Jameson is competitive, Lyra could hear Grayson saying. Intensely and frequently reckless. Fearless to a fault.

“What Jameson does remember,” Grayson continued evenly, “is that he thought he was going to die—that they were going to kill him.”

“What the hell is this?” Lyra said sharply. “All of it. Any of it.”

She still couldn’t tell Grayson to go, so she went—across the broken, uneven foundation, out onto the ruined patio with an ocean view. She walked right up to the edge, and this time, Grayson did not pull her back.

He stepped up even with her—beside her.

“I don’t know.” Those words cost him. Grayson Hawthorne was not a person with a high tolerance for not knowing. “But this?” His tone made it clear that he wasn’t talking about Alice Hawthorne anymore—or Jameson. He wasn’t talking about danger or threats.

He was talking about them.

“This,” Grayson said again, “is worth fighting for.”

This. A ball of emotion rose in Lyra’s throat. “The right kind of disaster just waiting to happen,” she whispered.

“A Hawthorne and a girl who has every reason to stay away from Hawthornes.” Grayson turned his entire body toward her, and Lyra’s responded like they were dancing, like this was just another pas de deux, angling back toward him. Water streamed down their faces, and Lyra reminded herself that Grayson was who he was, and she was who she was, and there was no changing that—for either of them.

Some things were just not meant to be.

“I need to get back to the game,” Lyra said. I, not we.

Lightning struck with sudden, electrifying force over the ocean. Seeing it out of the corner of her eye had Lyra’s head whipping back toward darkened ocean waters she could not make out in the night, and for the first time since the helipad, she felt something.

Eyes on us.

The warning rose up like bile from the pit of Lyra’s stomach and crawled down her spine.

“What is it?” Grayson said.

Lyra shook her head, then lightning struck again—close enough that it tore open the sky and lit up the world.

There was a difference between sensation and perception. It took a moment for Lyra to register what she’d seen in that blinding flash, and by the time she did, the ocean was pitch black once more.

Calla lilies. Hundreds of them. Floating on the water, washing onto the shore.

Chapter 80

GRAYSON

Grayson did not think, did not hesitate. He removed his jacket. Then shirt. Moving rapidly backward like a blade through the night, he calculated the exact trajectory needed and the exponentially small margin of error within which he would need to hit it.

And then he ran—straight for the edge of the patio, the edge of the cliff. His body anticipated the moment of liftoff, the way he would arc through the air to dive into the water a hundred feet below, narrowly skirting the rocks.

Then Lyra threw herself sideways—directly into his path.

Abort. Grayson couldn’t manage a full stop, so he flung his arms around her and twisted, redirecting his momentum as best he could and praying that it would be enough.

They landed hard, all of an inch from the edge.

“Have you lost your mind?” Lyra was not one for raising her voice, but she was yelling now. She was also on top of him.

“Let me up,” Grayson commanded.

Even at night, Lyra blazed. “What the hell, Hawthorne?”

“Let me up,” Grayson repeated, but she pinned him down instead. “Let me do this for you, Lyra.”

“Asshole.” She was straddling him now, her hands locked on his wrists. “Do you really think that I am going to let you dive off this cliff and just hope that you manage to avoid the rocks?” Her chest heaved. “Do you really think that you’re the only one who would do anything to protect the people who matter to you?”

Her voice broke on the word matter, and Grayson knew in that instant that he was going nowhere.

I matter. To you. This matters.

“I have spent years lying to my family because I knew that if they knew I was suffering, they would suffer, too,” Lyra continued, the timbre of her voice powerful and deep. “And maybe lying to protect them and expecting something different from you makes me a hypocrite. Maybe I am every bit as much of a liar as you are, Grayson Hawthorne. But in this much…”

Grayson sat up, shifting her lower on his thighs, his hands making their way back to hers, his fingers interweaving with hers.

“In this much,” Lyra said again, “we are the same.” Her grip on his hands tightened, like she didn’t trust him to stay put, like she’d put him right back down again if she had to.

We are the same. Grayson let those words roll over him. He committed them—and this moment—to memory, in case it was one of their last. But reality was a wolf at the door. “There’s someone out there. I saw what you saw, Lyra.”