Chapter 359: Chess Pieces

Liam opened his eyes slowly.

The ceiling of Kelly’s living room looked back at him, the lamp on the side table still on from the night before, the morning light coming through the curtains at the angle it came through at this hour.

Something warm and specific was happening below his waist.

He looked down.

A hand. Moving slowly, deliberately, with the practiced patience of someone who had been at this for a while and was entirely comfortable with the pace they had chosen.

He smiled, still mostly asleep, and said quietly, "Stella. You’re still on it I see."

The hand stopped.

He opened his eyes fully.

Kelly was kneeling beside the couch looking up at him with her hand still loosely around him and an expression that had several floors to it and none of them were warm.

"Who," she said, "is Stella."

Liam became completely awake.

Not gradually. All at once, the specific full-body awakening of someone whose nervous system had received information that required immediate and total consciousness.

He looked at Kelly.

Kelly looked at him.

Her hand was still there.

"I," he started.

"I was shocked to find you were asleep on my couch," she said, her voice carrying the specific evenness of someone organizing information before they decided what to do with it, "when I came out this morning. Which was already something I was going to ask you about." She looked at her hand. Then at him. "And then you woke up and called me by another woman’s name." She squeezed.

"Ow," he said. "Ow. Kelly. That hurts. Stop."

"That," she said pleasantly, "was what I was going for."

He reached for her hand.

"Don’t," she said.

He left his hand where it was.

"When did you become aggressive," he said.

She looked at him with the expression of someone who had not become aggressive and was simply applying proportional consequence to a proportional situation and did not consider those to be the same thing.

She started to stand up.

"If you don’t want it." Elena’s voice came from the direction of the hallway, even and entirely awake, carrying the specific quality it carried when she had been listening for longer than anyone had known she was listening. "I’ll take it."

Kelly stopped standing up.

She looked at the hallway.

Like a baby who was told to drop something they were playing with and didn’t want to share, she went back down and leaned forward and took him in her mouth.

*Mmm mmm*

The sound that came from her around him was muffled and deliberate and clearly also a statement directed at the hallway rather than at him specifically.

Elena appeared in the hallway entrance, dressed already, her silver white hair done, her coat on, looking entirely put together in the way she looked entirely put together when she had somewhere to be and had prepared for it.

She looked at Kelly and then at Liam and then at Kelly again.

"Whatever," she said. With a specific quality that meant the opposite of whatever.

She looked at Liam directly.

"You’re training today," she said. "So make sure you do not miss it."

Something ran down his spine that was not warmth.

"Yeah, I’ll be there," he said.

"Good," she said.

She crossed the living room and Kelly, without removing anything from her mouth, walked on her knees slightly to the side to clear the path to the door.

Elena opened it and then looked back at Liam one final time with the gold eyes doing what they did and then she was gone and the door was open.

Kelly removed him from her mouth and stood up and walked to the door and closed it and turned the lock and then turned around and looked at Liam on the couch.

He looked back at her.

She looked like she had slept.

Her blonde hair was slightly undone but not from distress, just from being slept in, and she was wearing a short dark robe tied loosely at the waist, the neckline sitting open enough that the upper curve of her chest was visible.

She looked at him with the eyes carrying something that had moved past the earlier temperature into something more settled.

She sighed.

"Are you going home to change for class," she said, "or are you skipping."

He stared at her.

Of all the sentences available to the English language at this specific moment in time, that was not the one he had been preparing for.

"I," he said. "I’m going to go home and change. Yes. And go to class."

She nodded once. She turned and went into the bedroom and he heard her move around and then she came back out with his clothes, folded, and held them out to him.

He took them.

"Thank you," he said.

She sat on the armchair across from the couch and watched him get dressed with the expression of someone who had decided to be normal about a situation that was not entirely normal because the alternative required more energy than the morning had allocated for it.

He put his jacket on and straightened it and looked at her.

"I’m heading out," he said.

"Wait," she said.

She stood up and crossed the room and stopped in front of him and kissed him.

Properly, her hand on the side of his face, her body pressing against his, and he kissed her back and his hands found her waist and pulled her in and then found her ass and stayed there.

When they separated she looked at him from close range.

"Be careful," she said. Not as a general expression. As a specific instruction to a specific person about specific things she knew about and was not going to list.

"I will," he said.

She stepped back.

He went to the door.

---

"Your turn," Stiles said.

Desmond reached forward and moved a piece. He set it down and sat back and looked at the result with the expression of someone who had made a good move and was comfortable with that assessment.

"Check," he said.

Stiles looked at the board.

He smiled.

It was the smile he smiled when something had arrived exactly where he had been guiding it and the arrival had been worth the patience the guiding had required.

He said nothing about the check.

He said, "Let’s see."

Desmond looked at him.

They were in a room where Stiles met with his uncle had no particular name and required none.

It was a study on the upper floor of the Blade family’s main property, the kind of room that had been arranged once by someone with specific tastes and had not been significantly altered since.

Dark wood throughout.

