Page 24 of The Grandest Game
“Are we talking about walls? Ilovewalls.” Another masked gentleman slid in between Lyra and Rohan with an impressive shimmy. The newcomer was tall and wore a golden mask. He held out a hand to Lyra. “This is the part where I humbly admit to being the boldest and most dashing Hawthorne—or, at a minimum, the least wary of explosions and social rejection—and ask if I can have this dance.”
This, Lyra realized, was the youngest Hawthorne brother.Xander Hawthorne.
Dance?Lyra looked beyond Xander’s outstretched hand to the center of the Great Room, where two others had indeed begun to dance. One of them was Avery Grambs, which made her masked partner Jameson Hawthorne.
Avery and Jameson each held a hand up, their palms touching as they walked in a slow, seductive circle around each other. The dance looked like it had been lifted from another era, one where men and women could barely touch, and yet, watching the two of them circle each other, Lyra found it hard to breathe.
Snap out of it, she told herself, tearing her gaze away from themand taking Xander’s outstretched hand. She was here to do a job.Anything it takes to win.
“I don’t suppose you have a clue to dispense?” Lyra asked Xander. She and the other players still hadn’t been told anything concrete about what was to come—other than the fact that,in some senses, the game would start tonight.
Xander spun her out, then in, then solemnly raised his right hand and waited for her to lift hers before responding to her request for a clue. “The stork flies at half past ten,” he said dramatically. “The hummingbird eats a cookie. My dog is named Tiramisu.”
Lyra snorted. “Oddly enough, I think you’re telling the truth about that last one.”
After their third clockwise circle, Xander put his right hand down and raised his left. Lyra mirrored the motion, and they began circling each other counterclockwise.
“Muffins or scones?” Xander said seriously.
“Excuse me?”
The Hawthorne across from her somehow managed to raise an eyebrow so high it shot up above the top of his mask. “If you had to choose: Muffins or scones?”
Lyra considered her options. “Chocolate.”
“They can be chocolate.” Xander was clearly the most agreeable Hawthorne.
“No,” Lyra told him as they danced. “I choose chocolate. Just chocolate.”
“I see.” Xander grinned. “A small enough piece to melt on your tongue or a bunny the size of your fist?”
“Both.” Lyra realized right after she’d answered that she hadn’t spoken that word toXander, who was no longer standing where he’d been a moment before.
Grayson had displaced him. “May I cut in?”
She’d known that she would recognize him, no matter the mask. His was black. No adornments. Just… black. “You already have.”
They were circling each other now, their hands barely touching. Lyra had never felt so aware of every inch of skin on her fingers and palms. It felt less like they were dancing than like they’d been pulled into each other’s orbit.Gravitywas nothing compared to the force that kept Lyra from stepping away—no matter how much she wanted to, no matter how vehemently she reminded herself that he was a Hawthorne.
ThatHawthorne.
The music changed, and with it, the dance. Grayson effortlessly took Lyra’s hand, as his other arm curved with utmost efficiency around her back. There was still space between them, a respectable amount of space.
Too much—and not nearly enough.
“Last year, when you called me,” Grayson said, his mask doing nothing to shield Lyra fromthose eyes, “you had questions about my grandfather’s presumed role in your father’s death.”
A Hawthorne did this.Lyra steeled herself against the feel of Grayson’s hand on her back, against the interweaving of their fingers. “I didn’tpresumeanything except that your grandfather was the Hawthorne most likely to ruin a man.” Lyra raised her chin. “And I didn’t come here—to this island, to this game—to talk about my father with you.”
Grayson stared at her from behind that mask. “You wanted to know the truth before.”
Lyra had wanted a lot of things back then. “If you’d discovered that you’d spent your entire life living a lie, you would have wanted answers, too.” She kept her voice perfectly even, perfectlycontrolled. “But I don’t need them now, the way I did when I called you.”
Despite her best attempts to the contrary, emphasis crept into the last word of that sentence:you.
“My grandfather had a list,” Grayson said after a moment. “The List, capital L. Enemies. People he’d taken advantage of or wronged. There was a Thomas Thomas on it, the last name the same as the first.”
Thomas, Thomas.Lyra’s thoughts went to the notes on the trees. Rohan had been so sure they hadn’t been the work of the Hawthornes or the Hawthorne heiress, but what if he’d been wrong?
