Page 96 of Glorious Rivals

Grayson did as she bade him, his back on the mattress, his head still turned toward hers.

Lyra raised a hand tohistemple.“Close your eyes,” she ordered.

“I’m the one,” Grayson told her, “who’s supposed to take care of you.”

“Oh really?”Lyra retorted.At this rate, neither one of them was going to be getting any sleep.“How many hours until nightfall?”Lyra asked.

Grayson didn’t even have to check his watch.“A little over six.”

They needed sleep.Lyra knew that.Her body decidedly did not.“How do you normally put yourself to sleep?”she asked Grayson, staring into his eyes, thinking about arctic ice and the silver of swords.“When you can, when you succeed—how do you turn it off?”

“The world?”Grayson said.

“Being Grayson Hawthorne,” Lyra replied.

His chest rose and fell, and her fingers ached to touch it in a way that might have proven impossible to deny if he hadn’t answered her question.

“I imagine myself floating on my back in a pool.”

Lyra flipped from her side to her back.There was maybe an inch between her shoulder and his.She closed her eyes.“Floating in a pool.”She could just almost feel it.“At night.”

“A moonless sky up above,” Grayson replied.She could tell just by the sound of his voice: His eyes were closed, too.

He breathed.

She breathed.

“Nothing but black,” Grayson continued.

“Deep breaths, lungs filling to keep you afloat.”Lyracouldfeel it now, her body and his, floating side by side.Silence.

And then, there really was nothing but black.

The calla lily.

The candy necklace.

“A Hawthorne did this.”

He has a gun.Lyra couldn’t breathe, but she didn’t wake up.She sank deeper into the dream, deeper and deeper and deeper until there was no shred of awareness that itwasa dream left in her.

“What begins a bet?Not that.”She can hear the man, but she can’t see him.There’s silence, and then—a bang.

She presses her hands to her ears.She’s a big girl.Not gonna cry.She’s not.

Another bang.

Silence.She drops her hands from her ears.The flower falls to the floor.She twists and twists the elastic of the candy necklace around her fingers so tight it hurts, and then she hears something like the creaking of a door.

Suddenly, her feet are walking toward the stairs.Quiet, she thinks.She has to be quiet.She slips off her shoes.

Up the stairs.One step.Then another.Her foot sinks into something sticky and warm and red.It’s red, and it’s on her, and it’s dripping down the stairs.

The walls are red, too.You’re not supposed to draw on the walls.

A mewling sound.It’s her.She’s the one making the sound as she sees something at the top of the stairs.

Not something.