Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (32)

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.

Maybe she could finally stop pushing people away.

Maybe she could dance.

Refusing to hold on to that thought any longer, Lyra stopped pacing and made her way to the bed in the middle of the ballroom. She climbed onto it and looked up at the dark rainbow of tiles on the mosaic ceiling. She reached for a pillow—and felt something else.

A piece of paper. Lyra realized what it was a second too late, a second after she’d already taken it in her hands and begun to unfold it. The night before, to earn a hint in the game, Grayson had been tasked with drawing her. He’d kept the drawing. Put it under his pillow.

Lyra finished unfolding it and sucked in a breath.

It wasn’t just the way he’d captured her otherworldly ballgown, the lines of her neck, the curves of her body. Not hidden. Not downplayed. It wasn’t the fullness of her lips or the way he’d drawn her hair loose and a little wild, like she was staring down the wind. It was the look in her eyes. It was the muscles he’d drawn, along with the curves. It was the way that he’d drawn her like she was on the verge of saying something, like she was a person with something to say.

It was bad enough that Grayson had made her beautiful, but he’d also drawn her strong.

And somehow, that made Lyra feel—for the first time in three years—like maybe she didn’t have to be.

I am not fine. Lyra let that be true. Just for a moment, she let it be true. She stopped fighting back the memory of a calla lily and gunshots and blood. She thought about being alone, as a child in that house with a dead body and now.

She let it hurt, and she breathed. She shuddered, and this time, when she heard a distant whisper in her mind—that memory she couldn’t quite grasp—it wasn’t quite as unintelligible.

She made out a single word in a woman’s voice: You…





Chapter 29





GRAYSON


In the Great Room, the dominoes had vanished from the gleaming wood floor, and a violin sat dead center on the round table. Grayson scanned the room for a bow and saw it balanced on the raised wood paneling of the wall. Based on experience, he knew better than to take that to mean that the key to solving the music box puzzle was the music.

It might be. It might not be.

Hawthorne games often contained traps—rabbit holes down which one could disappear for hours. The clue could just as easily have been the box itself. Or the calla lily inside.

Why that flower, Jameson? Grayson hadn’t been lying when he’d told Lyra that the one they’d found near the helipad was assuredly not a part of the game, but the choice of a calla lily for the music box was just as certainly not a coincidence. Grayson had chosen his words to Lyra with care: His brothers and Avery would never intentionally do this to someone. Grayson would have wagered every dollar he had that the calla lily was Jameson’s doing, and that Jameson had no idea that calla lilies held any significance for Lyra at all.

Thus, the real question was why that flower had been floating around in Grayson’s brother’s subconscious to begin with. It has something to do with Alice. That much was clear—as was the fact that Grayson was going to have to break his word. He’d given Jameson until the end of the game to get a handle on any threats, but as far as Grayson was concerned, that timeline had changed.

He would not sit back while an unidentified threat played with Lyra. Hurt her. Jameson clearly was not handling this—so Grayson would.

As if on cue, his watch buzzed, a message in response to the one he had sent the game makers, requesting a perimeter run.

(LITERAL) COAST IS CLEAR. FOCUS ON THE GAME.

The second part of that message had Jameson’s fingerprints all over it. Focus on the game. Grayson had been trying to get Lyra to do the same—and for much the same reason. He resisted the urge to send another message back to the game makers. Prudence dictated watching what one put in writing.

You have until midnight, Jamie, Grayson thought, and that is all.