Page 73 of The Grandest Game
Savannah picked up her white dice and rolled them again. “Another five and another three.”
Rohan didn’t wait for her to move before he rolled. As hers had, his dice turned up the exact same numbers the second time. He tossed them again to be sure. “They’re weighted to always land the same way.”
That made the numbers a clue.To this room? Or another?
Savannah jumped her game piece forward eight spaces, thenanother eight, bringing her to one of two squares on the board markedHAYSTACKinstead of justHAY. The stacks of cards in the middle of the board shared that label. Savannah beat Rohan to drawing one.
“Blank.” Her eyes narrowing, she kept drawing. “Blank. Blank.”
Rohan took a card from the stack closest to him and used it to flip the entire stack, then reached across and did the same for Savannah’s cards, scattering them out in a neat line across the board.
Among all the cards, there was only one that wasn’t blank. Five words had been scrawled across that card in black marker.
THIS IS NOT YOUR CLUE.
Chapter 54
LYRA
Omega.” Lyra’s voice went husky, but her body felt suddenly, unnaturally calm. Grayson’s hands were still on her neck. His forehead was still touching hers. Lyra didn’t have to speak up to make sure he heard her next question. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“No. It does not.” Grayson pulled back from her, just enough to turn his head without letting go. His gaze settled with military precision on Odette. “Does it mean anything toyou, Ms. Morales?”
Lyra thought suddenly about notes on trees, about her father’s names, about how small the suspect pool for that act really was.
Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás.
He’d been dead for fifteen years. Who else on this island, besides Odette, was old enough to have known anything about him?
“Omega means the end.” The old woman in question lifted two fingers to her forehead and crossed herself. “‘Yo soy el Alfa y laOmega, el principio y el fin, el primero y el ultimo.’ It’s from the book of Revelation—Apocalipsis, in Spanish.”
“You’re Catholic?” Lyra said. She searched for some kind of tell in the set of Odette’s features, anything that could tip off whether or not the old woman was putting on an act.
“The more pertinent question,” Odette replied, “is whether or not your father was a religious man.”
“I don’t know.” Lyra knew so very little about the shadowy figure responsible for half her DNA.I know his blood was warm. I know I stepped in it. I know he used it to draw that symbol on the wall.
“And that’s the only meaning the wordomegaholds for you, Ms. Morales?” Grayson’s hands finally dropped away from Lyra’s neck as he turned and took two steps toward Odette. “The only meaning you associate with that symbol?”
“The only place I have ever seen that symbol,” Odette said evenly, “is behind that altar of the church I attended as a child, and I have not stepped a foot in that church—or in Mexico, for that matter—since my seventeenth birthday, which was also, incidentally, my wedding day to a much older man who saw me and wanted me and convinced my musician father that he could make him a star.”
Lyra could feel the truth in Odette’s words, but even if Odettewastelling the truth about the last time she’d seen that symbol, that wasn’t what Grayson had asked.
He’d asked if it held any other meaning for her—and Odette hadn’t actually answered the question.
“Ms. Morales, during your many years as a high-priced attorney”—Grayson cocked his head slightly to one side, a tiger sizing up his prey—“did you, by chance, ever happen to work for the law firm of McNamara, Ortega, and Jones?”
Odette was silent.
“And that’s my answer,” Grayson said. He cast a sideways glance at Lyra. “McNamara, Ortega, and Jones was my grandfather’s personal law firm. He was their only client.”
Odette worked for Tobias Hawthorne.Lyra stopped breathing for a second or two, then started up again.And who knows a man’s secrets better, she thought slowly,than his lawyers?
A Hawthorne did this.“Please,” Lyra said urgently, fiercely. “If you know something, Odette—”
“There is a game my youngest granddaughter was quite fond of as a teenager.” Odette somehow managed to make that sound like itwasn’ta sudden and absolute subject change. “Two Truths and a Lie. I’ll do the pair of you one better and offer up three truths, the first of which is this, Lyra: I know nothing about your father.” Odette shifted her gaze to Grayson. “My second truth: Your grandfather was the best and worst man I have ever known.”
To Lyra’s ears, that didn’t sound like the declaration of Tobias Hawthorne’slawyer. She remembered the way Odette had said—twice—that Grayson wasvery much a Hawthorne.
