Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (93)

Some things were just not meant to be.

“I need to get back to the game,” Lyra said. I, not we.

Lightning struck with sudden, electrifying force over the ocean. Seeing it out of the corner of her eye had Lyra’s head whipping back toward darkened ocean waters she could not make out in the night, and for the first time since the helipad, she felt something.

Eyes on us.

The warning rose up like bile from the pit of Lyra’s stomach and crawled down her spine.

“What is it?” Grayson said.

Lyra shook her head, then lightning struck again—close enough that it tore open the sky and lit up the world.

There was a difference between sensation and perception. It took a moment for Lyra to register what she’d seen in that blinding flash, and by the time she did, the ocean was pitch black once more.

Calla lilies. Hundreds of them. Floating on the water, washing onto the shore.





Chapter 80





GRAYSON


Grayson did not think, did not hesitate. He removed his jacket. Then shirt. Moving rapidly backward like a blade through the night, he calculated the exact trajectory needed and the exponentially small margin of error within which he would need to hit it.

And then he ran—straight for the edge of the patio, the edge of the cliff. His body anticipated the moment of liftoff, the way he would arc through the air to dive into the water a hundred feet below, narrowly skirting the rocks.

Then Lyra threw herself sideways—directly into his path.

Abort. Grayson couldn’t manage a full stop, so he flung his arms around her and twisted, redirecting his momentum as best he could and praying that it would be enough.

They landed hard, all of an inch from the edge.

“Have you lost your mind?” Lyra was not one for raising her voice, but she was yelling now. She was also on top of him.

“Let me up,” Grayson commanded.

Even at night, Lyra blazed. “What the hell, Hawthorne?”

“Let me up,” Grayson repeated, but she pinned him down instead. “Let me do this for you, Lyra.”

“Asshole.” She was straddling him now, her hands locked on his wrists. “Do you really think that I am going to let you dive off this cliff and just hope that you manage to avoid the rocks?” Her chest heaved. “Do you really think that you’re the only one who would do anything to protect the people who matter to you?”

Her voice broke on the word matter, and Grayson knew in that instant that he was going nowhere.

I matter. To you. This matters.

“I have spent years lying to my family because I knew that if they knew I was suffering, they would suffer, too,” Lyra continued, the timbre of her voice powerful and deep. “And maybe lying to protect them and expecting something different from you makes me a hypocrite. Maybe I am every bit as much of a liar as you are, Grayson Hawthorne. But in this much…”

Grayson sat up, shifting her lower on his thighs, his hands making their way back to hers, his fingers interweaving with hers.

“In this much,” Lyra said again, “we are the same.” Her grip on his hands tightened, like she didn’t trust him to stay put, like she’d put him right back down again if she had to.

We are the same. Grayson let those words roll over him. He committed them—and this moment—to memory, in case it was one of their last. But reality was a wolf at the door. “There’s someone out there. I saw what you saw, Lyra.”

Grayson’s mind went to the letter A.

Lyra let loose of him and slid off his thighs, standing and orienting her body toward the water. “I don’t feel anything anymore. Whoever’s responsible for those flowers—they’re gone.”

Grayson was not sure which defied logic more: her certainty or his predisposition to believe it. He climbed to his feet. “I’ll let my brothers know.”

The image of calla lilies on the water, illuminated for less than a second by a lightning strike, was emblazoned on Grayson’s mind. It felt, to him, like a warning.

A declaration of war.

He typed and sent the message, then looked back up at Lyra, who beat him to speaking.

“There is only one way that this is going to work,” she said.

This. Grayson lingered on the word. This. This. This.

“I get to pull you back from cliffs, too.”

Grayson felt the rise and fall of his own Adam’s apple, then a tightening of the muscles in his throat and a loosening of the ones between his shoulder blades. This. “I accept your premise,” he said, a Hawthorne striking a deal, “but I do not like it.”

“Join the club,” Lyra told him. “And no more lies. If there’s something you can’t tell me, just say that. You’re entitled to secrets, Grayson. You are entitled to put your family first, to protect them, but if you ever lie to me or try to manipulate me again, this—us—we’re done.”

“No more lies.” Grayson could agree to that much at least—for her. Differently. Better. “To that end, there is something that you need to know. You said that I would not choose you.”

“I’m not asking you to—”

“You were wrong. I would choose you, Lyra—not over my family but as a part of it.” Grayson thought about Nash saying that he’d known immediately with Libby, about the old man and his propensity for talking about the way that Hawthorne men loved.