“And where will I find Nash?” Grayson queried.
“Up in the North Tower,” Zara replied. “He’s been assisting Oren and me with the keys.”
“I’ll be back,” Grayson told Lyra. She pushed down the impulse to go with him and stayed exactly where she was in the golden, sparkling suite that had once belonged to Grayson’s mother and, before that, to Alice.
“News?” Lyra asked Zara.
Grayson’s aunt studied Lyra for a moment, twisting the stem of the ruby key, which she held the way one might hold a rose.
“Did you hear any of what Alisa told Nash?” Lyra tried again. “Or anything she told Oren?”
“Alisa Ortega was named after my mother, you know. Alisa—forAlice.” Zara side-stepped the question. “Alisa’s own mother died quite young. The girl subsequently spent a great deal of time at Hawthorne House growing up. There was a period when it looked like she and Nash might marry, but that is neither here nor there.”
Zara Hawthorne was elegant and self-contained, the kind of personwho probably twisted her hair into a French knot the moment she woke up, and Lyra was absolutely certain that Grayson’s aunt had come here—in person, instead of just calling Grayson—for a reason. A reason she’d sent Grayson away and gotten Lyra alone.
Based on the rundown Lyra had just been given about Alisa’s history with Nash, Lyra had a suspicion about what that reason might be.
“Is this the part where you ask me what my intentions are toward your nephew?” Lyra said.
“My favorite nephew, as it happens,” Zara replied. “And no. This is the part where I break it to you that the press has learned your name.” Zara held out her phone then, the screen angled so that Lyra could see not just the photograph of herself and Grayson but also theheadline.
MYSTERY GIRL—SOLVED! Meet Lyra Kane.
Zara gave Lyra a moment to absorb that, then spoke again. “The tabloids and gossip sites are running with the theory that Avery is jealous of you, that the Hawthorne heiress is off licking her wounds somewhere at the idea of sharing Grayson. It just goes to show, if the presscanpit two women against each other, they will, every time.”
“Sharing Grayson?” Lyra managed not to sputter. “Avery’s with Jameson. Everyone knows that.”
“And now everyone knowsyourname,” Zara replied.
Lyra couldn’t bring herself to care too much about that. “Good,” she said abruptly. “That was the plan. Controlling the story. That headline should buy us some time.”Buy Avery some time.
“It was notyourplan,” Zara pointed out.
“I would have said yes, if Alisa had asked.”
“I tend to believe you.” Zara offered Lyra the slightest of smiles. “And now, Iamgoing to ask: What are your intentions toward my nephew?”
Lyra wondered if this was how Grayson had felt at Mile’s End, when her dad had escorted him to the spare room, no doubtchattinga bit along the way. “Right now,” Lyra said, “I intend to help Grayson search this room.”
“He is who he is, Ms. Kane. There will be no escaping that—for either of you. My father raised those boys to be extraordinary, and hemade them a thing of legend the moment he disinherited them. The world’s fascination for extreme wealth is one thing; its fascination for scandal and tragic young men is quite another. First, there was Toby and the fire. And then, the four of them—brothers, each more handsome and charismatic than the last, all cast aside in favor of a stranger. It is not the money for which this family is now best known, Lyra, and it has not been for some time.”
“What about you?” Lyra asked. Zara was Tobias Hawthorne’s eldest child. She’d been disinherited, the same as the boys.
Zara looked at Lyra for a moment. “That is not a question I am accustomed to anyone asking.”
Lyra considered that. “You said your sister redecorated this room all of a week after your motherdied.”Without asking. Without a thought to your feelings. The same way your father wrote his will.“I take it the gold was Skye’s doing?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m wondering what we might find beneath the gold,” Lyra replied. “And I’m thinking that you might be the perfect person to help me answer that question.”
If there was one thing Lyra knew, it was what it was like to be fine when you weren’t.
“Want to do some damage?” Lyra asked Grayson’s aunt.
Zara raised an elegant brow, then held up the ruby key. “One might be able to do a great deal of damage,” she told Lyra, “with this.”
Chapter 51
