Grayson flicked a button open on his tuxedo jacket with one hand as the other laid out quarters on the marble coffee table with an audible click, click, click. Lyra couldn’t help noticing that he’d chosen to work on the coffee table that was half-covered in glass shards.
The one that was farther away from her.
Focus on the letters, Lyra told herself. And only the letters. She’d lined the Scrabble tiles up on the floor, the way she would have if she were actually playing Scrabble: vowels first, then consonants in alphabetical order.
A, A, E, E, E, O, O, U, U, B, C, D, G, H, N, P, R, R, T, T, W, Y.
Grayson’s suggestion echoed in Lyra’s mind: Look for patterns, repetition, anything that will let you get it down to a smaller pool.
I could do that. Lyra looked up to see a single strand of blond hair fall into that stone-carved face of his. Or I could play.
Grayson’s logic had been that too many words could be made from a pool of letters this large. But if the goal wasn’t just making words or a sentence? If the goal was laying out the perfect Scrabble board, focusing on choosing the right plays to maximize your score?
That changed the game—and Lyra had never lost at Scrabble.
She settled on UNPOWERED as her opening play. Fifteen points. She went to the D and made ADAGE—another seven points—then doubled up, forming YE and YACHT in one go, crossing through the first A in ADAGE
and allowing her to count the Y twice. Eighteen points.
Less than a minute later, Lyra had finished her board. She dragged a finger lightly over each tile, feeling the words, committing them to memory
—and then she scrapped the whole thing and made another board from scratch. Then another. And another. Certain words cropped up again and again.
“Power, crown, adage,” Lyra murmured. “If only there were an adage about power.”
Lyra realized with a start that Odette Morales was standing directly over her.
“One with explicit reference,” the old woman continued, “to a crown.”
Adage. Power. Crown. It took Lyra a moment, but she got there. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
“I prefer the original version myself.” Odette walked toward the wall of windows, commanding the room as if she were on a stage and the audience was out there in the dark. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
“Shakespeare.” Grayson stood. “Henry IV, Part Two.” He crossed the room and took in Lyra’s board. “You’re not even trying to eliminate letters.” Lyra wasn’t about to let him tower over her, so she stood. “Maybe I don’t need to eliminate anything.” She walked briskly past him to the screen and its three blinking cursors. She tapped one, and a keyboard appeared. “Shakespeare.” Lyra tried the word, then hit enter. The screen
flashed red. “Henry. Henry4. Henry4P2. Henry4Part2.”
Every combination Lyra tried ended with the same result: a red flash, a wrong answer.
“Try Roman numerals instead of numbers,” Odette said, coming to stand behind her.
Lyra did as she’d been bidden, trying each of the combinations again. “No go.”
“Prince. Knight. Succession. King.” Odette threw out one suggestion after another.
“It won’t be that simple.” Grayson strode toward Lyra. He stopped three feet away from her, but Grayson Hawthorne had the kind of presence that extended well past his body.
Lyra’s own body clocked his position, no matter where he stood.
“If you’ve indeed found something—and I am not convinced you have,
Ms. Kane—then it is almost certainly the case that what you have found is not an answer but a clue.”
There was something about the overly formal, self-important way Grayson said Ms. Kane that made Lyra briefly entertain the idea of throwing something at him.
“And did you find anything, Mr. Hawthorne?” Odette asked pointedly.
“There are forty quarters in a roll.” Grayson arched a brow. “All of ours were minted in the same year except two.”
“I suppose you want us to ask about the year?” Odette said dryly. “Thirty-eight of the quarters were minted in nineteen ninety-one.”
Grayson looked to Lyra, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was testing her.
She just loved being tested. “Is this the part where you tell us about the other two quarters, or do we have to earn that information, your highness?”
“I’m feeling magnanimous.” Grayson’s lips twitched slightly. Very slightly. “One of the remaining two quarters was minted in twenty-twenty, the other in two thousand and two.”
“Same digits in both numbers,” Lyra noted. “Just rearranged.”
