Page 5 of The Grandest Game

But that was better than drowning.

Gritting her teeth, Lyra picked up her speed. This far into a run, that shouldn’t have been feasible. But sometimes, all you could do waspush.

By the time she stopped, she could barely breathe. The track blurring in front of her, Lyra bent over, her hands on her knees, sucking in oxygen. And some asshole chose that moment to catcall her. Like she’d bent overjustfor him.

A moment later, a soccer ball rolled to a stop by her side.

Lyra glanced up, spotted a group of guys waiting to see how she would react, and spent a few seconds wondering what the collective noun forassholewas.

A bevy?

A clutch?

No, Lyra thought, picking up the ball.A circus.The circus of assholes probably wasn’t expecting her to punt the ball over their heads toward the goal, but her dad was a high school soccer coach, and once her body knew how to do something, it never forgot.

“Missed!” one of the guys yelled, cackling. The ball hit the crossbar at an angle, ricocheted off, and smacked the jerk who’d catcalled her in the back of his head.

“No,” Lyra called out. “I didn’t.”

Dropping out was the right move. The only move. But when Lyra tried to walk up the steps to the Registrar’s Office, she ended up a block away at the campus post office instead.

I’m going to do it. I just need a minute.Lyra walked mechanically to her PO box. She wasn’t expecting mail. This was pure procrastination, but that didn’t stop her from turning the key and opening the box.

Inside, there was an envelope made of thick linen paper.No return address.She reached for it. The envelope was heavier than it looked.No postage.Lyra froze. This envelope—whatever it was—hadn’t been mailed.

Looking back over her shoulder, feeling suddenly like she was being watched, Lyra ripped the envelope open. There were two items inside.

The first was a thin sheet of paper with a message scrawled across it in dark-blue ink.YOU DESERVE THIS.As she read the words, the paper began crumbling in her hands. Seconds later, there was nothing left but dust.

Acutely aware of the way her heart was beating in her chest—pounding against the inside of her rib cage with brutal, repetitive force—Lyra reached for the second item in the envelope. It was thesize of a folded letter, but the instant her fingers brushed its golden edge, she realized that it was made of metal—very thin metal.

Removing it from the envelope, Lyra saw that the metal was engraved: three words, plus a symbol.Not a symbol, she realized.A QR code, just waiting to be scanned.Reading the words told Lyra exactly what she held in her hand.

This was a ticket, an invitation, a summons. The words engraved above the code were instantly recognizable—to her, to anyone on the planet with access to media of any kind.

The Grandest Game.

Chapter 4

GIGI

Gigi Grayson was not obsessed! She was not over-caffeinated! She certainly wasn’t about to fall off the roof! But try telling a Hawthorne that.

A steady hand caught her elbow. A suit-clad arm encircled her waist.

The next thing Gigi knew, she was safe in her bedroom. That was the way it was with her Hawthorne half brother: He made things happen inan instant. Grayson Hawthorne bled power. He won arguments with a single arch of his sharply angled blond brows!

And there was a teeny, tiny chance that Gigihadbeen about to fall off the roof.

“Grayson! I’ve missed your face! Here, have a cat!” Gigi swooped up Katara—her large Bengal cat, practically a leopard, really—and dumped the cat in Grayson’s arms.

Cats were an excellent way of disarming people.

Grayson, however, was impossible to take off guard. He strokeda hand firmly over Katara’s head. “Explain.” As the second-eldest of the four grandsons of deceased billionaire Tobias Hawthorne, Grayson was prone to issuing orders.

He also had a bad habit of forgetting that he was three and a half years older than she was, not thirty.

“Why I was on the roof, why I haven’t been returning your calls, or why I just handed you a cat?” Gigi asked cheerfully.