Page 75 of The Grandest Game

Burned into skin.

All she could think about was a masked heiress giving her advice.Sometimes, in the games that matter most, the only way to really play is tolive.

Odette reached across Lyra and hit Play on the projector. With the moment broken—thankfully,blessedlybroken—Lyra forced herself to catalog the scenes in the montage in purely objective terms, and she did her best to not think about Grayson Hawthorne andmistakes—aboutweaknessandrunningandliving—at all.

A smoking man. A stolen martini. Cowboys and a noose. A diamond earring dropped down a drain. A man with a gun.When the gun appeared on-screen, Lyra breathed through it.

She breathed, and Grayson breathed beside her. Throughthe bodyandthe blood. Breaths in. Breaths out. And even though Grayson never touched her, Lyra couldfeelhis hand on the back of her neck, warm and steady and there.

The montage played on.

A teenage boy in a leather jacket.

A female pilot pulling off her goggles and cap.

A long kiss good-bye.

Lyra watched that kiss with Grayson Hawthorne beside her, unable to keep herself from thinking about the kind of mistakes that were worth making.

And somewhere, in the back of her mind, the ghost of her father whispered:A Hawthorne did this.

A set of symbols appeared on the screen. Lyra concentrated on them. Not Grayson. Not ghosts. Not things she had no business feeling. Just the symbols.

Chapter 55

LYRA

Grayson was the one who solved it in the end. “That’s not a wheel, and it’s not a circle. It’s apie. This whole thing has Xander’s name written all over it.”

“Pie.” It took Lyra a second, and then her brain kicked into gear. “Without theE.” She did the math—literally. “A, pi,r, square.C, two, pi,r. They’re equations.”

“The area and circumference of a circle,” Grayson confirmed. “But for our purposes and doubtlessly Xander’s, the important part is the Greek letterpi.”

Greek letter.“The tins.” Lyra was already on the move. “Who went through the ones markedpi?”

“I did.” Grayson strode past her. “Here. Forty-two canisters markedpi. None contains anything but film reels.”

“What about the years?” Lyra said. “Most of the films in the montage were older. They started black-and-white, then turned to color.”

“Pull every tin from the sixties,” Odette said curtly. Something about the look on the old woman’s face made Lyra entirely certain that Odette knew something that they didn’t.

Probably multiple somethings.“Then what?” Lyra probed.

“Watch the films,” Odette said coolly. “At least a sample.”

“That will eat up time,” Grayson noted, but Lyra didn’t see that they had any other choice.

The twenty-second pi film they tried was calledChanging Crowns. The moment the title slide hit the screen, Odette spoke. “This is the one we’re looking for.”

“Acrown, a scepter, an empty throne,” Grayson quoted instantly.

“There is that,” Odette agreed, as she stopped the film and peeled the long, velvet gloves off her hands. “And also: This one is one of mine.”

“One of yours?” Lyra said.

Odette gave an elegant little shrug. “The man I married when I was seventeen never made my father a star,” she said, an odd glint in her eyes. “I was another story.”

Chapter 56