Omega.” Lyra’s voice went husky, but her body felt suddenly, unnaturally calm. Grayson’s hands were still on her neck. His forehead was still touching hers. Lyra didn’t have to speak up to make sure he heard her next question. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“No. It does not.” Grayson pulled back from her, just enough to turn his head without letting go. His gaze settled with military precision on Odette. “Does it mean anything to you, Ms. Morales?”
Lyra thought suddenly about notes on trees, about her father’s names, about how small the suspect pool for that act really was.
Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás.
He’d been dead for fifteen years. Who else on this island, besides Odette, was old enough to have known anything about him?
“Omega means the end.” The old woman in question lifted two fingers to her forehead and crossed herself. “‘Yo soy el Alfa y la Omega, el principio y el fin, el primero y el ultimo.’ It’s from the book of Revelation— Apocalipsis, in Spanish.”
“You’re Catholic?” Lyra said. She searched for some kind of tell in the set of Odette’s features, anything that could tip off whether or not the old woman was putting on an act.
“The more pertinent question,” Odette replied, “is whether or not your father was a religious man.”
“I don’t know.” Lyra knew so very little about the shadowy figure
responsible for half her DNA. I know his blood was warm. I know I stepped in it. I know he used it to draw that symbol on the wall.
“And that’s the only meaning the word omega holds for you, Ms. Morales?” Grayson’s hands finally dropped away from Lyra’s neck as he turned and took two steps toward Odette. “The only meaning you associate with that symbol?”
“The only place I have ever seen that symbol,” Odette said evenly, “is behind that altar of the church I attended as a child, and I have not stepped a foot in that church—or in Mexico, for that matter—since my seventeenth birthday, which was also, incidentally, my wedding day to a much older man who saw me and wanted me and convinced my musician father that he could make him a star.”
Lyra could feel the truth in Odette’s words, but even if Odette was telling the truth about the last time she’d seen that symbol, that wasn’t what Grayson had asked.
He’d asked if it held any other meaning for her—and Odette hadn’t actually answered the question.
“Ms. Morales, during your many years as a high-priced attorney”— Grayson cocked his head slightly to one side, a tiger sizing up his prey
—“did you, by chance, ever happen to work for the law firm of McNamara, Ortega, and Jones?”
Odette was silent.
“And that’s my answer,” Grayson said. He cast a sideways glance at Lyra. “McNamara, Ortega, and Jones was my grandfather’s personal law firm. He was their only client.”
Odette worked for Tobias Hawthorne. Lyra stopped breathing for a second or two, then started up again. And who knows a man’s secrets better, she thought slowly, than his lawyers?
A Hawthorne did this. “Please,” Lyra said urgently, fiercely. “If you know something, Odette—”
“There is a game my youngest granddaughter was quite fond of as a teenager.” Odette somehow managed to make that sound like it wasn’t a sudden and absolute subject change. “Two Truths and a Lie. I’ll do the pair of you one better and offer up three truths, the first of which is this, Lyra: I know nothing about your father.” Odette shifted her gaze to Grayson. “My second truth: Your grandfather was the best and worst man I have ever
known.”
To Lyra’s ears, that didn’t sound like the declaration of Tobias Hawthorne’s lawyer. She remembered the way Odette had said—twice— that Grayson was very much a Hawthorne.
Just how well did you know the billionaire, Odette?
“And my final truth for the two of you, free of charge, is this: I am here, playing the Grandest Game with every intention to win it, because I am dying.” Odette’s tone was matter-of-fact, if a bit annoyed, like death was a mere inconvenience, like the old woman was too proud to let it be anything else.
Again, Lyra couldn’t shake the feeling: She’s telling the truth.
“Tell, Mr. Hawthorne.” Odette stared Grayson down. “Have I told a single lie?”
Grayson’s gaze flicked toward Lyra. “No.”
“Then allow me to remind the two of you that you already have my terms. If I am to answer the question of how I knew Tobias Hawthorne, of how I ended up on that capital-L List of his, it will happen if and only if we make it out of the Grandest Escape Room and down to the dock by dawn— which, I might point out, draws ever closer.”
