CHAPTER 11

GRAYSON

Twenty minutes later, Grayson pulled the Ferrari up to the Haywood-Astyria and let the hotel valets fight over his keys.

“Name?”

In lieu of replying to the desk clerk’s request, Grayson slid a black card rimmed in gold out of his wallet. He placed it flat on the counter.

“Your name, sir?” the clerk prompted again, but he barely got the question out before an eagle-eyed woman with her hair in an elegant bun approached.

“I’ll take care of this one, Ryan.” She picked up the card—not a credit card, but a key to a designated suite in this and every hotel under the same ownership in the country. If the suite was occupied, it would be vacated shortly, unless its occupant had the same card Grayson had just displayed.

Hardly likely.

“Will you be staying with us for the week?” The inquiry was polite, discreet. She did not ask his name.

“Just a night,” Grayson replied, but he wasn’t as sure of the answer as he sounded. His encounter with Gigi had given him much to consider—and very little of it good. “Is the pool open?” he asked evenly.

“Of course,” the woman replied.

Grayson calmly met her gaze. “What would it take for it not to be?”

Swimming, like the violin, longsword, knife fighting, and photography, had been one of Grayson’s selections in their grandfather’s yearly birthday ritual. He’d been on the track for the Olympics once. Now all he wanted was to swim until his body gave in—faster, harder, cutting through the water, his pace punishing, unsustainable.

He sustained it.

With his lungs and muscles burning, Grayson didn’t have to think about Gigi, about hospital rooms full of balloons and fathers who sat in the front row at games. About the safe-deposit box. About the key Gigi wore around her neck.

Most people considered power and weakness opposites, but Grayson had learned early in life that the real opposite of weakness was control.

He wasn’t sure how many times his phone rang before he heard it. His body screaming, he swam to the side of the pool and checked his messages. He had three new voicemails and two texts from Xander. The first text said: Call me back in ten minutes, or I’m going to fill your voicemail with yodeling.

The second text was a reminder: I do not excel at yodeling.

In the black-card suite, Grayson took a brief, scalding shower. He wrapped a towel around his body, then bit the bullet.

“I’m fine,” he said immediately, once Xander had picked up the call.

“You’re in Phoenix,” Xander replied cheerfully.

Grayson made a mental note to scan his electronics for tracking software.

“You know that I know who lives in Phoenix, right?” Xander prodded. “Allow me to remind you that I am a good listener. A very good listener who has not told Jameson, Avery, or Nash where you are. Yet.”

The yet was as much of a threat as the yodeling had been. Grayson knew that neither would have been effective if he hadn’t, on some level, wanted to talk.

“Sheffield Grayson was married when I was conceived.” Grayson started with facts, the obvious ones. “He slept with Skye to spite our grandfather, whom he blamed for the death of his nephew Colin.”

“The fire on Hawthorne Island,” Xander said quietly.

Grayson bowed his neck. “The fire on Hawthorne Island,” he confirmed. Grayson had never held any illusions that, if only his mystery father knew about his existence, he would be wanted. But he hadn’t expected to be hated, either.

“Several years after Colin’s death,” Grayson told Xander calmly, “my father and his wife had twins. Girls.”

“You have sisters,” Xander said cheerily. The twins’ existence wasn’t news to him. None of this was.

“I have responsibilities,” Grayson corrected. “Their father is dead.” In the mirror, the muscles over his collarbone had gone tight. “The twins don’t know what kind of man he really was or what happened to him.” Grayson swallowed. “They can never know.”

“Why are you in Phoenix, Gray?” Xander said softly.

“One of the girls ran into trouble. I was tipped off about the issue and came here to resolve it.”

He could practically hear Xander turning that information over. “And did you?”

Grayson’s entire body ached. “No.”

Gigi was no longer in police custody. Given the way Grayson had been allowed to walk out of the precinct with her, he doubted paperwork would ever be filed. But the true situation? That was far from resolved.

Grayson told Xander what he had learned. “I don’t know what’s inside that safe-deposit box,” he finished, “but if there is any chance it implicates Sheffield Grayson in the bombing of Avery’s plane or her kidnapping…”

“That could then implicate Avery,” Xander filled in, “in his disappearance.”

“I can’t let Gigi open that box,” Grayson said, the words coming out with the force of a vow. He’d failed to protect Avery once. More than once. He wouldn’t fail her again.

“So what’s our play?” Xander asked.

“There’s no we here, Xan.” Grayson turned away from the mirror. “Just me.”

“Just you.” Xander was being far too agreeable. “And your sisters.”

We share nothing but blood. The thought was deliberate, measured, but its purpose was entirely undone when Xander spoke next. “What’s she like, the one you met?”

Grayson kept his answer short. “In some ways, she reminds me of you.” Maybe that explained how protective he felt of the girl already.

“You’re going to have to lie to her.” The warning in Xander’s tone was clear. “Sabotage her. Gain her trust and betray her.”

Grayson ended the call before he replied. “I know.”

Without giving himself even a second for guilt or second-guessing, he picked up the hotel phone and called down to the lobby. “As it turns out,” he said, his voice like stone, “I’ll need this room for at least a week.”