One of dozens.
And all Lyra could think, as Grayson led her into Hawthorne House,as he led her down corridor after corridor and up two sprawling staircases, was that this place was about as far from Mile’s End as you could possibly get.
And even wearing her dad’s flannel shirt and jeans, Graysonfithere.
He stopped in front of a mahogany door with an elaborate, bronze doorknob. Grayson twisted the knob.
“My room,” he told Lyra. It was neat, almost pathologically so. The bed, comforter, and sheets were all black. Thick mahogany moldings ringed the ceiling. On a nightstand carved from matching wood, there was a single visible object: a river rock, small and smooth.
Grayson slipped the rock into the pocket of his jeans and opened the drawer to the nightstand. From inside it, he withdrew a file folder, then held that folder out to Lyra.
She took it, knowing exactly what it was. “Your grandfather’s file on my father.”
The file looked so ordinary compared to its surroundings, compared to this place, compared to Grayson, who had always and would always belong here.
American royalty, disinherited or not.
Lyra flipped open the file. A mostly blank page stared back at her. There was a name at the top:THOMAS, THOMAS—all capital letters, the last name the same as the first. Beneath the name, there was a date: Lyra’s fourth birthday. And below that, written in left-handed cursive, there were a grand total of three sentences.
Three sentences. That’s it?Lyra read them out loud.“Suicide—two bullets. A tragedy in three acts. Minority stake in patent purchased ninety days earlier.”
The numbers jumped out at her:two,three, andninety. Lyra flipped the page to find a receipt. The wordRESTITUTIONwas written across the top. Scanning the receipt confirmed that it was for an online order for flowers, sent to a funeral home in Delaware.
The flowers in question? Forty white calla lilies.
Another number. Forty.Lyra stared at the receipt, looking for anything else that could hold meaning. The funeral home was AscensionHeritage Chapel, located at 118 Main Street. Tobias Hawthorne had paid $175 for the flowers, inclusive of delivery. The last four digits of the credit card he’d used to make the purchase were 2921.
And that was it. There was nothing else in the file.
“What about the patent?” Lyra said.
“There was no such purchase,” Grayson replied. “My grandfather owned thousands of patents, some in whole, some in part, some purchased, some of his own design. I searched them all. When that turned up nothing, I called the phone number for the flower store. It’s still in business, but unsurprisingly, they had no records of a random purchase made fifteen years ago. The funeral home to which the flowers were delivered is indeed a funeral home, though I could find no record of the funeral in question ever being held there.”
Lyra’s father had died in Kansas, not Delaware.Dead ends. Lies. Code.“Ascension Heritage,” Lyra murmured, and then she zeroed in on the initials. “A. H.”
“Alice Hawthorne.” It was clear from Grayson’s tone that he’d never made that connection before, but why would he have? Before the Grandest Game, before he’d met Lyra, he hadn’t even realized that Alice was alive.
“There has to be something else,” Lyra said.
“There is.” Grayson reached back into the drawer and withdrew a single, folded piece of paper. As he did, Lyra’s gaze went to the only other object in the drawer.
A ring box.
Grayson unfolded the page and closed the drawer. “In addition to doing a patent search,” he told Lyra, “I also executed a manual search of all of my grandfather’s filing cabinets and hidden drawers. The old man was forever sketching out ideas. I’d estimate that at least two-thirds of them eventually yielded patents. I went through all the ones that didn’t, and this was the only one that jumped out to me. It’s marked with a patent number that clearly isn’t a patent number—too many digits.”
With no further ado, Grayson handed over the page.
“How long did it take you to go through all of your grandfather’s filing cabinets?” Lyra asked.
Silvery blue eyes met hers. “Months.”
Months, Lyra thought. And all that time, what Grayson had really been looking for was her.
Five days.They’d only really known each other for five days, but they’d loomed larger than life in each other’s minds much longer than that.
Setting that thought aside, Lyra looked down at the page Grayson had given her. On it, Tobias Hawthorne had sketched out design specs for what looked like a knife—an elaborate knife made of steel and plated with gold, fashioned to look like a rose. Per the specs, if you twisted the handle, the petals on the rose opened, and the blade was thrust downward.
Lyra stared at the knife, and her heart skipped a beat as she realized—
