Page 89 of The Grandest Game

Lyra tried and failed to look away. “About the objects?”

“No.”Grayson Hawthorne and the wordno. “Seventeen months ago, you came to me for help.”

Lyra couldn’t let him say another word. If he’d never buried his hands in her hair, if he hadn’t been the one to pull her from that flashback, to anchor herhere, it might have been different. But Lyra couldn’t do this.

Not now. Not on the verge of all of this ending. Not after he’d told her that every time she moved, she danced.

“Forget about it,” Lyra bit out. “It doesn’t matter. Just concentrate on the game.”

“I excel at multitasking.” Grayson sank to the place where the wall met the floor and ran his hand along the seam, looking up at her like he might never look away. “And last year, when I told you to stop calling—I didn’t mean it.”

Chapter 64

GIGI

Gigi shimmied up the rope like a person with actual biceps. It wasn’t a feat of athleticism so much as an energy-fueled, near-incandescentneedto see what came next. As her hand latched around thick, solid stained glass, she could feel someone starting to climb the rope behind her, but she didn’t look back at Brady and Knox.

She pulled herself through the hole and climbed to her feet.

The attic—if you could call it that—was shaped like a pyramid, maybe eight feet tall at its highest point and lit along every edge. All four of its walls were made of glass.The very top of the house.Gigi pictured the roofline—and then she looked out into the night. “It’s so dark outside.”

“Not for long.” Knox effortlessly pulled himself up and in, Brady—with the longsword somehow strapped to his back—coming next.

“We have, at most, two and a half hours until dawn,” Brady commented.

Two and a half hours, Gigi thought,until this, with the three of us, is over.

She placed her hand on the ocean-side pane and ran her fingers over the word carved into the surface of the glass.FINALE.

“Here.” Brady squatted. “There’s a loose pane in the floor.” He lifted a large stained-glass square and began pulling objects out of the compartment beneath.

A pair of sunglasses.

A roll of wrapping paper.

A ball of a yarn.

A bottle of nail polish remover.

“One of these has to contain a clue about what we’re supposed to do next,” Gigi said intently. The wrapping paper boasted unicorns and rainbows. The sunglasses were black with rhinestones. The yarn was multicolor—a rainbow, just like the paper.

Brady unscrewed the cap of the nail polish remover and took a whiff. “Smells like acetone,” he confirmed. “Or something with a very similar chemical composition.”

“This is the part where he rattles off a chemical formula,” Knox said, putting on the sunglasses.

“The rhinestones really bring out your eyes,” Brady deadpanned.

Gigi unrolled the wrapping paper and scoured it for some kind of clue: a unicorn that didn’t fit with the rest, a rainbow missing a color, hidden letters or numbers, a variation in the pattern. When she was done with her examination, she flipped the paper over.

The back side was solid red.

Knox took off the sunglasses. “Nothing written on the inside,” he reported briskly. “The lenses appear to be normal lenses.”

Gigi grabbed the ball of yarn and started unraveling it on the off chance that there was something hidden at its center.Nothing.She turned her attention to the attic room. The floor was made of stained glass. The walls and ceiling were transparent. There was nothing in the room but the objects they’d already found.

Gigi knelt to examine the stained glass. None of the other panels were loose—but the trapdoor was still open. “Every other time we moved to a new room, we lost access to the old one,” she said out loud. She made a snap decision. “Bombs away!”

Gigi dropped back down to the library. Knox cursed, but he followed her, and so did Brady.