Page 34 of The Grandest Game
Nine objects, Lyra thought.A piece of paper. A small box. A black velvet pouch. Quarters. Scrabble tiles. Poetry magnets. A mirrored plate. A disposable cup. A single petal from a red rose.
Lyra reached for the poetry magnets. Grayson did the same. Her fingers brushed the back of his hand, and Lyra’s body was taken back—to the cliffs, to their dance. There were downsides to having the kind of memory where you saw nothing in your mind’s eye and felteverything.
Lyra jerked her hand back. She turned her attention to the Scrabble tiles. He could have the damn poetry.
“By my count, there are twenty-two Scrabble tiles,” Grayson said brusquely. “Unless there are fewer than five vowels total, you’ll want to start by finding a way to eliminate some of the letters. Look for patterns, repetition, anything that will let you get it down to a smaller pool, otherwise the number of possible combinations will render the tiles virtually useless to us on the puzzle front—until or unless we uncover a clue that sheds light on which ones to use.”
“I don’t recall her asking you for advice, Mr. Hawthorne,” Odette commented austerely, but she was smiling like a cat that had just eaten the proverbial canary.
“You take the Scrabble tiles, then,” Lyra told Grayson, clipping the words.
“No.” Grayson’s gaze settled on hers, like a laser locking on its target. He arched a brow. “Are we going to have a problem here, Lyra?” He said her name the way her father did in the dream:Lie-ra.
“It’s Lyra,” she corrected.Leer-a.
“Rest assured, Lyra.” Grayson’s voice was low and smooth. “For the duration of this game, I’ll be keeping my hands to myself.”
Chapter 27
GIGI
Rehabilitation took time. So did examining the chest of items Gigi’s team had liberated from a compartment built into the desk in the study in which they were now locked—theybeing Gigi, Brady, and the jerk formerly known asEyebrows of Doom, who Gigi was currently mentally referring to asGrumpy Pants Tuxedo Abs, because hey, the man was built.
He was also going to rue the day he’d stolen that bag, but she was pacing herself.
Grabbing the mirrored plate off the desk, Gigi took up position dead center in the study, then slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees, angling her makeshift mirror up and down as she did, taking in the room’s reflection, drinking in every last detail.
When it came to puzzles, the minutiae mattered.
The study was rectangular, half as wide as it was deep with soaring ceilings. Built-in shelves ringed the top of the room, well out of reach. Gigi angled her mirror to pay special attention to themoldings on the shelves, hand-carved pieces that looked like they belonged in a cathedral.
The shelves themselves, to all appearances, were empty.
Gigi kept turning and angled her mirror toward the desk. Knox was seated in a throne-like chair behind it, taking apart the wood chest, board by board.With his bare hands.Gigi ignored him in favor of the recovering physicist standing over the desk, looking down at the items spread across its surface.
Brady stood so still that Gigi could make out every rise and fall of his chest beneath his tuxedo jacket.Deep breaths. Slow ones.
“Don’t just stand there, Daniels,” Knox snapped, ripping another board off the chest. “Do something.”
Just for that, Grumpy Pants, Gigi thought,I am demoting you to Grumpy Knickers.
“I am doing something,” Brady said, his tone meditative. “Have a little faith, Knox.”
The way Brady said those words made Gigi think thathave faithwas a criticism Knox Landry had heard before. It was tempting to chew on that, to go down the rabbit hole of thinking about everything she’d overheard. About the photograph. AboutCalla.
But Gigi was a Gigi on a mission. “I’m sensing some tension here.” She lowered the mirrored plate. Since they were stuck as a team until sunrise, Gigi figured it was better to poke at the elephants in the room than to ignore them. “Luckily,” she continued, “I am an expert mediator and a pleasure to have in class.”
Disarming people with cheerful goodwill was an art form, and Gigi was an artist.
“Youare a liability,” Knox said.
“Hey.” Brady put a little heat behind his tone. “Knock it off. She’s just a kid.”
That stung more than Gigi wanted to admit.Just a kid. A liability.
“She’s a kid who happens to be Grayson Hawthorne’s half sister,” Knox told Brady, his tone equal parts intense and smug and justintensely smug. “Happy-go-lucky little rich girl here had her ticket to this game handed to her, just like she’s probably had everything handed to her for her entire life.”
There was a type of person—a lot of types of people, really—who took Gigi’s bubbly demeanor and determined optimism as faults, a combination of vacuousness and naivete, when really, happiness was a choice Gigi made every day.