“And nineteen ninety-one,” Grayson replied, one-upping her, “is a palindrome.”
The part of Lyra’s brain that loved a good code latched on to the pattern, as that same damn strand of blond hair fell into Grayson’s face a second time. He brushed it back.
“And the years on the quarters matter why?” Lyra said tartly.
“In a Hawthorne game, everything matters. The question is not why but when.” Grayson looked at Lyra like the answer to that question might be buried somewhere behind her eyes. “Assume for the moment that the words adage and crown are indeed the clue that is meant to start us off.” Grayson turned and stalked toward the fireplace on the far side of the room. “In that case, the pattern to the quarters will matter later, and what matters now…” He laid a hand flat on the black granite of the fireplace. “… is finding a crown.”
Lyra watched as Grayson ran his hands over the granite, left to right, then down, his movements automatic, like systematically feeling every square inch of a massive fireplace was something he’d done ten thousand times before.
“Why a crown?” Lyra pressed. “Why not something heavy? Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
“Heavy is vague, and vagueness makes for imprecise puzzles.” Grayson Hawthorne said imprecise like it was a fighting word.
Lyra looked to Odette, who’d been suspiciously quiet, and found the old woman tracing a finger through the mazelike path on the wood-paneled walls. Rather than join her, Lyra turned her attention to the heaviest pieces of furniture in the room.
Imprecise, my ass. The coffee tables were made of what looked like solid white marble. Tiny hairline cracks marked the surface of the stone, each crack inlaid with gold.
“Like a crown,” Lyra murmured, running her own hand over the first table, aware on some level that she’d adopted Grayson’s exact pattern of movement as she searched. Within a minute, she’d turned her attention to the second table, the one covered in shards of glass.
“All things being equal, Ms. Kane, I would prefer you did not shred your hands to ribbons this evening.” Grayson’s tone took Lyra right back to the cliffs, to his hand on her arm.
“I have twenty-twenty vision and an above-average amount of common sense.” Lyra plucked a shard off the table. “I can handle a little glass.”
Grayson’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “The number of scars my brothers have collectively obtained directly after uttering the statement I can handle a little glass means you will have to forgive my skepticism.”
I don’t have to forgive anything, Lyra thought. Out loud, she opted for a different message. “You don’t need to worry about me, Hawthorne boy.”
“I don’t worry. I calculate probabilistic risk.”
“As entertaining as it would be to let the two of you bicker,” Odette interjected, “at my age, you only have so much time left, so I suggest the pair of you ask me what I found.”
Lyra set down the shard of glass. “What did you find?”
“Nothing yet,” Odette said, playing the contrarian. “But in the decades I spent cleaning other people’s houses to scrape by, I learned how to read them—the people and the houses.” The old woman pressed her palm to the wood. “There’s a compartment hidden here.” She slid down the wall four feet and rapped it with her fist. “And something larger over here.”
“That hardly sounds like nothing,” Grayson told her wryly.
“Until we figure out how to trigger the compartments, it is precisely nothing,” Odette replied. She edged farther down. “This, on the other hand…”
Lyra joined the old woman at the wall.
“Look at the grain of the wood,” Odette murmured. “See the shift?
There’s no visible seam—the work is that good—but feel the wood.”
Lyra brought her fingers up and explored the area that Odette had indicated. The wood gave. Not much. Barely enough to notice.
Suddenly, Grayson’s fingers were right next to hers. True to his vow, he didn’t allow their hands to so much as brush as he pressed on the wood. Hard. An entire section of the wall depressed.
Somewhere, gears audibly turned, and the chandelier began to descend from the ceiling. It sank inch by inch, crystals vibrating with the movement, clinking against one another in a fragile melody that had Lyra holding her breath.
When the chandelier stopped moving, it was still well out of reach.
Odette gestured imperiously at Grayson. “Well? Don’t just stand there, Mr. Hawthorne.” The old woman extended her gesture to encompass Lyra. “You’re going to have to lift her up.”
