Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (20)

“Not very well.”

“And do you think that fact has escaped me?”

Lyra gave a little shrug. “Probably not.”

“Then I suppose,” Grayson told her, “that logic dictates it was a suggestion.”

Lyra picked up her golden dart. “The design,” she said, running her thumbnail along the shaft of the dart, stopping when she hit the first slash she’d felt back in the Great Room. “Rings cut through with diagonal lines.”

Grayson made quick work of inspecting his own dart. “There are ten diagonal slashes, equally sized, dispersed around the dart’s circumference. What’s the pattern?”

There’s always a pattern, isn’t there? Lyra closed her eyes, rotating the dart in her fingers, feeling for the slashes—ten of them, just as Grayson had said.

“You are forever doing that,” Grayson commented. “Closing your eyes.”

“I’m not a visual person.” For Lyra, that was an understatement. “I need to feel things.” With her eyes closed, Lyra couldn’t even summon an image of Grayson’s face to her mind, but the way the contours of his body felt against hers, the way he smelled faintly of cedar and fallen leaves— “One mark every four rings.” Lyra clipped her words and opened her eyes. “That’s the pattern.”

“Four rings. A diagonal line.” Grayson’s voice shifted. “Tally marks.”

Twisting the dart in her fingers, Lyra saw that he was right. Viewed from any one perspective, she could see what looked like hashmarks: four lines with a fifth cutting through the diagonal. “Five, ten…” She stopped counting and leapt straight to the answer. “Fifty.”

“Bull’s-eye,” Grayson said beside her. “In darts, the only way to get fifty points with a single throw is to hit the bull’s-eye.”

Adrenaline flooded Lyra’s veins. “So we’re looking for a bull or an eye or a target.”

“A target.”

Lyra’s heart leapt in her chest. “What do you know, Hawthorne?”

“Where on this island have we seen a target?” Grayson replied.

Lyra pushed down the urge to grab him by the front of the shirt and request he get on with it. “I told you, I’m not a visual person.”

Grayson laid his dart to the side and picked up his champagne flute. “The answer’s right here, a very Hawthorne kind of hint.” He reached for Lyra’s hand, and she allowed him to bring both his and hers to touch the champagne flute, tracing their thumbs in a slow circle around the H cut into the crystal.

Lyra had told him that she needed to feel things. He’d listened, and right now, eyes wide open, she felt far too much.

“An encircled H,” Grayson told her, “is the typical marking for a helipad.”

Lyra thought back to landing on Hawthorne Island. She couldn’t see the helipad in her mind, but she remembered thinking that Jameson Hawthorne had touched down dead center.

Right on target.





Chapter 19





GRAYSON


Grayson wondered if this was what it had felt like for Jameson and Avery, solving the old man’s puzzles. A thrum of energy was palpable in the air as he and Lyra stepped foot on the helipad. Strips of light burst to life all along the edges of the concrete.

There, in the center of the helipad, was the landing target.

“The bull’s-eye,” Grayson said. He and Lyra moved toward it in perfect synchrony. At the center of the target, there was a circle roughly the length of Grayson’s arm from shoulder to fingertip.

Bull’s-eye. Grayson knelt to run a hand over its surface, feeling the concrete beneath his palms, pressing at it with his fingers, looking for…

“A latch.” Grayson found it and pried it upward. There was a click. He pulled, and the edge of the bull’s-eye came up just far enough for him to slip his fingers beneath it. Bracing his body with his legs, Grayson tightened his grip on the concrete.

Lyra slid in beside him, placing her hands next to his. “On three?” she said.

Her voice killed him. She did. For once in his life, Grayson truly understood what it was like being hungry, wanting answers, wanting everything. “Three,” he said.

They put their weight into it, and the disk moved, and soon, they’d removed it altogether, uncovering a circular sheet of metal down below.

“Bull’s-eye,” Grayson murmured. The metal was smooth, nothing engraved on or cut into its surface, except at the very center, where there was a slit.

Less than two inches wide but not by much, Grayson noted. No more than two-tenths of an inch high.

Grayson pressed his hand against the metal, feeling around the slit. The closest thing he had to a flashlight was his watch, so he brought his wrist down to the metal, then lowered his head, trying to look through the slit to whatever his brothers and Avery had hidden below.

“No hinges,” Lyra reported, having finished her own assessment. “The metal can’t be lifted up or moved. It’s locked into place.”

Locked. Having played Hawthorne games for as long as he had, Grayson knew exactly what that meant. “We need a key.”

“A key,” Lyra repeated, and then her eyes lit up, electric in a way that Grayson felt to his core. “Grayson. For every lock a key.”