Page 69 of The Grandest Game
That was ridiculous enough—unexpected enough—to bring her the rest of the way back.Here. Now.
Him.
Grayson bent to block out the rest of the world from her view. “Give me your eyes, sweetheart.”
Lyra looked at him. “A kitten?” she managed.
“A calico, I believe.”
Inside Lyra, the floodgates broke. “This symbol,” she bit out. Each breath she took felt like shards of glass in her lungs. “The night my biological father killed himself, he drew this symbol on the wall in his own blood.”
Grayson’s hands made their way from her face to the back of her neck, his touch warm and sure, as he followed her gaze to the Greek letter in question. Lyra expected him to name it, but he didn’t.
“What begins a bet?” Grayson said, his voice low and humming, the kind of voice that reverberated down her spine. “A bet,” he repeated.
“Grayson?” Lyra spoke his name like a prayer.
“It wasn’t a riddle,” Grayson told her. “It’s wordplay. A code. What looks like two words is, in reality, only one, with the middle of the word omitted.”
A bet.
“My grandfather tried this on us in a game once,” Grayson continued, his voice shot through with almost palpable focus. “At the time, we werelookingfor codes, and there was more than one word that had been broken in two, so we got there eventually—or rather, Jamie did.”
Intensity rolled off Grayson in waves, but Lyra barely even felt it.Wordplay. A code. A bet.What letters could you insert in the middle to form a single word?
“A bet.” Lyra’s voice rang in her own ears. “Alphabet.What begins alphabet?”
“Not that,” Grayson murmured, and if there had been space between them before, it was gone now. “NotA—or in the case of the Greek alphabet, not alpha.”
“Not the beginning,” Odette said, her voice coming to Lyra as if from across a great distance, “but the end.”
The last letter.Lyra wasn’t even aware that she’d reached for Grayson, but suddenly, her fingers were clamped down on his arm. With his hand still on her neck, Grayson leaned his head toward hers, bowing until their foreheads brushed.
He knew what this meant to her. Heknew, and from the look in his eyes, she would have sworn it meant something to him, too.
Odette was the one who actually said it, her voice cutting through the air like a bullet: “Omega.”
Chapter 52
GIGI
Gigi stepped from the metal chamber onto a narrow wooden staircase that stretched up into darkness. The second she shifted her weight onto the first step, it lit up, casting a faint glow that did nothing to illuminate what awaited them at the top of the stairs. Gigi half expected Knox to push past her, but he didn’t, so Gigi led the way, step after step, light after light, until she made it to the top of the stairs and a plain wooden door adorned only by four words scratched roughly into the wood.
HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.
Gigi trailed her fingers along the words, and her thoughts went to the potentialdragonon the island—the person who’d used that wetsuit, the one who’d brought a knife and a listening device into the game.
The person who might be listening to us right now.Gigi sectioned that thought off in her mind and reached for the doorknob. It freely turned, and she pushed the door inward and stepped into… a library.
Brady and Knox stepped through the door to join her, as Gigi turned to take in the entire circular room. Brady walked to stand in front of one shelf in particular. “The spiral staircase let outherebefore.”
Behind them, theHere There Be Dragonsdoor swung shut. Like clockwork, a curved bookshelf descended from the ceiling, blocking off the door. The three of them were now completely encircled by fifteen-foot-tall shelves. Gigi craned her neck toward the ceiling. In the dead of night, the stained glass overhead shouldn’t have cast any hint of color onto the floor, but a veritable rainbow of lights danced along the wood floorboards.
There must be a light source behind the glass.Gigi stepped through the colored lights, examining the pattern. Beside her, Knox’s assessing gaze roved over the shelves and the books.
“Escape room logic?” Brady proposed, setting down the sword and crossing back to examine the section of the shelving that had just descended. “In the absence of instructions, you find your own clues.”
“Search the shelves,” Knox summarized.
