by Eva Chase
“So you can warm up,” I said emphatically, although let’s be real, my mind had already gone to all sorts of other places.
Chess chuckled to himself, but he complied. He peeled off his shirt and kicked off his sodden shoes. Rather than ogle him as he tugged down his pants, I slipped back into bed to warm up the space beneath the blanket, scooting over to leave room for him. And then, okay, I ogled him a little as he tucked that well-muscled body—still with a pair of boxer-briefs on for a tiny bit of modesty—under the covers next to me.
I let my hand ease over to rest on his bicep, not wanting to assume he’d want more contact than that. Chess had indicated he was attracted to me, but he’d been pretty restrained with any physical overtures so far. Right now he was probably too busy thawing out to be thinking about any more, er, intimate ways of warming up.
“Sorry I woke you,” he murmured.
“You didn’t,” I said. “I hadn’t managed to get to sleep yet.”
He rolled onto his side to face me. There was still a foot of space between us, but I could feel the spreading warmth of his body gathering in the cocoon under the covers. “Too many thoughts whirling around in that lovely head of yours?”
“It’s not every day you find out you’re the heir to a long lost royal family.”
“Indeed. And being asked to rule over the lot of us—not the most appealing offer I can imagine.” He winked.
“That’s not really the problem. I wasn’t looking to rule over anyone.” I paused, considering. “It would be the Diamonds too, wouldn’t it? Even if a lot of them hate the Queen of Hearts, would they really want some Otherlander taking over the throne?”
“Difficult to determine how those minds work behind the sparkliness,” Chess said. “I suppose they’d have to learn to like it.”
That didn’t sound very promising. My stomach clenched with an ache of uncertainty. “Maybe it’s better if I don’t think about it anymore for a while. I’m just tying myself in knots without getting anywhere useful.”
It occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one with a quandary. “Chess, what are you going to do now that the Hearts’ Guard will be searching specifically for you? You can’t just stay invisible all the time.”
“Technically I could,” Chess said in his playful way. “It would keep everyone on their toes on a permanent basis.”
“Seriously,” I said. “Even if we can stop the Queen from taking new prisoners, she’ll still want you now that that Duchess woman has accused you.”
I’d seen Chess talking to the Duchess once—an elegant young woman covered in gems and layers of silk. She’d come looking for him specifically. He’d said they’d been… friends, or something, when he’d used to visit the palace and hobnob with the Diamonds.
“Do you know why she’d have done that?” I added. “I thought—she knew you before. She thought you’d help the Diamonds by giving her information. Why would she suddenly tell everyone you’re with the Spades?”
Chess’s gaze slid away from me. “She and I had a… rather fraught affiliation. And I believe she has even less grasp on sanity than the rest of us lunatics. Her reasons seem reasonable to her, no doubt.”
There had to be more to it than that. “Chess,” I prodded.
His mouth tightened as his eyes met mine again. “There’s little else I could say that’s fit for a queen’s ears.”
The tension in his expression made the ache in my gut dig deeper. “I’m not a queen right now,” I said. “And I don’t know if I’m ever going to be one. And… And even if I become one, I’m not going to be like the queen you’ve got now. I’d still be me. I’d want to know what people are really going through, what’s upset them, everything. I wouldn’t go around using people’s vulnerabilities as weapons against them either.”
For a long moment, silence hung over us. I dared to raise my hand to stroke the backs of my fingers over his cheek. “I know something has been bothering you. The way you froze up when the grass caught you, this thing with the Duchess, secret powers you don’t want anyone to know about… If you’d just rather not talk about it, that’s fine. But you have to believe me that I want to know. I want to know you. Okay?”
I meant those words so much my voice thickened with the emotion that had filled my throat. Chess stared at me. Something shifted in his face. Then he took my hand and kissed my knuckles the way he had when he first helped me find my way back home.
“Okay,” he said, his own voice rough. “Ask, and I’ll tell you.”
Now that he’d given me the opening, I wasn’t sure where to start. The thought of the Duchess itched at me, but I didn’t want to sound like a jealous girlfriend interrogating her guy about every woman he’d interacted with. So I started with, “Why did getting trapped in the grass shake you up so much?”
That couldn’t be too intrusive a question, right? Hatter had seemed to have an idea, and he and Chess weren’t exactly BFFs.
Chess’s raw chuckle told me I’d estimated wrong. “That’s the whole story right there,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “However much you’re ready to tell me.”
He eased over onto his back again. An uncharacteristic furrow creased his brow as he contemplated the ceiling. Then he started speaking, in a lilting tone that somehow managed to sound flippant and ominous at the same time.
“I told you before that there was a while when I passed time with the Diamonds. I got bored, and they were different, and treading that close to the Queen and her temper was a little thrilling. I thought if things turned dangerous, I could simply vanish. I thought the only thing I had to worry about was keeping my head attached.”
I scooted a little closer, tucking my hand loosely around his arm and tipping my head toward his bare shoulder to indicate he had my full attention.
