Page 70 of Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game #2)

LYRA

I t’s not a 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 as letters instead 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 the simplest answer, 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 was right there .

ONLY AT NIGHT

“Right place,” Lyra said, “wrong time. We can only move on—only find the ledger and the next clue—at night.” She looked from Grayson to the bed between them, a beautiful antique setup in a damp and shallow cavern that would probably be overrun with water as soon as the tide rose. “Hence the bed.”

Night. Bed.

“We’re all running on fumes,” Grayson commented. “And thus, the game includes a programmed break.”

Lyra’s brain raced. “After a night on that yacht—”

“That ensured that all players encountered the tree during the day,” Grayson finished.

We were on the music box. Brady was one puzzle ahead—the compass. He must not have solved it before midnight.

“The tide will come in again.” Grayson rested a hand on the wrought-iron headboard. “ This bed is just for show.”

“But we do need to sleep,” Lyra said, looking at the bed, drawn to it—and to him. She tilted her eyes up to catch his. “We need sleep, and we need food.”

They were only human.

“We need,” Grayson said, his voice echoing through the cavern, “to go back to the house.”

Back at the house, they found food and ate their fill.

“And now,” Grayson said, “we sleep.”

Lyra gave him a look. “You say that like it’s such a simple thing.”

“Control of your body. Control of your mind.” Grayson returned Lyra’s look. He paused, ever so slightly. “Sleep should be a simple thing.”

But it isn’t for you, either. Lyra understood that, despite his words. She thought of that moment with the snake and the way he’d looked afterward, and then she thought about Savannah and Eve, about Alice and omega and everything else.

“Should be,” Lyra echoed. “But isn’t.”

“I fail most often,” Grayson told her, “at simple things.”

Lyra thought again about Grayson Hawthorne having to practice making mistakes. She thought about the girl he’d lost, the one he blamed himself for. And then she thought about herself: four years old, made a party to her father’s suicide. The only witness. The only survivor.

She wondered if sleep was ever simple for survivors.

“Grayson.” Lyra’s voice came out rough. “Would you like to fail together?”