Page 25 of The Grandest Game
“I see,” Grayson said, not specifyingwhathe saw in her expression.
“My father’s last name wasn’t Thomas.” Lyra just couldn’t keep from pushing back.
“The file in question was scant,” Grayson told her. “But the details, such as they were, matched your description of your father’s death.”
Lyra felt the room begin to spin. The sound of a gunshot echoed through her mind. She fixed her eyes on Grayson’s, like a dancer spotting by keeping her gaze locked on one point for pirouette after pirouette.
“Why are you telling me this?” Lyra demanded.Now, she added silently.Why are you telling me thisnow?She’d gone to him for help when she was seventeen, at a time when it had felt like she had no one. She’d tricked herself into believing that Grayson Hawthorne had some shred of honor, that he might actually help her, that she wasn’t alone.
And what she’d gotten from him was:Stop calling.
“I am telling you this,” Grayson stated, his tone far too gentle for her liking, “because that file led nowhere. Every detail in it, besidesthe description of your father’s death, was artificial. A lie.” There was a slight pause. “I had no way of finding you to tell you that.”
The warmth of his hand on her back was getting harder and harder to ignore.
“But you tried,” Lyra said cuttingly. “To find me.” Her withering tone made her skepticism clear, because if Grayson hadactuallytried to find her, he would have—the way Avery Grambs apparently had for the Grandest Game.
You told the heiress something, andshefound me—or your brothers did. Or maybe they chose players from that capital-L List of Tobias Hawthorne’s. Either way,theydidn’t have any problem tracking me down.Lyra didn’t think for a second that Avery or the rest of the Hawthorne family was somehow more capable of moving mountains than Grayson was.
Grayson Hawthorne could damn well move mountains with a flick of his wrist.If you’d really wanted to find me, you would have.
For the longest time, Grayson was silent, and then his expression shifted, the angles of his face becoming more pronounced. “If you are here as part of some vendetta against my family—”
“I’m here for the money.” Lyra cut him off. If she’d been capable of it, she would have cut him down, but he was Grayson Hawthorne, not easily felled. “And you don’t get to act like I’m a threat because of somelistmade by your soulless, life-ruining billionaire grandfather. I am here because”—Lyra almost saidbecause I was invited, but she thought about what that invitation had said, and the words burned true—“because Ideservethis.”
Now was not the time for her to go hoarse.
“I don’t have a vendetta against your family,” she continued, her voice low. “I’m not a threat, and I am not asking for anything fromyou.”
“Except,” Grayson said, the oddest undercurrent in his tone, “for me to stay out of your way.”
Lyra wanted so badly to look away from him. Her anger smoldered, then burned. “That’s the only thing I could ever want from you, Hawthorne boy.”
Grayson dropped her hand. He pulled back, ending their dance. “Consider it done.”
The music stopped, and the next thing Lyra knew, Avery and Jameson were making their way to the front of the room.
Focus on them. Not him. Never him.
“Hello, everyone.” The Hawthorne heiress took off her mask, and for a moment, her gaze lingered on Lyra. “And welcome to the second annual Grandest Game.”
Chapter 20
GIGI
Here we go.Gigi tried to clear her mind. Did she have a knife strapped to her thigh with leopard-print duct tape beneath her ball gown, where no one could see it? Yes. Yes, she did. Did anyone in this room realize that? No. No, they did not. Was she carrying a grudge the size of Pangaea about what she’d had to sacrifice to keep said knife and said duct tape? Also yes.
But right now,noneof that mattered. The only thing that mattered was that Avery was addressing the room. “The seven of you are here because three years ago, I went from living in my car to having the world. I became an extremely unlikely heiress.”
At the front of the room, the remaining Hawthorne brothers took up position around Jameson and Avery in a way that made it hard for Gigi to think of the five of them as anything other than a unit: Nash-and-Xander-and-Grayson-and-Jameson-and-Avery against the world.
All four Hawthornes removed their masks.
“Anything I could imagine,” Avery continued, “was suddenly within my grasp, and I was thrown into the middle of a game I can’t even describe.”
Beside Avery, Jameson was looking at her like she was the sun and the moon and the stars and eternity, all rolled into one.
In Gigi’s entire life, no one had ever looked at her likethat.
