Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (38)

“If you’d found something,” Lyra replied, “I would know.”

Grayson was not a total stranger to being known. His brothers knew him. Avery did. But Grayson had never been an easy person for others to pin down. “So,” Grayson said, joining Lyra in staring out into the night, “where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know.” The later it got, the lower Lyra’s voice went, and in that deeper register, there were more layers to her tone than Grayson could count. “You never told me what you thought about the possibility that the calla lily in the music box was an echo,” Lyra said finally. “Not a coincidence but not necessarily intentional, either.”

Lyra was coming far too close to the truth for Grayson’s comfort. An echo—but not from one of the old man’s games. From something else. What, Grayson did not know.

“I recall no such clue in any game I ever played,” Grayson said—a truth, and one he could give her. Something in him compelled him to give her more. “You have my word,” he said slowly, “that if midnight brings us face-to-face with the game makers, I will ask my brothers and Avery about the calla.”

Clearly, Lyra wasn’t letting this go, and promising to ask was not the same thing as promising to tell her the answer.

“But if you want to win the game,” Grayson continued, pitching his voice to cut through the night, “we can’t keep circling the same drains.”

Lyra turned slowly to look at him. “We can’t keep circling each other, either.”

Grayson really should have been expecting that. He’d told her that he was falling for her. Knowing that she might run, he had told her anyway. And now…

Now, Lyra Kane was reaching to grab the front of his shirt. She was pulling him toward her. “What happened while I was gone?” Grayson murmured.

Lyra’s eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Maybe I just feel like doing a little more damage.” She surged upward, and Grayson caught her face in his hands as her lips crashed into his.

A moment later, his hands were buried in her hair.

Grayson had known from their first kiss that there would be a second, but he hadn’t been expecting this from her. Here. Now. Grayson pulled back just far enough to breathe out four words. “Away from the ledge.” He moved, and she moved with him.

“I don’t like being told what to do,” Lyra said, her lips brushing his with every word.

“I am aware,” Grayson replied. They kissed again, and Grayson let it all come. The chill of the night air. The feel of her skin. The right kind of disaster just waiting to happen.

The last thing that Grayson wanted was to stop kissing, to put any space whatsoever between them, but his sense of honor sent up a reminder about why he was here. He’d committed to seeing phase two through for her, and as often as he’d redirected Lyra’s attention to the game for his own purposes, Grayson owed her the decency of focusing on the puzzle himself.

Midnight was rapidly approaching. The clock was ticking.

Parting, even a fraction of an inch, was sweet and torturous sorrow. “If we want to win,” Grayson murmured—we, not just her. “For your family. For Mile’s End. We need to play. Everything else can wait.”

Even this.

Lyra looked at him for the longest time, just looked at him, like she was on the verge of saying something. And then, she looked back out at the island. “Then let’s play.”





Chapter 34





ROHAN


Rohan stood at the edge of the ocean, wave after wave washing onto the shore, stopping just short of his feet. The darkness, the water—it was like pressing on a bruise. I never did learn to swim all that well, he’d told Savannah.

There was a utility to pain, mental clarity in mastering it.

Gripping that clarity with both hands, Rohan willed himself into the labyrinth of his mind, sorting through information—the music box puzzle; letters scrawled across Savannah’s bare arm; a pair of photographs belonging to Brady Daniels; Jameson Hawthorne viewing Lyra Kane as a threat.

Back in reality, a bigger wave broke. Rohan refused to step back as the water washed up and over his feet. In the corridors of the labyrinth, an unwanted memory reared its head.

A woman humming. Safe and warm. And then a man’s voice: “Give him to me.” Rohan could have fought the memory, could have shut it down, but he did not. It was, after all, just another bruise.

“Please,” he could hear the woman say.

And then the man: “We both know you’re going to give him to me eventually, and if you fight me on it, if you disobey me again, it’s going to be so much worse when you do.”

The sound of footsteps pulled Rohan back to the present. Primed to fight and ready to win, he turned, and there she was: Savannah Grayson, glorious even in the dark.

“How are you at groveling, British?”

“Nowhere near as good as I am at lording my victories over people,” Rohan replied. “Why?”

“You’re going to want to grovel.”

Figured something out, did you, love? And she’d come to him with it, as a partner should. Rohan took a step toward her. “Tell me, Savvy, what kind of groveling did you have in mind?”





Some time later, Rohan stepped into the Great Room. No dominoes. The gleaming wood floor was very nearly bare. Rohan noted a violin and a bow, both leaned neatly against the wall, but Savannah ignored them as she strode to the black granite fireplace. A fire now burned inside it—the first time it had been lit, as far as Rohan knew, since the start of the game.