“You can stop if you need to,” Grayson said.
“No, I can’t.” Lyra was halfway up the stairs now, and she realized with a start that she’d taken off her shoes without even thinking about it.
You’re not supposed to wear soccer cleats in the house, she thought, past and present beginning to blur, step after step, all the way to the top.
Blood on my feet.
The next thing Lyra knew, Grayson was holding her, and Lyra wanted nothing more than to let him hold her, to look at his face, todrink in every last detail of it, to forget that anything else existed. But shehadto remember, so she pulled back from his embrace and retreated down the stairs, back to the living room, to the exact spot where she’d stood as a child.
Think about the flower.Lyra willed the past to sweep her away.Think about the candy necklace. Think about the gun.She forced herself to conjure up the dead’s man voice.
Happy birthday, Lyra.
A Hawthorne did this.
Slowly, another memory began to rise like smoke from the depths of Lyra’s subconscious. There was no visual element to it, only words—words that Lyra had never heard before in any flashback, in any memory, in any dream.
“What is it?” Grayson asked beside her.
Lyra focused on his voice and blinked until the sharp angles of his face came back into focus. And then she told him the words she’d remembered, the words her kidnapper had said to her right after that fateful sentence aboutA Hawthorne.
“Don’t be afraid, Lyra Catalina,” Lyra whispered, pronouncing her own name wrong.“She will come for you.”
Chapter 23
JAMESON
Nighttime in Tuscany was nothing like nighttime in Prague. It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet, and the moon was already unspeakably vivid in the night sky, as were the stars. The only non-celestial light Jameson could even see was the blue-green glow emanating from the heated pool where he and Xander had found yet another hidden object an hour earlier: a frame made of braided metal.
A square frame.
A triangle. A circle. A square.Jameson’s mind hummed.A mirror. A ring of copper. A silver frame.Jameson stared holes in the night sky like it might hold the answer, like the stars or the moon could tell him what the three objects were meant to convey—ordo.
The triangular mirror had been delivered an hour earlier via courier, and Xander had immediately started trying to build something out of the pieces. Copper wiring conducted electricity, and a mirror, Xander had informed Jameson, was practically a poor man’s laser.
A triangle. A circle. A square.
“We’re missing something,” Jameson bit out, and without warning, a memory hit him, one in which he’d said those exact same words toAvery in a candlelit tunnel beneath Hawthorne House, back when he was still figuring her out, back when she was a puzzle he wanted to solve and there was pleasure to be found in peeling back those protective layers of hers, one by one.
“We’re missing something. Or maybe…” Jameson leans forward to murmur his next words directly into the back of her head. “You’re holding something back.”
She neither confirms nor denies that statement. If there’s one thing he’s learned about Avery Grambs in the past couple of weeks, it’s that she is immune to the pressure to fill silences. There is nothing restless about her, nothing impulsive.
That’s the challenge. “I see how it is, Heiress.”
“Maybe there are more pieces?” Xander’s suggestion ripped Jameson suddenly and unforgivably back into the present. “We could keep looking.”
“No.” Jameson got ahold of himself. “We don’t need to keep looking.” He was sure about that, though he didn’t know why. “The answer… it’s right here.”
“You know something.” Xander deployed finger guns at Jameson. “You just don’t know what you know or how you know it. Should you so desire, I would be happy to provide an epic and, dare I say,cinematicdistraction to jar it out of you.”
Jameson shook his head. “A triangle, a circle, a square,” he murmured. Why was that so damn familiar? He reached to take the pieces from Xander.
“One of us,” Xander reminded him delicately, “thinks in a minimum of three dimensions at all times, and the other one…”
“Sometimes gets stuck in two,” Jameson finished.Two dimensions.The dog-gnawing-giant-bone feeling was back. Jameson spread the objects out on the ground.A triangle. A circle. A square.The circle was bigger than the triangle but only just.
Big enough, Jameson thought suddenly,to fit around the circle. He put the two pieces together—flat, in two dimensions. The moment he saw the result, Jameson suddenly knew what had been eating at him, knew exactly what his subconscious had remembered that he had not.