“Never trust a sentence with three ifs,” Grayson told Lyra. “Particularly when spoken by a lawyer.”
“You want answers,” Odette told him. “I want a legacy to leave my family. To that end, we have a game to play, one that I am going to win if it’s the last thing I do.”
The last thing. Lyra wondered just how much time Odette had left.
Head held high, the old woman made her way—slowly, gracefully, regally—to the projector and manually rewound the film that had welcomed them to this room.
A moment later, the montage—the cipher—began to play from the beginning. Lyra tamped down on the deadly whirlpool of emotions churning in her gut. She’d lived with the suffocating weight of not knowing for years. For now, she needed to concentrate on solving this puzzle and any others that followed and getting down to the dock by dawn.
For Mile’s End—and for answers.
Lyra crossed the room and paused the projector the moment the multiple-choice question appeared on-screen, studying the now-familiar
symbols of the “correct” answer.
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Lyra compared that to the other three answers, all of which also contained four symbols, a mix of letters and shapes. “Odette.” Lyra’s voice sounded throaty and raw to her own ears. “You said there was another set of symbols at the end of the film?”
“There is,” Odette confirmed.
After the gun. Lyra felt the dread of that in the pit of her stomach and the back of her throat. After the body. After the blood.
“Skip to the end of the film,” Grayson ordered. He was obviously trying to protect her, to spare her.
Whatever had or hadn’t passed between them, Lyra wasn’t about to let herself be spared anything by Grayson Hawthorne.
“No.” She refused to cower—from anything, but especially from this. “We need to watch the whole thing again.” In a Hawthorne game, anything could matter. “I’m not weak. I can handle it.”
Grayson’s pale eyes locked on hers with an odd kind of recognition, like the two of them were strangers who’d met gazes across a crowded room only to realize they’d met before.
Like they were the same.
“It has taken me a lifetime,” Grayson said softly, “to learn how to be weak.”
Some people can make mistakes, make amends, and move on. Lyra wanted to cut the memory of his words off there, but she couldn’t. And some of us live with each and every mistake we make carved into us, into hollow places we don’t know how to fill.
“And now?” Lyra thought about the cost of being fine, of running—and running and running and running—away from every person who might have realized that she wasn’t, of keeping the whole damn world at arm’s length. “Do you get to be weak now, Grayson?”
Look away from his eyes, Lyra told herself desperately. Look away from him.
She didn’t. “Do you get to make mistakes now?” she said.
Silence stretched between them—living, breathing, aching silence.
“Only the ones,” Grayson told her, “that are really worth making.”
Lyra wanted to turn away from him, but all she could think about was the poem she’d destroyed, the one he’d pieced back together.
Gone too fast. Burned into skin.
All she could think about was a masked heiress giving her advice. Sometimes, in the games that matter most, the only way to really play is to live.
Odette reached across Lyra and hit Play on the projector. With the moment broken—thankfully, blessedly broken—Lyra forced herself to catalog the scenes in the montage in purely objective terms, and she did her best to not think about Grayson Hawthorne and mistakes—about weakness and running and living—at all.
A smoking man. A stolen martini. Cowboys and a noose. A diamond earring dropped down a drain. A man with a gun. When the gun appeared on-screen, Lyra breathed through it.
She breathed, and Grayson breathed beside her. Through the body and the blood. Breaths in. Breaths out. And even though Grayson never touched her, Lyra could feel his hand on the back of her neck, warm and steady and there.
The montage played on.
A teenage boy in a leather jacket.
A female pilot pulling off her goggles and cap. A long kiss good-bye.
Lyra watched that kiss with Grayson Hawthorne beside her, unable to keep herself from thinking about the kind of mistakes that were worth making.
And somewhere, in the back of her mind, the ghost of her father whispered: A Hawthorne did this.
A set of symbols appeared on the screen. Lyra concentrated on them. Not Grayson. Not ghosts. Not things she had no business feeling. Just the symbols.
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