Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (87)

Slate broke eye contact first, turning to Gigi. “And… false.”

It took Gigi’s scrambled mind a second or two to think back to the last True or False question she’d asked him. This was Mattias Slater, telling her that he and Eve did not have the kind of relationship that involved making out.

Before Gigi could make heads or tails of that, the wall to her left parted.

Gigi whirled. Slate slid in front of her and Eve as the wall closed behind a woman who wore not a spot of red. She was tall and willowy in a way that should have made her look slight but didn’t, her skin very nearly ebony—luminescent, flawless. Thick black braids of varying sizes streamed down her back.

She was one of the most beautiful, self-possessed, arresting women that Gigi had ever seen—and Slate slammed her back against the wall.

“Are you quite finished?” The woman’s voice was familiar, but her accent was much stronger now. The first woman in red. The one who was playacting. The one who used us to bait the other.

“You’re…” Gigi thought of about a thousand different descriptors that would have applied. “British?”

“When it suits me,” the woman replied. “Zella,” she introduced herself, like Slate didn’t have her pinned to a wall. “Charmed. Now, I’m going to need at least one of you to tell me, word for word, what the Watcher said to you.”





Chapter 74





LYRA


Lyra looked from Rohan to Savannah to the clue in the sky. She barely even felt the rain or the cold.

“It happened, didn’t it?” Savannah said from the ground. “Just like I said it would. With Grayson.”

Lyra refused to answer that and focused only on the word in the sky. LIE. The clue seemed to be mocking her. How many times had Grayson Hawthorne lied to her? What exactly did his brothers know?

About the lily.

And the three.

And omega.

“Did Eve offer you a deal, Lyra?” Savannah rose to her feet, looking so much like Grayson that it hurt. “You should have taken it.”





Lyra needed someplace dry to think, but she couldn’t go back to the house, couldn’t risk running into Grayson. She had to work the puzzle. For Mile’s End. She had to keep playing. It was dark. She was wet. And there were a limited number of places that offered coverage.

She ended up in the boathouse—and not on the roof this time. Alone, she walked to the very edge of the dock and stared out at the blackened ocean.

Come and get me, she thought. But her body sent up no warnings. Every instinct she had said that no one was watching her right now.

The great stone arches above her only did so much to the block the rain blowing in off the ocean, but it was better than nothing. It was enough for Lyra to be able to rage and seethe and hurt and think.

LIE. She paused, breathing through every single emotion that wanted to come. An abbreviation? She hit a wall with that line of thinking quickly enough. An anagram? With an S, she could have made ISLE, but the word wasn’t LIES. It was LIE.

Unless it’s not a word. Lyra turned that thought over in her mind. A number? The letter E wasn’t a Roman numeral, so she discarded that possibility. L was the twelfth letter of the alphabet. I was the ninth. E was the fifth.

1295. Lyra tried as hard as she could to make sense of that number or any of its component parts, but she couldn’t. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run until her muscles burned and her lungs threatened to combust, but even that had been ruined for her, because when Lyra thought about running, all she could think about was his body and hers, a synchrony like she’d never known.

The muscles in Lyra’s throat constricted. She’d known better than to trust Grayson Hawthorne, known better than to rely on him in any way.

When I told you to stop calling… Grayson’s voice echoed in her mind. I didn’t mean it.

He’d let her down before, and Lyra had hated him for it, hated him even though she’d had no right to expect anything from him back then. They’d been strangers.

They weren’t strangers anymore.

You don’t fall. I do.

The thing that hurt most was that Lyra knew Grayson hadn’t been lying—not about that. He’d manipulated her, and he’d lied to her, and maybe she should have been questioning whether any of it had ever been real, but she wasn’t. Her body knew, and so did she.

It had been real, and it had been beautiful, and now it was done.

I am forever pulling people back from cliffs.

I don’t want your protection.

You have it nonetheless.

Grayson Hawthorne was who he was. He’d been pulling her back from cliffs from the start. And I don’t have it in me to let him. He’d known that. She had as good as told him that.

Lyra paced the docks beneath the massive stone arches: one enormous slip perpendicular to two somewhat smaller ones, a large platform in between.

1295. Lyra tried, as she paced, to concentrate on that, on the clue. LIE. But her mind just wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let Grayson Hawthorne go.

You don’t fall. I do. His voice—even before these last few days, Lyra had never been able to forget Grayson Hawthorne’s voice.

Breathe for me, Lyra Catalina Kane.

Lyra couldn’t stop herself from remembering. She couldn’t stop walking up and down the dock. Water was streaming down her face—rain and tears.