Page 82 of Glorious Rivals
Wordlessly, they climbed.The handholds stopped before they reached the branches, and for a moment, so did Lyra and Grayson.
“No ledger,” Lyra noted.“And nothing that could be the next clue.”She tilted her head back and her eyes up.“Do we keep climbing?”
Grayson went very still.“Give it a moment.”
A moment to consider.A moment to take it all in.There was just enough adrenaline crashing through Lyra’s veins to heighten her senses as she absorbed the view: the forestandthe trees, sun-kissed… and not exactly empty.
Rohan and Savannah were maybe a hundred yards out on the other side of the divide, Savannah’s white armor highly visibleagainst the blackened trees.LyrafeltGrayson register his sister’s presence.
“You’re hurting.”Lyra wasn’t about to start pulling her punches with him now.“Whatever secret you were trying to protect your sister from—juststop.”
“Stop what?”Grayson clipped the words.“I’ve already failed.Eve saw to that.”
No matter how much Grayson Hawthorne might have practiced making mistakes, this one—whatever it was—clearly wasn’t the kind of mistake he could accept from himself.
“Stop,” Lyra said again, “trying to protect her.”Lyra had the sense that she might as well have been lecturing rain not to fall, but she continued anyway.“I don’t know what Eve told Savannah or what either one of them is up to now, but I do know what it’s like to find out that you’ve been lied to in a way that rips the rug right out from underneath your entire existence.”Lyra’s parents had doubtlessly thought they were protecting her, too.“I can understand why my mom and dad did it—let memories I’d repressedstayrepressed.I know that they were trying to give me a chance to grow up free of that trauma, but…”
“The piper has to be paid either way,” Grayson said quietly.“The human brain is a miraculous thing, but it can’t keep anything caged forever.You’ll still pay the cost.Repressing something, pushing it down, refusing to feel it just means that you have to pay that cost again and again and again.”
A ball of emotion rose in Lyra’s throat as Rohan and Savannah drew closer to them.“Ask me howprotectedI felt when I found out the truth.”
Grayson took an audible breath.“Our father is a murderer, Savannah’s and Gigi’s and mine.”Lyra hadn’t asked forhissecrets, but there he was, offering them up like penance.“That’s what I wastrying to protect Savannah from.Do you remember seeing anything in the news a few years ago about a bomb on one of Avery’s jets?”
That story had been everywhere.Lyra remembered.“You don’t have to tell me this.”Her voice, as quiet and low as it was, echoed through the trees.
“My father planted that bomb.He lost someone in the Hawthorne Island fire, years ago.He held my uncle Toby responsible for that, and he believed Avery was Toby’s daughter.It was all veryan eye for an eye.”The muscles in Grayson’s jaw tensed.“Avery ended up in a coma, but she survived the explosion.Two of the men on her security detail did not.”
Lyra tightened her right hand around the handhold she was gripping, then let her left snake slowly around the trunk toward Grayson.“You didn’t have to tell me that.”
“I wanted to.”His hand made its way toward hers.“I think sometimes,” he continued, in a voice that was just a little more detached, “about what I might have inherited from my father.Do I have his perverted sense of justice?His ability to just shut morality off in pursuit of his own ends?”
“You’re nothing like him.”Lyra’s words came out fiercer than she’d meant for them to.
“You’re probably right.Of all of my brothers, I was always the one who was a Hawthorne through and through.”Grayson paused.“I wonder sometimes about what that means about me, too.”
Lyra could feel his mind churning again, and she knew—knew—that there wasn’t a thing she could say to stop it.
“There’s nothing up here,” Grayson declared finally.“And we’re about to have company.”
Rohan and Savannah weren’t more than twenty yards away now, compasses in hand, but as Lyra and Grayson began the climb backdown the tree, Lyra caught sight of movement in the shadow of the closest, massive tree, and she realized:We already have company.
As Lyra’s feet hit the ground, Brady Daniels met her gaze from the shadows.And then—slowly, deliberately—he angled his gaze down to the ground, to the base of the tree.
Lyra ran her foot over grass and dirt, and she realized that something had been buried there, in the forest floor.Can’t see the forest for the trees.Lyra didn’t start digging immediately, not with Rohan and Savannah incoming, but she couldn’t help thinking that Grayson had been right about what he’d said before, when he’d talked about paying the piper.
Nothing stayed buried forever.
Chapter 59
GRAYSON
Grayson had not meant to tell Lyra about his father, but he was fully cognizant of why he’d done so.He’d wanted to tell her something real, somethingtrue, to give her a secret, even if it wasn’t the one he’d been lying and not-lying to keep from her since the bonfire.
The secret he was keeping still.
Lyra couldn’t have made it clearer or more explicit: She didn’t want that kind of protection.Not from him.Not from anyone.Butshewasn’t the only person Grayson was trying to protect.Alice had threatened Jameson in Prague.Based on Jameson’s behavior, it was a sure bet that the woman had threatened Avery, too.
Lyra Kane wanted, maybe evenneeded, truth from those she loved.And Grayson couldn’t give it to her.