“At first,” Chess went on, “I played around with different people there. Mostly women, but occasionally the men too. But pretty soon the Duchess got her eye on me, and I discovered that was something of a thrill too—being chosen, being coveted. And she… was very different. I never knew what to expect. There was always some new element to explore. So we made an arrangement. When I came to the palace, I belonged to her, and we would try everything.”
“When you say you ‘played’ with people…” I said, pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“Indulging ourselves,” Chess said. “With food, with leisure, and very frequently with sex. The appetites of the Diamonds aren’t so different from those of the Clubbers.”
“Except for the Duchess?”
“The Duchess simply…” He sighed. “We experimented with the line between pleasure and pain. It was during the freeze, so nothing was permanent. She would… cut me, or burn me, or whatever else she’d come up with that day, and I ate it up.” He wet his lips and glanced at me. “If you’d rather I didn’t keep going—”
I brushed a kiss to his shoulder. “I’m listening.” Did he think I was going to be horrified by what he’d told me? Even in a world where you weren’t being driven around the bend living the same day over and over again, S&M wasn’t so weird. Melody had a boyfriend a couple years ago who’d wanted her to put clamps on his nipples and things like that.
For a second I thought Chess was going to stop for his own comfort. He swallowed audibly.
“All in good fun,” he said, with a self-deprecating edge. “She liked to up the ante, and she became more and more controlling about the ways I could speak to or even look at anyone else in the palace. I started to develop the sense she saw me as a toy rather than a person. But I was getting off, and that’s what we Wonderlanders care about most, isn’t it? I thought, if I ever got uncomfortable, I could simply leave…”
A quiver ran through his muscles, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. I hugged his arm a little harder to say I was here, I was with him. What could have happened back then to leave this strong, gleeful man so shaken?
A faint rasp came into his voice. “I came one da
y, and she was in more of a mood than I’d ever seen her. She wanted to tie me up, and she tied me hard. And then she started to cut. Not just a little, here and there, but deep. I told her it was too much, but she just laughed. After a while I couldn’t talk at all. I couldn’t shift to slip out of the bonds—when pain is rushing through me, I can’t focus enough to use my deepest talents.”
So he’d been trapped there like he’d been in the grass. My throat constricted.
“She strung me up over her bed, upside down, and carved away at me until I didn’t have any idea what anything but pain was,” Chess went on. “Breathing, swallowing, it all hurt. She worked me to the limit of where I suppose she assumed I wouldn’t die, and after that she left. She left me alone, hanging, bleeding all over her fucking white satin sheets…”
The last few words came out in a whisper and a snarl. He hesitated, his chest stuttering as he exhaled.
All of me hurt, hearing him describe what the Duchess had done to him. I reached my arm across his chest tentatively, wanting to embrace him properly, not sure if he’d even want that. He caught me and tugged me to him, and I hugged him hard, tears leaking from behind my closed eyelids.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said. “I thought she’d gotten bored with me and wanted me gone. Toward the end, I wanted to die… I can take a hint. When I woke up where I always did the next morning, I knew I was never going back. But she came looking for me a few days later, as if it hadn’t even occurred to her I’d stay away after that, and I realized she hadn’t wanted me dead at all. She’d just wanted to watch me hurt, and she’d want to do it again.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured against his chest.
“Ah, well, some good came out of it. Seeing how mad the Diamonds were getting gave me the guts to start helping the Spades. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t set myself up to be used.”
“You didn’t ask for that,” I said fiercely. “No one would have. No way in hell can you say it’s your fault.”
“If a queen decrees it, I suppose it must be so,” Chess said. He sounded grateful but not convinced. “In any case, that’s the rambling answer to your question. Being tangled up like that reminded me of how she tied me that day… I can’t always keep my head straight when the memories leap up. It’s also why she’s probably made this accusation. She doesn’t even know I’m with the Spades. She’s just peeved she lost her toy, and it’s another way for her to try to control me. And what else was there? Oh, the reasons I keep my transformative skill secret.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “You’re allowed to have some secrets.”
He shifted onto his side and cupped my cheek, gazing into my eyes for the first time since he’d started his story. His eyes were bright again. “Are you saying that for my sake or for yours? If it’s too much—”
“No,” I said quickly. “I’m just worried about you. I didn’t mean to stir up a whole bunch of awful memories.”
“Of course you didn’t. They’re only that—memories. My other form… Being able to shift completely from one thing to another is a rare talent even in Wonderland. If the Queen knew, she’d want me not for my head but for her menagerie. I’ve generally been circumspect. But more so—when I was more reckless, I let the Duchess see—I had the ridiculous idea of impressing her—and for her it turned into a new type of—”
His mouth pressed flat against something more than he wanted to say. “Since then, I don’t shift, even on my own, unless I absolutely have to. It brings back the time with her more sharply. I don’t want anyone else to get it into their heads that they could use that part of me. Hatter knows, because I was madder than usual when I found my way to him in the early days, and he helped me arrange that she would forget. So now it’s just him and you. Not too shabby.”
How exactly had they “arranged” for the Duchess to forget a detail like that? I wanted to ask, but I’d already dragged so much pain out of him. Questions like that could wait.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make sure it stays that way. No one’s hearing it from me.”
