Page 67 of The Grandest Game
“No instructions.” Savannah made her own appraisal of their surroundings. “No phone to make calls. No screen on which to type in answers.”
All they had was the room. Rohan accessed his mental map of the house. They’d descended two flights of stairs to get to the metal chamber, which put them on the lowest level of the house—the level that had appeared to be nothing but walls.
“One of these shelves almost certainly doubles as a door.” Rohan checked for obvious hinges and found none, then tested each shelf to see if any would pull inward or push out—to no effect.
As Savannah did her own inspection, Rohan leapt silently into the recessed area cut into the floor. There was an art to moving silently and quickly, to never being where other people thought you were, to cultivating the sense in your opponent, on a raw, subconscious level, that the laws of physics and man did not apply to you.
But when Savannah turned back toward the center of the room, when she registered his new location, she didn’t bat an eye. She jumped down to join him. A line of tension cut across her brow as she landed.
The knee.“ACL?” Rohan said.
Savannah flicked her gaze to his. “Childhood neglect and trauma?” she returned in the exact same tone. “Or would you prefer we keep our scars to ourselves?”
“You really don’t pull your punches, do you, Savvy?”
“If I were a man, would you expect me to?” Savannah ran her hand over the mahogany surface of the game table. “There’s a seam, here.”
Rohan crouched to look beneath the table. “No buttons or triggers,” he reported, flowing back to standing position. “There may be something hidden beneath the top of that table, but we’ll have to find a way to unlock it to find out. Same for the shelves. At least one of them—thatone, I suspect—will open if we can find the right trigger.”
“Solve the puzzle,” Savannah said evenly. “Unlock the door.”
“More puzzles,” Rohan murmured, “more doors, which leaves to us the problem of finding the puzzle—or at least the first clue.”
“The games on the shelves.” She was already moving.
“Start with the names on the boxes?” Rohan suggested. “See if anything pops out—the proverbial needle in a haystack, if you will.”
“Fine,” Savannah replied. “If that yields nothing, we’ll open the boxes.” Her aura of intensity, Rohan noticed, was notdecreasing. Again, he felt the call of the labyrinth, of shifting corridors and connections still to be made.
Savannah was doing thisfor her father.
“I’ll start with the shelves on this wall,” she said, pulling herself out of the recessed area. “You take that one.”
“We’ll meet in the middle,” Rohan replied.
Savannah tossed a look back over her shoulder the way another person might have tossed a grenade. “If you can keep up.”
Chapter 51
LYRA
Lyra took in the now-enormous theater—and the stacks and stacks of film reels that covered the newly revealed section of the room. There were hundreds, maybe even a thousand, in metal canisters stacked six feet high in row after row after row.
With the longsword in one hand, Grayson walked the length of the room, taking stock of the sheer volume of film tins that stared back at him. Lyra pushed down the urge to follow him. She didn’t need to be close to Grayson Hawthorne. She wasfine.
You don’t have to be fine right now.Lyra didn’t want to admit, even to herself, the way Grayson’s words had cut to her core.I have spent my entire life beingfinewhen I wasn’t.
Each time he opened a vein for her, each time he willingly showed weakness, it got harder to think of Grayson as an arrogant, cold, above-it-all, asshole Hawthorne. Each time, Lyra saw just a little more of the person she’d seen when she was sixteen years old, watching Grayson interviewed alongside Avery Grambs.
Sometimes, Lyra could practically hear the masked heiress telling her,in the games that matter most, the only way to really play is tolive.
Her throat stinging, Lyra reached for a tin off the closest stack. There was something drawn in gold on its lid—a shape.
“You found something.” Odette did not phrase that as a question.
“A triangle.” Lyra thought back to the symbols at the beginning of the montage. There hadn’t been a triangle—not in the circled answer. She reached for a second tin and found another triangle, and another, then she moved on to a new stack.More of the same.She went farther down the row and finally found a canister bearing a different symbol.
“Look.” Lyra held the film tin out to Odette, her gaze cheating back toward Grayson. “There’s an X on this one.” Lyra jogged down the rows, grabbing two more tins from different stacks. “An E,” she reported, “and… a different E?”
