Page 77 of Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game #2)

GRAYSON

I gnoring 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 simply be .

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.

Grayson should have known. He had known. The piper had to be paid either way.

This is all on me. It was Grayson’s nature to carry failure with him—mistakes carved into hollow places he’d never been able to fill—but no part of him felt hollow now.

She filled him.

In his mind’s eye, Grayson could see Lyra—stretching for a chandelier overhead, the lines of her body damn near impossible; amber eyes meeting his from behind a masquerade mask.

He could hear her. Give me your jacket?

She was probably never going to forgive him. She’d told him exactly what she needed and why, and he had still denied her the truth.

My mistake.

But Grayson refused to carry this one with him, refused to let this be one more regret, refused to stand by, frozen, while she was out there somewhere, hurting, when he could at least try to make it hurt less.

You just resisted the urge to say that Hawthornes do not try. Toby’s voice rang in Grayson’s mind, and Grayson thought about other things Toby had said—about his Hannah, about regrets. Maybe if I’d learned to love differently, I could have loved her better. I certainly couldn’t have loved her more.

This close to the water’s edge, Grayson could hear the waves. He couldn’t see them in the dark, but he felt them breaking against stone, and somewhere in his mind, he heard Lyra’s voice.

Maybe some of us need to break to be whole.

“Maybe some of us do,” Grayson whispered. Maybe that was the secret to loving without reservation, without fear.

A broken man could try . And try. And try.

To love her differently. To love her better.

Grayson shuddered. He threw back his head, raising his face to the night sky, and he let it all out. There was a poem he’d always liked by Elizabeth Bishop about the art of losing things and people and dreams.

He’d lost.

And he’d lost.

And he’d lost.

And this time, he was not letting go.