Page 94 of Glorious Rivals

“What sort?”Eve demanded.“And what do you mean,warnings?”

“I am not,” Calla, who wasno one, told Eve, “talking to you.”

“Maybe you should be.”Eve stepped in front of Gigi once more, shielding her.“Omega.”Eve let that word—that one word—hangin the air.“Calla lilies.”Eve paused again.“Alice Hawthorne.Lyra Kane asked me about all of those things.”

Calla went silent for a moment, and Gigi had the oddest, eeriest sense that behind the veil, the Woman in Red was smiling.“Evelyn Blake—or do you prefer Laughlin?Shane?Hawthorne?”The Woman cocked her head to the side.“Regardless, Eve, you do not disappoint.”

With that, the Woman in Red—Calla,not-Calla, the Lily,the Watcher—turned to walk away, like Eve had given her what she wanted, what she’d been trying to get from Gigi.

“You can’t just leave us here,” Eve called.

“I can do many things.Mine is a higher law.”

Gigi managed to free her vocal cords.“Calla—”

“Calla,” the Woman in Red replied in that frightfully even tone of hers, “was a naive, sheltered seventeen-year-old girl in love.She was also the only great-granddaughter of Helena Thorp, and that mattered a great deal, so much so in fact that it did not matter to Helena that Calla, among all of her great-grandchildren, was the only one that had no Thorp blood at all.Calla did not know, growing up, that her father was not, in fact, her father—but Orion Thorp knew from the day she was born.Calla’s eyes made her true paternity quite obvious to him, you see.For a man like Orion, an insult like that, a betrayal like that, was unforgivable—but giving his family the firstdaughterin three generations made Orion the Thorp heir.Andthatmattered more than any insult or betrayal.”

Gigi felt dizzy just trying to follow that—all of it, any of it.

“After all,” not-Calla continued, “it was not as if Calla’s so-called father did not have a biological child of his own.”

“I don’t understand,” Gigi said.

“You are not meant not to.”

“Why are you telling us this?”Eve asked.

“I am not Calla Thorp.There is no Calla Thorp anymore.”The wall parted.“And thanks to dear, dear Eve, the time forwatchingis done.”

Chapter 68

LYRA

It’snota riddle.It’s a code.A very simple code.It took Lyra long enough to figure it out, to look at the letters in the poem aslettersinstead of as part of a whole.Once she stopped looking for meaning in the words of the inscription, once she forced herself to look for thesimplestanswer, there it was.

OFTEN

NEVER

LITTLE LATE

YOU

AND TWO

TOO MUCH, TOO GREAT

NEVER, EVER

I TRAP YOU NOT

GO NOW

HOW

TO SHOOT YOUR SHOT

The first letters in each of those lines—they spelled out a message, an explanation for why she and Grayson hadn’t been able to find the ledger at the tree.The trick wasright there.