“I know they won’t, lovely,” he said, a warm smile crossing his face. “And I—” His gaze followed his fingers as they teased over my hair and then down the side of my neck to my shoulder. “I do want you, you know. Very much. But whether you choose to be queen or not, I don’t know if I can be all that good for anyone as anything more than the briefest of flings, and you should have more than that.”
“Chess.”
“It’s not just the damage done, you know,” he said before I could go on. “Maybe I was already screwed up even before, to let it go on so long, to let it go that far, to have enjoyed it until it was almost murder…”
“I don’t think that,” I said. “It was a screwed-up situation. And you’re already more than that. You can make me laugh when I’m terrified, and you’ve had my back every time I’ve needed it, even when you had to risk exposing your secret to protect me. I should get to decide what’s good for me, shouldn’t I?” And God, the brush of his fingertips had felt so good I was already tingling to experience everything else he could offer.
The flash of desire in his eyes turned the tingling into a surge of heat. He leaned in, the tip of his nose grazing mine. His voice dropped even lower.
“I haven’t been with anyone on my own since—since then. It’s always been with someone else joining in, usually the White Knight… Less pressure when the focus isn’t all on my performance. Less intense. I don’t know—I don’t want to disappoint you.”
“I’ll take whatever you’re ready to give,” I said. “And I’ll be a lot more disappointed if you don’t kiss me, as soon as humanly possible.”
He gave me a perfect Cheshire grin, and then his mouth captured mine.
Even after that build-up, his kiss was as sweet as the ones before. He tipped his head, teasing my lips apart, and his hand slid down my side to my hip. He left it there, hot as a brand, as we kissed and kissed again, deeper and sweeter until my whole body was trembling giddily with anticipation of what would come next. The tips of his fangs grazed my lip with a sharply thrilling tingle.
I looped my arm around his shoulders, and he rolled us over. The weight of him over me, braced on one elbow as he trailed his fingers up under my nightshirt, and the tangling of our naked legs made me even hungrier than before. I shifted, arching into him, and my back bumped something flat and hard.
The sword. I eased back from Chess and tugged it out from where it had gotten tangled in the covers. “I think maybe we’d better get this out of the way.”
Chess laughed. “Now that’s a dangerous bed companion.”
“Meant to be dangerous to the wrong sort of person coming knocking at my window,” I muttered.
“I’ll be glad you don’t count me among that number.” He took the hilt from me gingerly, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen him handle anything with a blade before. Maybe he had bad associations with cutting instruments after what the Duchess had put him through. But he didn’t look particularly discomforted by the sword. He just tipped over on his back so he could drop it over his side of the bed. It hit the floor with a thump.
The covers had fallen partly off him, leaving his sculpted chest on full display in the hazy lamplight. On an impulse, I followed him, slipping my knee across his waist to straddle him. Chess smiled up at me with a sound that was almost a purr as I smoothed my splayed hands over those planes of muscle. The burn between my legs urged me to scoot lower, to fit myself against him in the most tantalizing way, but that momentary thought about the sword held me back.
“Is there anything I should make sure to be careful of?” I asked, forcing my hands to still over his pecs. “Anywhere that being touched bothers you?”
I didn’t know how to phrase it better than that, but the shadow that passed through Chess’s eyes told me he understood. He clasped his hand over one of mine. “Don’t worry yourself about that. I’ve had practice at tuning out that kind of discomfort.�
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Because he hadn’t been with any partner before me he felt comfortable telling about his past. A much more intense emotion than lust squeezed my heart. I squeezed his fingers in turn. “I don’t want you to have to tune any of this out,” I said. “I want you to enjoy all of it. It’ll be easier for me not to worry if I know.”
He let out a breath. “It may be best to avoid my neck, and the sides of my ribs, and the backs of my knees.”
The words gave me a flash of an image, the picture he’d drawn with his voice of him hanging there bleeding, the places where she’d dug the wounds deepest. I gripped his fingers a little harder, my throat choking up.
Then he was pushing himself upright to catch my lips again, and everything fell away except the tenderness of his kiss and the intoxicatingly rich scent of his skin.
His hand crept up under my nightshirt again, tracing sparks over my skin, so teasingly slow I squirmed on his lap. His palm finally settled over my bare breast. I barely filled his large hand, but Chess didn’t give any sign of minding. He flicked his thumb over my nipple, and I whimpered into his mouth.
He raised his head to look over my shoulder. A smile that was more a smirk curved his lips. “We appear to have company.”
I glanced over. The bedroom door had opened a few inches; the lamplight caught on Hatter, rumpled and flushed in striped pajamas. He nudged the doorknob farther and then caught it, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should be coming or going.
“I heard a thud,” he said, and I remembered Chess dropping the sword on the floor. “I thought I’d make sure everything was all right. You had a change of heart about my hospitality?”
He was talking as if he hadn’t found us in the middle of anything particularly exciting, but I felt his gaze on us, on me, like a heated caress. It set off a hot flare between my thighs.
“The rain proved too much for me, I’m ashamed to admit,” Chess said, equally casual. He paused. “I believe there’s plenty of room here, if you’d like to join in. If our Lyssa would like that too.” He gave my cheek a gentle nuzzle.
