Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (82)

“What who said?”

Lyra opened her eyes to stare straight into Grayson Hawthorne’s. “I never knew how they found me—the police or my parents or whoever it was that took me out of that house.” She’d never been able to ask, not without admitting to her family what she had remembered. “I was alone with my father’s body. I had blood on my feet—blood on my feet, and I was alone.” Lyra sucked in a breath. “And then I wasn’t.”

Grayson’s hands made their way to the sides of Lyra’s face. He cupped her jaw, cradling her head, his fingers gently massaging the back of her neck. Small movements, steady. He was there, and he wasn’t asking a damn thing from her.

That, more than anything else, let Lyra continue. “She wore a black cloak, the hood pulled up.” Lyra pressed her lips together. “Her face was veiled. She said I shouldn’t be there. And then—it was like she was covering for me, for the fact that I was there. She fed me some kind of liquid, poured it down my throat.”

“I’ve got you.” He was still only touching her face and neck, but Lyra could feel Grayson’s presence in every inch of her body, anchoring her like silver and steel. “I am here, and I have got you, Lyra Kane.”

“Alice.” Lyra said the name out loud. It was the only thing that made sense. A Hawthorne did this—and then, the woman in black was there.

“Breathe,” Grayson murmured. He breathed, and so did she, and it was like running beside him all over again, a duet of sorts.

I am not alone. Lyra leaned in to one of Grayson hands, feeling the warmth of his skin on her cheek, and then there was a buzz at his wrist. His watch.

Grayson pulled back. He didn’t blink, and from his eyes alone, she wouldn’t have even thought he felt it—but he pulled back.

Grayson Hawthorne didn’t pull back. Not when she needed him. Not like this. Lyra’s fingers locked around his wrist, her hand too small to make it more than halfway around the circumference. But she was strong enough to hold his arm in place, if only because he let her.

“That was your watch,” Lyra said.

Grayson stroked the thumb of his free hand over her cheek. “My watch doesn’t matter right now.”

Lyra wanted to believe that. But… “My body knows yours.” Better than it should. Better than it has any right to. She swallowed. “You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Grayson. There’s tension in your muscles all the time, but there’s a difference between tension and tensing.” The tension that lived in Grayson’s body was the tension of a bow with an arrow notched and at the ready. He was always ready. “You only tense for a reason.”

Slowly, Lyra turned his arm over. She pressed her thumb to the inside of his wrist, knowing her technique was lacking but not willing to risk loosening her grip.

“What are you doing?”

Lyra would have thought that was obvious. “Taking your pulse.” He looked so calm, so steady, but his heart—it was racing. “If I turn your wrist back over,” Lyra whispered, “if I look at your watch, what am I going to see?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She tried to turn his wrist back over, and Grayson’s free hand caught hers. For the longest time, the two of them stayed there in the bed, in a silent standoff, her hand on his arm and his on hers, neither one of them saying a word.

“Don’t look.” Grayson broke first—and so did his voice. “I am asking you not to look,” he said, his entire body taut now, “the way that I asked Emily not to jump.”

Lyra’s heart twisted, but in the back of her mind, all she could hear was Savannah and her warning, a warning Lyra had set aside, a warning that hadn’t come back to her even once since the yacht.

When all is said and done, when it matters most…

Lyra bowed her head to look.





Chapter 70





GRAYSON


Grayson twisted his wrist, angling the face of his watch out of Lyra’s view. He had no idea what the message he’d just received said, but the last messages he’d sent had indicated that Toby knew—and not just about Eve.

About Alice. Alice, whom if Lyra was to be believed—and he did believe Lyra Kane, body and soul—might have been there the night that Lyra’s father had died. Grayson’s mind went to Jameson saying that he’d been drugged, saying that his memory of what had happened to him in Prague was minimal, fractured—all feelings, few specifics. Grayson remembered thinking that Jameson knew more than he consciously remembered—the calla lily, for one—but Grayson hadn’t made the connection between Jameson’s splintered memory and Lyra’s.

What if she didn’t repress that night because of the trauma? What if someone repressed it for her?

Across from him, Lyra Catalina Kane was looking down, but she still couldn’t quite see the face of his watch—not yet. Grayson let loose of her arm and twisted his wrist as far as he could without fully breaking her hold.

“It’s funny,” Lyra said, bringing her amber eyes back up to his face. “Playing the Grandest Game, you start to get a sense for when you’re missing something.” She swallowed.

Grayson went to pull his arm back, and Lyra’s grip tightened.

“Don’t you dare,” she said.