Lyra stepped through the FINALE door into a massive room like none she’d ever seen. A tile mosaic covered the floor, the ceiling, the walls. A majority of the tiles were black, but every color imaginable made an appearance in the elaborate, twisting swirls of the mosaic.
“It’s a ballroom,” Grayson offered behind her.
Lyra made her way to the closest wall, pulled to it with almost magnetic force. She brought her hand to the surface of the mosaic, feeling each individual tile—so small, so perfectly set. How many millions of tiles had gone into making this room? The ceiling. The floor. The walls—all except one.
The back wall was made of glass.
Lyra stared out the wall of windows into velvety darkness. How long did they have until the first haze of soft morning light would appear? How long until the sun broke the horizon and ended this phase of the game?
Finale. This room—this puzzle—was the last.
Lyra made her way to the center of the room. The floor was smooth under her feet, the tiles laid so perfectly it felt like walking on wood. Directly overhead, there was a crystal chandelier.
Memory was a physical thing. Back arching. His fingers, my thighs.
“A ballroom is made for dancing,” Odette commented.
Lyra banished the memory and looked down at her ball gown with its cascading blue layers. Made for dancing. “I don’t dance anymore.”
Part of her wanted to. Part of her ached to.
But she put it in terms Odette would understand: “That was another life.”
Lyra turned her focus to the pattern on the walls and floor: dark, mesmerizing spirals and swirls, each one unique. She paced the room, taking it all in.
“You never stopped dancing,” Grayson said behind her. “Every time you move, you dance.”
“I do not.” Arguing with him was the easiest thing in the world.
“It’s there in the way you hold your head, like there’s music the rest of us can’t hear.” Grayson Hawthorne was a natural debater. “Every step you take, every twist, every turn, every pissed-off whirl.”
He could have stopped there and won. He didn’t.
“The way you stand,” he continued mercilessly, “one foot slightly in front of the other. The way you lift your heels off the ground when you’re deep in thought, like it’s everything you can do not to rise all the way to the tips of your toes. The spread of your fingers when your hands hang loose by your side. The lines of your body when you stretch those hands overhead.”
The chandelier, Lyra thought.
“Believe me, Lyra Kane.” Grayson’s voice was deeper now. “You never stopped dancing.”
How the hell was she supposed to argue with that? How was she supposed to exist in a world—let alone a locked ballroom—with Grayson Hawthorne saying things like that?
You won’t be locked in with him much longer. Lyra tried to take comfort in that, but it hurt—not a sharp pain, not even a new one. The idea of this night ending hurt like a once-broken bone, long-healed, that ached every time the weather turned.
The kind that might never stop aching.
Lyra laid her palm against the tiles on the wall and began to search it the way Grayson had the fireplace in the Great Room.
“There could be something to the pattern.” Grayson came to join her at the wall, setting the longsword on the ground at their feet.
Lyra took a step back—from the wall, from the sword, from him. “What about the objects?” She turned abruptly toward Odette as the old woman
began laying their objects out on the mosaic floor.
The lollipop.
The sticky notes.
The paintbrush.
The light switch.
“We started this game with a collection of objects,” Odette noted, “and I seem to recall our Mr. Hawthorne being quite certain that one of those objects would be a clue to start us off.”
“Yes, well, doubt has never been my strong suit.” Grayson’s gaze cheated toward Lyra’s. “But if this is a more typical Hawthorne puzzle than the first was, we’ll want to think of unconventional uses for each object.” He nodded to the lollipop. “Take that.”
The face of the lollipop was flat, circular, and larger in diameter than Lyra’s fist. The stick was long and sturdy.
“There could be a code built into the swirling of the candy,” Grayson continued, “something that identifies a specific portion of the mosaic. Or perhaps we’re meant to discard the lollipop and use only the plastic wrapping that covers it.”
Lyra moved to stand a little farther from him, directly over the objects, keenly aware of the way she moved and the way he watched her.
