Instrumental music floated up from the ground floor as Lyra descended the spiral staircase. Avery Grambs was nowhere in sight. It was like the heiress had disappeared into thin air.
When Lyra made it to the foyer, she discovered that it had been transformed. Towering chocolate and white chocolate fountains sat opposite Greek columns the height of her waist. Each column boasted a platter piled high with meat or fruits. The three massive doors Lyra had seen earlier were now open, revealing the rooms beyond.
A dining room. A study. The music was coming from beyond the third door, on the far side of the staircase. Lyra followed the sound of it into what was, unmistakably, a Great Room. Soaring ceilings boasted an elaborate crystal chandelier, but Lyra barely even noticed the sparkling crystals. Her brain couldn’t process anything but the view.
The entire back wall of the Great Room was made of glass.
Floor-to-ceiling windows offered an unvarnished panorama of the Pacific Ocean at twilight. Thousands of fairy lights dotted the rocky shore. Lyra paced forward, pulled to the windows like a moth to a flame, and it was only once she’d crossed the room that she was able to turn back and shift her attention to what was happening inside the Great Room.
To the ball.
Lyra still didn’t see Avery anywhere, but based on the number of tuxedo-clad masked men present, at least some of the Hawthorne brothers
had to be there.
Not Grayson. Lyra couldn’t shake the feeling—the very annoying feeling—that she would have recognized him instantly, no matter the mask he wore.
Forget him. Focus on your competition. Odette was easy to pick out, with her long, thick, black-tipped hair. The old woman wore a black velvet gown complemented by matching gloves that covered her from elbow to fingertip. Her mask was white. Feathered. On the outside edge of each catlike eye, there was a single, deep-red gem.
Rubies, Lyra thought—and not small ones.
Savannah was just as recognizable. Her platinum blond hair was pulled into an even more elaborate braid now than it had been before. From behind, Lyra couldn’t see Savannah’s mask, but that did nothing to lessen how striking the other girl looked draped in ice-blue silk, a vintage-style gown that seemed like it had been plucked straight from the 1930s.
The heavy chain Savannah had worn around her arm before encircled her hips now.
“You’re staring, pet.”
Lyra hadn’t heard Rohan approach, hadn’t so much as seen him out of the corner of her eyes. His mask was a light and shining silver, the metalwork more befitting a crown. It covered the entire left side of his face but for his eye and extended above his brow and down the temple on his right. The startling asymmetry of the mask made Rohan look, if not broken, then just a little bit twisted.
In a good way.
“I wasn’t staring,” Lyra said.
“Let me guess,” Rohan murmured. “You were looking at the walls.”
The walls? For the first time, Lyra looked to the perimeter of the Great Room. Wood panels lined the walls. A raised design in the wood was reminiscent of Art Deco, but the longer Lyra stared at it, the more the design called to mind a maze.
This is the Grandest Game. What are the chances that it is a maze?
“Are we talking about walls? I love walls.” Another masked gentleman slid in between Lyra and Rohan with an impressive shimmy. The newcomer was tall and wore a golden mask. He held out a hand to Lyra. “This is the part where I humbly admit to being the boldest and most dashing
Hawthorne—or, at a minimum, the least wary of explosions and social rejection—and ask if I can have this dance.”
This, Lyra realized, was the youngest Hawthorne brother. Xander Hawthorne.
Dance? Lyra looked beyond Xander’s outstretched hand to the center of the Great Room, where two others had indeed begun to dance. One of them was Avery Grambs, which made her masked partner Jameson Hawthorne.
Avery and Jameson each held a hand up, their palms touching as they walked in a slow, seductive circle around each other. The dance looked like it had been lifted from another era, one where men and women could barely touch, and yet, watching the two of them circle each other, Lyra found it hard to breathe.
Snap out of it, she told herself, tearing her gaze away from them and taking Xander’s outstretched hand. She was here to do a job. Anything it takes to win.
“I don’t suppose you have a clue to dispense?” Lyra asked Xander. She and the other players still hadn’t been told anything concrete about what was to come—other than the fact that, in some senses, the game would start tonight.
Xander spun her out, then in, then solemnly raised his right hand and waited for her to lift hers before responding to her request for a clue. “The stork flies at half past ten,” he said dramatically. “The hummingbird eats a cookie. My dog is named Tiramisu.”
Lyra snorted. “Oddly enough, I think you’re telling the truth about that last one.”
After their third clockwise circle, Xander put his right hand down and raised his left. Lyra mirrored the motion, and they began circling each other counterclockwise.
“Muffins or scones?” Xander said seriously. “Excuse me?”
The Hawthorne across from her somehow managed to raise an eyebrow so high it shot up above the top of his mask. “If you had to choose: Muffins or scones?”
Lyra considered her options. “Chocolate.”
“They can be chocolate.” Xander was clearly the most agreeable Hawthorne.
“No,” Lyra told him as they danced. “I choose chocolate. Just chocolate.”
“I see.” Xander grinned. “A small enough piece to melt on your tongue or a bunny the size of your fist?”
