Page 33 of Glorious Rivals
Lyra righted herself and swung the minute hand on the clock around, until it formed an upside-down L, the hour hand still on the eight.
VIII,L.
There was a sound like a bolt being thrown, and the face of the massive clock swung out from the wall, revealing two rows of metal drawers.
Sitting on top of the uppermost drawer on the righthand side, there was a ledger.
Grayson picked it up and opened it.Two names stared back at him, the first players to solve this particular puzzle.
The players who’d beaten them here.
“Rohan and Savannah,” Lyra said.She cheated her gaze toward Grayson’s.“Not Brady.”
Brady Daniels had known where to go after the helipad.So wherewashe?Grayson thought again about the girl in Brady’s photograph, the one the scholar had clearly—one way or another—lost.Calla.Briefly, Grayson’s thoughts went to another girl, one whomhehad lost, the first cut but no longer the deepest.
He really was getting better at letting it all come.
Beside him, Lyra pressed her smartwatch to the page.Her name appeared in elaborate scrawl on the ledger, third in line.Grayson went next.Two of the metal drawers popped open.Inside each, there was a silver box—and, on top of each box, a charm in the shape of a clock.
Clue after clue after clue.Grayson met Lyra’s gaze.“Onward.”
Chapter 26
ROHAN
Rohan wasted no time making himself comfortable on the bed.It was not, strictly speaking, his bed—or Savannah’s, for that matter.
“Need I point out that we could do this inyourroom?”Savannah said crisply.“Or mine.”
She stood with her back to Brady’s door, above it all—or so she would have had Rohan believe.
He leaned back against Brady’s headboard.“Where’s the fun in that?”
Part of controlling the board was positioning yourself just so—sometimes literally.Brady Daniels and Lyra Kane might both have been keeping secrets, butBradydid not have a Hawthorne running interference on his behalf, and when it came to thinning the herd, the wise man always started with the most vulnerable target.
Hence, their current location.
Turning his attention to their next clue, Rohan laid the object—a silver music box—on his lap, his long legs stretched out toward the end of the bed.Savannah held a matching silver box.The two of them had already been over the music boxes and their contents out in the hall, but in games such as these, everything merited a second look.
And a third.
And a fourth.
Rohan had always done his best thinking in places he wasn’t meant to be.
“Who says this is supposed to be fun?”Savannah stayed right where she was.Don’t trust yourself to come any closer to this bed, do you, love?
Rohan gingerly opened his music box.Individual notes cut through the air, one at a time.A waltz.The inside of the silver box was lined with deep purple velvet.Where some music boxes might have displayed a ballerina twirling to the music, there was a flower made of white-and-gold marble.
The music the box was playing changed—no longer a waltz but a tango.
“You can pretend you’re not enjoying this,” Rohan told Savannah.“But you have your tells.”Rohan refrained from letting his gaze slide to hers.Instead, he retrieved his silver chain bracelet and both charms he’d obtained thus far and affixed the charms to the chain, one after another.The sword.The clock.
The music coming from the box shifted once more, the marble flower turning and turning.
“You must get some pleasure in beating Grayson at a Hawthornegame,” Rohan said.Thus far, he and Savannah had signed two ledgers, and they’d been the first to do so both times.
“In basketball,” Savannah said, “there are two kinds of players on the court: the type who feels a thrill with every basket they sink and the type who cares only about the win.”
