A perverse part of Lyra wanted to get up close and personal with every cliff on the island just to prove that Grayson Hawthorne didn’t get to give her orders. Instead, she ran—through burnt trees and healthy ones, down the center of the island, then along the coast.
Push harder. Go further. Miss nothing. Lyra let the rhythm of her feet beating against dirt and rock and grass fill her, its own kind of song. She felt the island. In the space between the ruins and the new house, between the dock and the boathouse and the helipad, this place had been left in its natural state: wild and free and real. Beautiful.
She made it back to the ruins and cut across the island again—a different path, and this time, she stopped at every structure she found, eschewing only the house on the north point. When she finished, she circled back to the ruins again, via the perimeter this time.
Keep pushing. Her lungs started burning before the muscles in her thighs did, and when her entire body was on fire? Then she climbed, exploring the cliffs and the rocky shore below.
As sundown drew nearer, Lyra found herself back in the fire-ravaged part of the forest one last time. Breathing hard, she placed her hand flat on a blackened tree and closed her eyes.
A Hawthorne did this. For all Lyra’s brain couldn’t produce mental images, it made up the difference with sounds. She never just thought those words; she heard them—the way her biological father had said them, the
depth in his voice, his accent shifting, impossible to place.
Happy birthday, Lyra. He’d pronounced her name wrong: Lie-ra instead of Leer-a, a reminder that she was only his daughter by blood.
A Hawthorne did this.
What begins a bet? Not that.
A sound snapped Lyra back to the present. Something flapping in the wind? She whipped around, her eyes scanning the charred trees. And then she saw it—paper taped to blackened bark.
Another hint? Lyra jogged to the tree in question. Gingerly, she loosened the tape from the bark. White paper. Dark-blue ink. A surge of adrenaline hit her immediately. Processing the single word written on the page took longer.
Not a word, she thought. A name. All the paper said was THOMAS.
A breath froze like cracking ice in Lyra’s throat, and she heard another sound and another. More papers in the wind, more flecks of white among the blackened trees.
More pages.
She bolted from one tree to the next, less gentle in removing the notes, the words burning themselves into her mind. THOMAS again. TOMMASO. TOMÁS.
“Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás.” Lyra could only manage a whisper. Her fingers curled into a fist, crumpling the pages, which sparked.
Sparks turned to flame. Fire. Lyra yelped and dropped the notes. She watched as her biological father’s name—all of his names, variations on a theme—burned to ash on the ground.
Lyra had no idea how much time she lost to staring at those ashes. Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás. Jameson Hawthorne had said the island bore hints about what was to come. Was that what this was? Just another part of the game?
Did you tell your brothers about our phone calls, Grayson? Did you tell Avery Grambs everything that I told you? Lyra didn’t want to be addressing Grayson in her mind, and she didn’t want to think the obvious, the one thing that she’d been avoiding thinking since she opened her golden ticket: This is why I’m here. This is why they chose me.
A chance at unfathomable riches had been handed to her. A gift. But in reality, she’d always known on some level that it was probably more like
blood money, somewhere between damage control, a payoff, and amends.
And yet, Lyra would have sworn that Grayson Hawthorne hadn’t known who she was—that he’d had no idea who she was—until the moment he’d heard her voice. And on those phone calls, she’d never told him her father’s name. Or hers.
I know you. Grayson’s words echoed in her mind. Your voice. I recognize your voice.
“Are you unwell?”
Blinking, Lyra managed to pry her gaze away from the ashes and dirt to look at the person who’d spoken. The first thing Lyra noticed about her was her hair, long, braided, and so pale a blond it looked almost silver, a match for the girl’s fair and practically luminescent skin. The next thing Lyra noticed was the thick chain wound around the stranger’s arm from shoulder to wrist.
The last thing Lyra noticed was the girl’s eyes. Grayson Hawthorne’s eyes.
He was everywhere. Am I unwell? Unwell? The girl in front of Lyra even sounded like him. “This game is sick,” Lyra bit out. “They are.”
“They as in the Hawthornes and the Hawthorne heiress?” A familiar, British voice came out of nowhere. “Doubtful.”
Lyra scanned the forest for Rohan, and he appeared in the clearing as if by magic. His long legs made short work of the stretch of burnt forest between them.
“Self-aggrandizing, overly angsty, and prone toward mythologizing an old man who seems like he was a right bastard?” Rohan continued. “Yes. But cruel? Avery Grambs and the Hawthornes four? I think not. And whatever it is that put that look on your face…” Rohan openly studied Lyra, the feel of his attention like a silk glove against her skin. “Was cruel.”
Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás. Lyra swallowed. Thankfully, her apparently poorly masked turmoil didn’t capture Rohan’s attention for long. His gaze traveled languidly to the girl with those eyes.
“Savannah Grayson,” Rohan said, “meet Lyra Kane.”
Grayson. They have to be related. Lyra didn’t let herself dwell on that. “What, precisely, upset you?” Savannah aimed that question squarely at
Lyra. “Did you find something?” Savannah took a single step forward. “A hint?”
She even walked like him. Lyra had no intention whatsoever of answering Savannah’s question. And yet… “Notes. With my father’s name on them.” His names. “He’s dead.” Lyra’s voice sounded flat even to her own ears. “What the hell kind of hint is that?”
“I suppose it depends.” Savannah clearly didn’t consider Lyra’s question to be rhetorical. “Who was your father, and how did he die?”
Right for the jugular, Lyra thought. “Not a hint,” Rohan said airily.
“I don’t want to talk about my father,” Lyra told Savannah. “I sympathize.” Savannah didn’t sound all that sympathetic. “Not a hint,” Rohan coughed.
“Ignore him,” Savannah advised. “It’s good for the soul.”
“Easier said than done, love,” Rohan replied. “And…” He smirked. “Not a hint.”
“A dead man’s name didn’t just write itself.” Lyra focused all her frustration on Rohan. “The notes burst into flame. You really expect me to believe this isn’t the game makers’ idea of being clever? That it’s not some twisted part of the game?”
“I never said it wasn’t a part of the game,” Rohan replied. “Now did I?” Savannah swiveled her gaze toward him. “You said it wasn’t a hint.”
“I also said that the makers of this game aren’t cruel. I don’t believe I made any such assessment of the other players—though I would wager, Lyra, that whoever smuggled in the supplies to set up this little display was hoping you would come across it a bit closer to sunset.”
Sunset. Lyra saw the meaning there. The curfew. “Distraction,” Lyra said. Sabotage. Rohan was suggesting that she’d been targeted by another player.
A player who somehow knew her father’s name. His names, plural.
“And just like that,” Rohan said, his fathomless brown eyes angling back toward Savannah’s once more, “the gloves come off.”
