Chapter Twenty-Seven
I wake up to a note that says only one thing: 3 p.m.
Which means I have the rest of the day to think about my strategy for the game. I’d rather read a book or watch a movie. I’d rather watch the grass grow, but like with the professor at the museum, I’m too starved for stimulation. My brain has decided to win regardless of what I want.
Well, I wouldn’t say that I want to lose. That’s not really what this is about, though. This is about giving him a piece of me, opening myself up beyond my body. There are a hundred myths about the way chess play exposes the true identity of a person—a long-lost son reunited with his father by an unusual chess combination alone. Messages written in black and white wood, in an infinite number of moves.
I’ll play with Gabriel. I’ll play to win, but I won’t give up every secret I have.
When I arrive in the library, he already sits in one of the armchairs. The board has been set, with black facing him. He stands when I enter the room, an old-school politeness fitting for a game over a thousand years old.
“Good afternoon,” he says.
I eye him warily as I circle the opposite chair, wondering if he’s still pissed about Justin. Probably, but he doesn’t appear angry today. He has the same bland and solicitous expression that hides everything he’s thinking. The perfect poker face.
I wring my hands together. “About Justin.”
His face doesn’t move a centimeter, but I feel his rage bubble near the surface. “What about him?”
“I need your promise that you won’t do anything to him.”
He uses that dangerously soft voice he gets when he’s lethal. “What would I do to someone like him?”
I force myself to gather my courage, because I couldn’t live with myself if Justin ended up hurt. If he ended up like my father. The men in my life were in ruins enough. “Send men to attack him.”
He’s silent a moment, and all I hear is the faint crackle of the fire. “Is that what you think I did to your father?”
My courage falters, but I force my shoulders back. “Did you?”
“I don’t send people to do my dirty work. If I want to beat someone to a pulp, I’ll do it myself.”
Which doesn’t tell me whether he hurt my father. Except my father said they were strangers to him. That there were multiple men, wearing masks. Was that the truth? Or had it been Gabriel Miller?
He looks grave. “And I have no desire to hit an old man.”
The relief that fills me is deeper than knowing I’m not in the same room as my father’s attacker. It has to do with Gabriel himself. My feelings for him. “You gave the state’s attorney evidence about my father.”
“It was the most public way to ruin him.”
It ruined him. It weakened him enough that somebody else felt comfortable sending men after my father in a dark alley. Maybe it doesn’t matter that Gabriel didn’t throw the punch himself. He kicked off the chain of events that led to my father in bed, hooked up to a million different machines.
“And to buy his daughter,” I say, voice shaking only a little. “In a public auction. Your idea, I remember.”
“One of my best ideas.”
I don’t flinch on the outside. Inside I’m sick with caring about a man who manipulates me like a chess piece. My father? Gabriel? They have that in common, their heavy hands moving me around the board.
The pieces line up, so ordered and polite. The battlefield before there’s bloodshed. “I’m white.”
“You made the first move,” he says because I went to the Den that night.
He’s right about that. If I’d never done that, I wouldn’t have met Gabriel, wouldn’t have been put up for auction, wouldn’t be at his estate. Would I change it, if I could? I would have lost the house, the only link to my mother. I would have had to accept Uncle Landon’s proposal, trapping myself in a marriage both with a man I think of as family and with a cheater—a man who’d have kept a virgin for a month while engaged to me.
I take a seat and study the board. The pieces are shiny, well polished, not dusty. Obviously hand-carved, expensive, but not especially ornate for a man as rich as Gabriel. He has the home court advantage, but I can infer more from it.
“When did you get this set?”
He smiles briefly. “The day before you arrived. I had it commissioned after the night you visited the Den. Well, a few days later. Once Damon had gotten ahold of your chess teacher’s letter.”
My eyes widened. “There’s no way they could have made it that fast.”
“I paid a premium,” he says. “I’m not sure the artist slept much.”
I look down at the set through new eyes. No one had ever played on this before. The symbolism touches me more than I want it to. A virgin set. Like me. “Why?”
“Call me extravagant.”
He is extravagant, but he’s also methodical, intelligent. Strategic. Everything he does has a purpose. He must have planned to bid on me from the moment he suggested the auction. Public shame. The ultimate triumph over my father. I should hate him for that, but I can’t, any more than I can hate my father for losing.
I move my pawn to e4, a straightforward opening. It doesn’t give him any clues about me, but I need to learn something about him if I’m going to win.
He thinks for only a second before moving a pawn to c5. The Sicilian Defense. It doesn’t tell me much except that he’s not a beginner. If he had done the King’s Gambit, I might have been able to lead him along, make him believe he had a chance before ending it. He knows enough to challenge me.
“An interesting game for a mythology major,” he murmurs, watching me. “A little aggressive. Mathematical.”
If he’s trying to distract me it won’t work. I move my knight to f3, allowing him to play out his moves before I surprise him. “Actually chess is deeply rooted in mythology. From its many creation stories to the wars that were won and lost with it. Philosophers, kings, poets. People from every walk of life have used chess to explain things.”
He smiles and plays again. “You don’t believe it was invented by Moses, then?”
Moses is one of many said to have invented the game. The Greek warrior Palamedes created it to demonstrate battle positions. An Indian philosopher designed it to tell the queen that her only son had been assassinated. I’m interested in the truth, but the stories tell us so much about the people throughout history as well.
I move again. “It’s not only the myths surrounding chess. Chess itself is a myth, you know? A game of hierarchy, of war. It’s a story that people have been using to explain complex concepts for eons. Mathematics, yes. Geometry. Business. Philosophy. Even love.”
“Love,” he says, making a Knight’s Gambit. “In a game of war.”
I can’t tell whether his words are refuting the possibility or marveling at them. Either way I’m not sure I can discuss love with a man who has purchased me like cattle. Or maybe like the brutality of chess, his ownership of me is the perfect myth in which to explore it.
I take his knight. “And if you think archeologists aren’t aggressive, you’ve never seen them fight over a new find.”
Our next few moves are done in silence as we fight for control over the board, reaching into the center, establishing our strongholds from which the final battle will be fought.