Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (71)

Grayson took Lyra at her silent word and began to climb—fast and hard, the way only someone who’d had the hesitation trained out of them could. Despite his pace, it took time for him to pull even with Savannah.

Forty feet off the ground.

“I don’t need your help,” Savannah told him through gritted teeth. “I never did.”

The teeth gave her away. Savannah was in pain—physical pain. Her ACL. “There’s nothing up here,” Grayson told her. “No matter how far you climb, you won’t find a ledger.”

“You don’t know that.”

“My brothers and Avery wouldn’t make anyone climb this high.”

“I suppose I’m just expected to trust you on that?” Savannah knew exactly how to deploy every pointed arch of her brows. “Trust them.”

She might as well have been wearing literal armor to go along with the clothes they’d been given for the game. Grayson was not holding out hope that anything he said would pierce it, but he had to try. “I know you’re working with Eve. She’s manipulating you, Savannah.”

“Do I strike you as gullible?” Savannah gave no sign of weakness, but her knee—that knee concerned Grayson.

“I won’t let you hurt Avery. Nor will I allow you to hurt yourself. There’s nothing up here, Savannah.”

“You don’t know that,” his sister said again, her voice struck through with an intensity he recognized all too well.

“I know that you are in pain—and not just your ACL.” Grayson didn’t want to do this fifty feet above the ground, but either she’d listen to him or she’d head back down. Either, he would count as a win. “Our father had a bomb planted on Avery’s jet. Two men died as a result, and when Avery was not among the casualties, he had her abducted. He held her hostage. He pointed a gun at her, intending to shoot her in front of Toby Hawthorne in revenge for our cousin Colin’s death.”

Toby’s words on the helicopter echoed in Grayson’s mind. You tell your sister it was me. But that wasn’t the truth, either, and Grayson couldn’t bring himself to lie to Savannah again.

“No. He wasn’t a murderer. He didn’t kidnap anyone.” Savannah’s voice shook—and so did her leg. “And he wasn’t our father, Grayson. He was mine.”

“Be that as it may, Savannah, Avery was not the one who shot him, and the person who did only pulled the trigger to save her life.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

“Are you under the impression that it would make a difference if I believed you?” Savannah asked. “If Avery’s only crime was the cover-up, do you think that it cost me any less?”

“The cover-up was Toby’s work—and he’s Eve’s father. She has more than one reason to point you at Avery instead.” Grayson did what Toby had told him to do. He gave Savannah a Hawthorne target, and he did it with the truth.

“How long did it take you to figure out what happened?” Savannah said, her voice far too calm for either their current height or the topic of conversation. “Or did Avery tell you the truth right away, because you deserved to know?”

If they’d been fencing, she would have scored a direct hit. Avery had told him. She hadn’t kept it from him, the way they’d all kept it from Savannah.

“I know exactly when Gigi found out.” Savannah’s voice echoed through the branches all around them. “Looking back, I can pinpoint the day. The hour.”

“We were trying to protect you,” Grayson said, Lyra’s words echoing in his mind: Ask me how protected I felt.

“We,” Savannah repeated, her hold on the tree so vicious it turned her knuckles white. “You and Gigi.”

She began to climb back down. Grayson paced her, ready to catch her if she faltered.

Savannah did not falter. “I am only going to say this once. It does not matter what lies Eve told me. It does not matter if you are telling me the truth now. Because this conversation? We both know that it’s not about protecting me anymore. All you’re trying to do now is make me complicit.”

Another direct hit. Grayson had seen what keeping this secret had done to Gigi.

“What about my mother?” Savannah clearly had no intention of letting up. Acacia Grayson was the closest thing that Grayson had to a real mother himself. She had Gigi’s open heart, Savannah’s bulletproof resolve. “Did you even think about her? Is the whole world just supposed to go on believing that Sheffield Grayson is alive and well and living a tax-evading life in the Maldives?”

Grayson forced himself to weather every ounce of his sister’s fury without a word.

“We were fine,” Savannah said, the words sounding like they’d been ripped from a part of her that was already dead. “Mom. Gigi. Me. Before you came, I was holding us together, and we were fine. And now, there is no us.” Savannah’s breaths were audible now and laden with pain—of all types. “And the worst part of it,” Savannah continued, her voice going uncharacteristically ragged, “is that Gigi chose you, but if push came to shove, you wouldn’t choose her. You’d choose your brothers and Avery. They are your family, the way Gigi was mine.”

Was. “Gigi is still your family,” Grayson said as they reached the handholds. “And like it or not, you are mine as well.”