Page 118 of Glorious Rivals
Without even looking at Grayson, Jameson brought his eyes to Alisa’s.“Do something,” Jameson told her, practically vibrating with intensity, like at any moment his earthly body might fail to physically contain the storm brewing inside.“Now.You heard Gigi.Calla Thorp.Calls herself the Watcher.Wears a red cloak.”
“Brady’s Calla?”Lyra, who’d been silent up until now, looked to Grayson.“A cloak, Grayson.”
Grayson heard exactly what she was saying.“Your dream.Alice.You said she wore a black cloak.”
“Alice,” Jameson repeated, his voice dangerously low.“I told you to stop saying that name, but you wouldn’t.”Jameson’s head swiveled slowly, the motion more animal than human, his gaze coming to rest on Lyra.“You did this,” Jameson told her.
Grayson put himself in front of Lyra.“What happened?”he asked.To Avery.Grayson didn’t need to say that part out loud.Avery was the center of Jameson’s universe, hiseverythingin every way that mattered.
Jameson looked past Grayson and addressed his reply directly to Lyra.“You did.”Jameson’s eyes were wild and charged, his entirebody like a live wire.“Youhappened, Lyra.Eve happened—and now Avery isgone.”
“Details,” Grayson said, his voice every bit as low as his brother’s and shot through with the kind of intensity meant to rattle bones.“Now.Est unus ex nobis, Jamie.”She is one of us.
From very nearly the beginning, Avery had been one of them.
Jameson’s head bent downward until his chin almost touched his collarbone, so much tension visible in his neck that the cords of muscle looked like they might snap.
I’m right here, Jamie.Just tell me.
“We were beingwatched,” Jameson said, his voice uncharacteristically dull as he parroted what Gigi had told them.“And now, the time forwatchingis over.You just had to push, Gray.You just had to keep right on saying that name.”
None of them said it now.Alice.
“And you.”Jameson raised his head again, locking feral eyes on Lyra’s.“You opened your big mouth to Eve, and now—” Jameson cut off.Without warning, he put his entire body behind a punch delivered straight to Grayson’s jaw.
Grayson went down, and the next thing he knew, Lyra had put herself directly between them, shielding his body with her own.
“Jameson.”Alisa’s voice cut through the air.“I need you to pull it together.”
“This is me,” Jameson told Alisa, staring down at Grayson on the floor, “pulling it together.”
“I understand,” Alisa told him.“Believe me, Jameson, I do.But keep acting like a liability, and I will have a discussion with Oren, and you will find yourself waking up locked in a storage unit somewhere with no way out while the grown-ups do whatever is necessary to get Avery back.”
“Get her back.”Grayson forced himself to say the words out loud.“Fromthem.”
“Odette said there are always three.”Lyra’s voice shook slightly—very slightly—as she addressed those words to Jameson and Alisa.“Alice Hawthorne was there the night my father died.She was wearing a cloak.Black.All black.”Grayson could practically hear Lyra’s mind churning.“And Calla’s was red…”
Grayson knew that Lyra was thinking about the twisted game her father had laid out for her the night he’d killed herself.Three pieces of candy on a candy necklace.A calla lily.A Hawthorne.And omega.
“This is the last time that I am asking for details.”His jaw still aching from Jameson’s punch, Grayson climbed slowly to his feet.
Alisa preempted any reply that Jameson might have given.“Less than an hour ago,” she told Grayson, “Avery shut down the cameras on the yacht, all of them, for a period of less than three minutes.She saw to it that Oren and his team were otherwise occupied.Based on the footage we do have, she was alone when she did it and gone by the time the cameras came back up.There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of anyone else with her at the time.And she left a note.”
Alisa plucked it off her desk and handed it to Grayson—purple ink, scrawled over the back of one of her mother’s old postcards.
I’m not missing.Don’t look for me.
The press cannot find out that I am gone.
“How long ago did you find this?”Grayson asked Jameson, knowing instinctively that Jameson was the one who had.
Jameson didn’t answer.
“Thirty-three minutes,” Alisa told Grayson.“Approximately fifteen minutes after the security outages.In that time, Oren and I have been completely read in.Multiple teams have been dispatched.Xander is trying to get ahold of Nash and Libby.Every shred of security footage we have is being gone over with a fine-tooth comb.Right before we talked to Gigi, I put in a call in with a very discreet contact at the Coast Guard.”
Discreet.The muscles in Grayson’s throat tightened as he looked back to Avery’s note.The press cannot find out that I am gone.Grayson would have recognized Avery’s handwriting anywhere.“What do we make of the lemniscate?”he asked.
“Wedon’t make anything of it.”Jameson’s voice was like a beast uncaged.“Avery is none of your concern.”He said Avery’s name like it had been torn from his soul, and Grayson felt Jameson’s statement like a sword through his heart.
