Page 74 of The Grandest Game

Just how well did you know the billionaire, Odette?

“And my final truth for the two of you, free of charge, is this: I am here, playing the Grandest Game with every intention to win it, because I am dying.” Odette’s tone was matter-of-fact, if a bit annoyed, like death was a mere inconvenience, like the old woman was too proud to let it be anything else.

Again, Lyra couldn’t shake the feeling:She’s telling the truth.

“Tell, Mr. Hawthorne.” Odette stared Grayson down. “Have I told a single lie?”

Grayson’s gaze flicked toward Lyra. “No.”

“Then allow me to remind the two of you that you already havemy terms. If I am to answer the question of how I knew Tobias Hawthorne, of how I ended up on that capital-L List of his, it will happen if and only if we make it out of the Grandest Escape Room and down to the dock by dawn—which, I might point out, draws ever closer.”

“Never trust a sentence with threeifs,” Grayson told Lyra. “Particularly when spoken by a lawyer.”

“You want answers,” Odette told him. “I want a legacy to leave my family. To that end, we have a game to play, one that I am going to win if it’s the last thing I do.”

The last thing.Lyra wondered just how much time Odette had left.

Head held high, the old woman made her way—slowly, gracefully, regally—to the projector and manually rewound the film that had welcomed them to this room.

A moment later, the montage—thecipher—began to play from the beginning. Lyra tamped down on the deadly whirlpool of emotions churning in her gut. She’d lived with the suffocating weight ofnot knowingfor years. For now, she needed to concentrate on solving this puzzle and any others that followed and getting down to the dock by dawn.

For Mile’s End—and for answers.

Lyra crossed the room and paused the projector the moment the multiple-choice question appeared on-screen, studying the now-familiar symbols of the “correct” answer.

Lyra compared that to the other three answers, all of which also contained four symbols, a mix of letters and shapes. “Odette.”Lyra’s voice sounded throaty and raw to her own ears. “You said there was another set of symbols at the end of the film?”

“There is,” Odette confirmed.

After the gun.Lyra felt the dread of that in the pit of her stomach and the back of her throat.After the body. After the blood.

“Skip to the end of the film,” Grayson ordered. He was obviously trying to protect her, to spare her.

Whatever had or hadn’t passed between them, Lyra wasn’t about to let herself be spared anything by Grayson Hawthorne.

“No.” She refused to cower—from anything, but especially from this. “We need to watch the whole thing again.” In a Hawthorne game, anything could matter. “I’m not weak. I can handle it.”

Grayson’s pale eyes locked on hers with an odd kind of recognition, like the two of them were strangers who’d met gazes across a crowded room only to realize they’d met before.

Like they were the same.

“It has taken me a lifetime,” Grayson said softly, “to learn how to be weak.”

Some people can make mistakes, make amends, and move on.Lyra wanted to cut the memory of his words off there, but she couldn’t.And some of us live with each and every mistake we make carved into us, into hollow places we don’t know how to fill.

“And now?” Lyra thought about the cost of being fine, of running—and running and running andrunning—away from every person who might have realized that she wasn’t, of keeping the whole damn world at arm’s length. “Do you get to be weak now, Grayson?”

Look away from his eyes,Lyra told herself desperately.Look away from him.

She didn’t. “Do you get to make mistakes now?” she said.

Silence stretched between them—living, breathing,achingsilence.

“Only the ones,” Grayson told her, “that are really worth making.”

Lyra wanted to turn away from him, but all she could think about was the poem she’d destroyed, the one he’d pieced back together.

Gone too fast.