Page 105 of Glorious Rivals

I’ve got you.I am here, and I have got you, Lyra Kane.

It hurt Lyra that she couldn’t picture the way he had looked when he’d said it—not the lines of his face or the look in those unmatched blue-gray eyes.But her body remembered.Your hands on my face.Your fingers combing tangles from my hair.

Her body remembered: his lips and hers; strong arms holding her aloft, a chandelier overhead.

Pacing the docks, walking them again and again and again, Lyra desperately tried to turn her mind to something else—not the puzzle this time but the dream and the woman in the black cloak.

You should not be here.That voice—Alice’s voice?—rang in Lyra’s ears.But who is to say that you were?Lyra could feel herself running, running with bare and bloody feet, out into the night.She tried to remember more—if therewasmore.

And then she triednotto remember: A Hawthorne boy and a girl who had every reason to stay away from Hawthornes…

A brush of his hand at her temple.

Stepping out of time.

Her lips crashing into his.

Fingers trailed lightly along her jaw.

Their bodies, side by side in bed, floating off into nothing.

Lyra was nothingbutmemories, and all she could do was just keep walking—down the edges of the large dock and across.Up the platform, over to the smaller docks.And suddenly, she realized…

The docks.

Sometimes, words were words.Sometimes, letters were letters—but sometimes they were numbers.And sometimes, like an infinity symbol carved into a silver music box, letters or numbers were really justshapes.

Nearly all problems, Grayson’s voice rang in Lyra’s memory once more,are a matter of perspective.

Lyra walked backward until she was as far from the docks as she could get and still be beneath the roof of the boathouse.She reached for the ladder built into the stone wall, and then she climbed until the top of her head very nearly scraped the bottom of the roof.

She had a bird’s-eye view now, and this time, shedidsee something.

The shape of the docks.

Lyra couldn’t rotate the visual in her mind, but shecouldlet go of the ladder with one hand and use it to trace the shape of the docks with her fingers.If you divided the platform between the slips in half, if you traced it twice…

Close.Lyra reversed the movements she’d just made, like she was teaching a dance class, standing in front of her pupils and mirroring the moves that they should make, going right for every left, her version of rotating the shape in her head.

And there it was, no space between the letters but clear as day.

LIE.

Chapter 75

GRAYSON

Ignoring the rain, Grayson stood at the edge of the ocean, only a few feet from where Xander had hoisted Lyra up onto his shoulders the day before.Gallus gallus domesticus en garde.It was hard not to feel like the universe had given him a window, a very tiny window, into the way things might have been, if he and Lyra had been allowed to simplybe.

His brothers and Avery would have liked Lyra.They would have welcomed her, if she’d been anyone else.

Damn Alice Hawthorne.Damn Eve for bringing Lyra into the Grandest Game not knowing what she was unleashing.Damn Jameson and his secrets.But above all…

Damn me.It took everything in Grayson not to walk right into the ocean, not to submerge himself in the bitterly cold water to swim and swim and push it all down.But he’d worked too hard and too long to give in to old habits now.

Don’t fight it.Grayson’s breath went jagged as he let it all come.What he and Lyra could have been.What they should have been.Why not me?

“I should have told her everything.”Grayson said the words out loud, every muscle in his body tense, his lungs screaming like each breath was an assault on his body.No matter his intentions, the truth had still come out in the end—enough of it, anyway, to ensure that Lyra would look and look and look for more.