“Haven’t you ever wanted to be the strong one?” The Woman in Red stepped right over Savannah’s body. “To prove the world wrong? Haven’t you ever… just…wanted?”
Gigiwanted. She wanted and she wanted and she wanted, but she knew what happened when she tried to play protector, when she tried to be something she wasn’t.I forgive you, Gigi. For Dad. But I will never—
Gigi knew then that Nora was right.It’s not going to be me.
“My answer,” Gigi whispered, “is no.”
Let’s play a game, Mattias Slater said somewhere in her mind.It’s called You Don’t Need to Prove a Damn Thing. To anyone. It’s called You’re Already Strong.
Gigi tightened her grip on Slate’s knife and lunged.
“Pity.” The Woman in Red caught Gigi’s hand at the wrist. An arm locked around Gigi’s neck. Gloved fingers trailed over Gigi’s skin, fingers that had been coated insomething.
A tidal wave of darkness hit Gigi.Not again.
“Tell him I miss him,” the Woman in Red whispered. “And if you manage to remember any of this when you wake up, tell him that we call ourselves the Gilded Blade.”
Chapter 34
LYRA
Lyra stared at the drawing of the rose-handled knife. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. It looked like it belonged at Hawthorne House every bit as much as Grayson belonged here. He and Lyra were currently ensconced in a circular library that made the one on Hawthorne Island seem like nothing but the palest of imitations. Lyra had no idea how many thousands of books, or tens of thousands, ringed the massive room, with its four wrought iron staircases spiraling upward toward a second story and a high, vaulted ceiling.
Lyra and Grayson stood, as they had for hours, in the very center of the room over a desk made of a tree trunk ten feet in diameter. Dozens of sheets of paper littered the top of the desk, filled with Lyra’s handwriting and Grayson’s, the work of two people who didn’t even know the wordquit.
“Is that it?” Lyra raised her gaze to Grayson’s face. “Every permutation we can derive based on all the numbers in the file?”
The fake patent number. The price of the flowers and the number ordered. The last four digits of the credit card that had been used to place the order. The address of the funeral home. The three numbers listed in Tobias Hawthorne’s cryptic notes: two, three, and ninety.
“Every permutation of those numbers plus all the obvious alpha-numeric ciphers that can be derived from them,” Grayson confirmed, reachingyet againfor his phone.
“Your sisters are avoiding your calls,” Lyra told him.
“Which is precisely why I will continue calling. Some battles are battles of will.”
Lyra was starting to appreciate the fact that her only sibling wasfour. Most Cooper Kane battles of will involved the type of animals that did and did not make appropriate pets, the number of sticks one person really needed at any given time, and the height from which it was mostly safe to jump.
Grayson’s call must have gone to voicemail yet again, because he hung up the phone—just as the door to the library swung inward. Lyra startled, half expecting to see a cloaked figure standing there. Instead, she saw a girl around her age whose black hair had been pulled back into messy buns on either side of her head and who appeared to be accompanied by…
“A droid?” Lyra blinked.
“Xander has hobbies,” Grayson explained, like the strangest thing in this equation was that anyone might have a hobby, let alone more than one, andnotthe fact that one of said hobbies was apparentlybuilding robots.“How’s Libby?” Grayson asked the girl.
“Well,sheisn’t wearing flannel, so that’s something.” The girl and the droid stopped just short of the desk. “I’m Max, by the way,” she told Lyra. “Maxine Liu. Avery’s best friend, Xander’s better half, purveyor of common sense in these hallowed halls.”
Lyra’s gaze was drawn to Max’s shirt, which had a picture of a fax machine on it, with the wordsYOU FIRST, MOTHER-FAXERemblazoned underneath.
“You must be Lyra,” Max continued. “Welcome to Hawthorne House, where the scones never stop scone-ing and the abs are ridiculously well-defined.”
Grayson laid a hand on Max’s shoulder and looked at her in a way that made Lyra think that what he was really seeing was Avery. “We’redoing everything we can to get her back, Max,” Grayson said quietly. “I swear it.”
“Spoken like a mother-faxing Hawthorne,” Max replied with a shake of her head. “I have no idea where Avery is, what she meant by that note, if it was written under duress, or what my best friend’s plan is here, but if there is one thing I do know, it’s that Avery Kylie Grambs is never the damsel in distress. It’s always one of you.” Max glanced at Lyra. “It’s always one of them.”
The robot beeped. Lyra wasn’t sure why.
Max looked down at the spread of papers on the desk. “Catch me up to speed, scruffy,” she told Grayson, poking fun at his stubble. “Knowledge is power. Puzzles are knowledge. And… go.”
For the first time since Lyra had stepped out of the SUV into a garage that held an eye-watering number of cars, she felt almost normal, like maybe it was possible to be normal in this capital-HHouse.