She knelt to eye the wrapping on the lollipop. “The nutritional info—” “—could contain a hidden message or code,” Grayson finished. He knelt
beside her. “Or perhaps the lollipop’s stick is the important part, and, at some juncture, we’ll find ourselves faced with a button that needs pressing and a gap too small for our fingers to fit through.”
“And these?” Lyra gestured broadly to the remaining three objects.
The light switch consisted of a panel, two screws, and a switch, all attached to a metal block with more screws. The entire thing looked like it had been plucked straight from a wall.
The sticky notes were standard size and square, the color shifting the farther down the pad you went, starting with purple and ending in red—a reverse rainbow.
“How many uses could there possibly be for sticky notes?” Lyra said.
“You’d be surprised.” A person could have written a book about all the ways that Grayson Hawthorne could almost-but-not-quite smile.
“Do any of them involve a cello case, a longsword, a crossbow, and a
calico kitten?” Lyra asked dryly.
Grayson actually smiled then, and Lyra wished that he hadn’t. She really, really wished that he hadn’t.
“What can I say?” Grayson told her. “I had an unconventional childhood.”
A Hawthorne childhood, Lyra reminded herself. Even setting aside everything else—blood, death, omega; a Hawthorne did this; stop calling
—the simple truth of it was that Lyra and Grayson Hawthorne were from two different worlds.
She fixed her gaze on the final object. The paintbrush looked like something from a children’s watercolor set. The handle was green, the bristles black. Grayson reached forward and tested the handle, trying to unscrew it to no effect.
“We could try brushing it over the paper,” Lyra said, her focus damn near close to legendary. “Or the walls.”
“A worthwhile pursuit,” Grayson told her. “Right after we flip that switch.”
Lyra flipped it. Nothing happened. She tried the brush on the paper, then staunchly started in on the walls. Grayson fell in beside her. Behind them, Lyra heard Odette pick up one of their objects.
Probably examining it with her opera glasses. Lyra didn’t turn around. She just kept at it with the brush, unable to keep her eyes from going to Grayson’s hands.
His fingers were long and dexterous, his knuckles pronounced. The skin of his hands was smooth, the muscles leading to his wrists defined. There was a single scar, a subtle crescent moon beneath the nail bed on his right thumb.
Lyra focused on the brush and the wall. “I had a very conventional childhood.” She stared at the mosaic so hard her vision blurred. “Ballet. Soccer. Running in the woods, splashing in the creek.” Lyra pressed her lips together. “That’s why I’m here.”
Was she reminding herself or telling him?
“Because of your conventional childhood?” Grayson tapped the index and middle fingers on his right hand against a section of deep blue tiles well within his reach and almost out of hers.
Lyra rose to her toes, swiping the paintbrush over the tiles he’d
indicated. Nothing. “My dad—my actual dad, who raised me—he owns land,” Lyra said. “And a house. Mile’s End.” She closed her eyes, just for a moment. “It’s like no place else on earth, and he might have to sell.”
“You’re doing this for your family,” Grayson said—not a question.
Lyra tightened her grip over the handle of the brush. “We’re getting nowhere.”
“Lyra.”
She thought at first, just from his tone, that Grayson had seen something in the mosaic, but when Lyra turned her head toward him, she realized that he wasn’t looking at the mosaic.
“I was wrong.” Grayson sounded as sure of that as he did of absolutely everything else.
Lyra tried and failed to look away. “About the objects?”
“No.” Grayson Hawthorne and the word no. “Seventeen months ago, you came to me for help.”
Lyra couldn’t let him say another word. If he’d never buried his hands in her hair, if he hadn’t been the one to pull her from that flashback, to anchor her here, it might have been different. But Lyra couldn’t do this.
Not now. Not on the verge of all of this ending. Not after he’d told her that every time she moved, she danced.
“Forget about it,” Lyra bit out. “It doesn’t matter. Just concentrate on the game.”
“I excel at multitasking.” Grayson sank to the place where the wall met the floor and ran his hand along the seam, looking up at her like he might never look away. “And last year, when I told you to stop calling—I didn’t mean it.”