“Both.” Lyra realized right after she’d answered that she hadn’t spoken that word to Xander, who was no longer standing where he’d been a moment before.
Grayson had displaced him. “May I cut in?”
She’d known that she would recognize him, no matter the mask. His was black. No adornments. Just… black. “You already have.”
They were circling each other now, their hands barely touching. Lyra had never felt so aware of every inch of skin on her fingers and palms. It felt less like they were dancing than like they’d been pulled into each other’s orbit. Gravity was nothing compared to the force that kept Lyra from stepping away—no matter how much she wanted to, no matter how vehemently she reminded herself that he was a Hawthorne.
That Hawthorne.
The music changed, and with it, the dance. Grayson effortlessly took Lyra’s hand, as his other arm curved with utmost efficiency around her back. There was still space between them, a respectable amount of space.
Too much—and not nearly enough.
“Last year, when you called me,” Grayson said, his mask doing nothing to shield Lyra from those eyes, “you had questions about my grandfather’s presumed role in your father’s death.”
A Hawthorne did this. Lyra steeled herself against the feel of Grayson’s hand on her back, against the interweaving of their fingers. “I didn’t presume anything except that your grandfather was the Hawthorne most likely to ruin a man.” Lyra raised her chin. “And I didn’t come here—to this island, to this game—to talk about my father with you.”
Grayson stared at her from behind that mask. “You wanted to know the truth before.”
Lyra had wanted a lot of things back then. “If you’d discovered that you’d spent your entire life living a lie, you would have wanted answers, too.” She kept her voice perfectly even, perfectly controlled. “But I don’t need them now, the way I did when I called you.”
Despite her best attempts to the contrary, emphasis crept into the last
word of that sentence: you.
“My grandfather had a list,” Grayson said after a moment. “The List, capital L. Enemies. People he’d taken advantage of or wronged. There was a Thomas Thomas on it, the last name the same as the first.”
Thomas, Thomas. Lyra’s thoughts went to the notes on the trees. Rohan had been so sure they hadn’t been the work of the Hawthornes or the Hawthorne heiress, but what if he’d been wrong?
“I see,” Grayson said, not specifying what he saw in her expression. “My father’s last name wasn’t Thomas.” Lyra just couldn’t keep from
pushing back.
“The file in question was scant,” Grayson told her. “But the details, such as they were, matched your description of your father’s death.”
Lyra felt the room begin to spin. The sound of a gunshot echoed through her mind. She fixed her eyes on Grayson’s, like a dancer spotting by keeping her gaze locked on one point for pirouette after pirouette.
“Why are you telling me this?” Lyra demanded. Now, she added silently. Why are you telling me this now? She’d gone to him for help when she was seventeen, at a time when it had felt like she had no one. She’d tricked herself into believing that Grayson Hawthorne had some shred of honor, that he might actually help her, that she wasn’t alone.
And what she’d gotten from him was: Stop calling.
“I am telling you this,” Grayson stated, his tone far too gentle for her liking, “because that file led nowhere. Every detail in it, besides the description of your father’s death, was artificial. A lie.” There was a slight pause. “I had no way of finding you to tell you that.”
The warmth of his hand on her back was getting harder and harder to ignore.
“But you tried,” Lyra said cuttingly. “To find me.” Her withering tone made her skepticism clear, because if Grayson had actually tried to find her, he would have—the way Avery Grambs apparently had for the Grandest Game.
You told the heiress something, and she found me—or your brothers did. Or maybe they chose players from that capital-L List of Tobias Hawthorne’s. Either way, they didn’t have any problem tracking me down. Lyra didn’t think for a second that Avery or the rest of the Hawthorne family was somehow more capable of moving mountains than Grayson
was.
Grayson Hawthorne could damn well move mountains with a flick of his wrist. If you’d really wanted to find me, you would have.
For the longest time, Grayson was silent, and then his expression shifted, the angles of his face becoming more pronounced. “If you are here as part of some vendetta against my family—”
“I’m here for the money.” Lyra cut him off. If she’d been capable of it, she would have cut him down, but he was Grayson Hawthorne, not easily felled. “And you don’t get to act like I’m a threat because of some list made by your soulless, life-ruining billionaire grandfather. I am here because”— Lyra almost said because I was invited, but she thought about what that invitation had said, and the words burned true—“because I deserve this.”
Now was not the time for her to go hoarse.
“I don’t have a vendetta against your family,” she continued, her voice low. “I’m not a threat, and I am not asking for anything from you.”
“Except,” Grayson said, the oddest undercurrent in his tone, “for me to stay out of your way.”
Lyra wanted so badly to look away from him. Her anger smoldered, then burned. “That’s the only thing I could ever want from you, Hawthorne boy.” Grayson dropped her hand. He pulled back, ending their dance.
“Consider it done.”
The music stopped, and the next thing Lyra knew, Avery and Jameson were making their way to the front of the room.
Focus on them. Not him. Never him.
“Hello, everyone.” The Hawthorne heiress took off her mask, and for a moment, her gaze lingered on Lyra. “And welcome to the second annual Grandest Game.”