A fireplace that was used rather than decorative, the grate showing evidence of a recent fire that had gone down to ash and not been cleared.

Two chairs facing each other across a low table, and on the table a chess board, the pieces in their current positions representing a game that had been going for forty minutes.

Stiles was in the chair on the left.

His uncle Desmond was in the chair on the right.

Desmond face carried the specific quality of someone who had learned to read rooms faster than most rooms knew they were being read.

Grey at the temples, the rest of it still dark, a jacket that fit the way jackets fit when they had been made for the specific person wearing them.

He looked back at the board.

Stiles was also looking at the board.

"I’ve been wanting to ask you something," Desmond said. He looked back at the board. "I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time now."

"You could have brought it up any of the fifteen times we’ve been playing recently," Stiles said pleasantly, his eyes still on the board.

"I could have," Desmond said. He picked up his cup from the table beside him and looked at it and set it back down. "I’m a man who appreciates the right moment. I find that questions asked at the right moment receive better answers than questions asked simply because they are available to be asked." He looked at Stiles. "I was waiting until I felt the moment."

"And the moment is now," Stiles said.

"The moment is now," Desmond confirmed.

Stiles looked up from the board. "Alright, uncle. What would you like to know?"

Desmond looked at him directly with the specific quality of attention that had made people uncomfortable across his career in various contexts for various reasons.

"Gage," he said.

Stiles said nothing.

"You matched your new fighter against Gage," Desmond said. "Of all the options available to you for a second match, of all the numbered fighters in your roster, you went to Gage." He held Stiles’s gaze. "I want to understand the thinking."

Stiles was quiet for a moment.

Outside the window the day was doing what days did, the light moving across the garden below, a groundskeeper somewhere on the far side of the property moving along the path with equipment.

"For some reason," Stiles said, "I felt like playing that card." He looked at the board. "I’ve been watching him. Since the first match. Since before the first match honestly. And I had a feeling about what that match would produce and the feeling was right." He picked up his own cup and held it. "Gage is just a special card necessary for a bigger game."

"And what specifically are you trying to find out," Desmond said.

"Whether Liam has what I think he has," Stiles said. "The first match tells me what someone can do. The second match tells me what someone is." He set the cup down. "Marcus was a question about capability. Gage is a question about survival."

Desmond looked at him.

"Gage will end him in seconds," Desmond said. "Whatever the boy has, Gage ends things in seconds. You know his record. You know what he does to opponents who are not prepared for him. You know that of his last fourteen matches eleven of them did not reach the two-minute mark." He said it without heat, just the information being laid out. "You may not get the answer to your question because the question may not survive long enough to be answered."

"You might be right," Stiles said.

"I usually am," Desmond said. "About these things."

"You usually are," Stiles agreed pleasantly.

"Then why."

Stiles was quiet for a moment. He looked at the board and then at the window and then at his uncle.

"Because the gang killer has been circling him," he said. "Because whoever or whatever that thing is, it has been watching this boy since before the arena was involved. And things that the gang killer watches tend to be things worth watching." He paused. "I’ve been doing this for long enough to know that when something that old and that specific takes an interest in something new, the new thing usually has a reason to be interesting." He looked at his uncle directly. "I want to know if that reason survives Gage. Because if it does, then what I think I have is real. And if it doesn’t." He shrugged slightly. "Then at least I found out before I invested further."

Desmond looked at him for a long moment.

"You’re using Gage as a measuring instrument," he said.

"I’m using Gage as a measuring instrument," Stiles confirmed.

"An instrument that tends to break what it measures."

"Most good instruments do," Stiles said. "That’s how you know the measurement is accurate."

Desmond was quiet.

Then something moved across his face that was not disapproval and was not approval but was the specific expression of someone who had raised a concern, heard the counter, and found it more substantial than they had expected.

"You could have just given him the gang killer," he said. "At least he might last."

Stiles smiled. The smile of someone who had heard a reasonable point and had a better one.

"The gang killer is the end of something," he said. "Gage is the middle." He looked at the board. "And I need to know what the middle produces before I can know whether the end is worth staging."

He reached forward.

He moved a piece.

He placed it on the board with a small precise sound and sat back and folded his hands in his lap and looked at his uncle.

Desmond looked at the board.

He looked at where Stiles had placed the piece and then at the pieces around it and then at his own position and he ran the available moves and found at the end of each one the same outcome waiting, patient and inevitable, already built into the board from several moves ago.

There was no move that did not lose.

He sat with that for a moment.

Then he looked at his nephew.

Stiles was already standing, adjusting his jacket, his two-toned hair catching the light from the window, his expression carrying the specific warmth of someone who had been here before and found it as satisfying as the first time.

"We’re not done," Desmond said.

"We are," Stiles said.

Desmond looked at the board again.

He found the move that was least bad and followed it forward and arrived at the same place.

He exhaled.

"Well done," he said.

Stiles moved toward the door.

He paused with his hand on the frame and looked back at his uncle, at the older man sitting in the chair with the losing board in front of him and the expression of someone who had followed the game all the way to its end and had found it exactly as well constructed as it looked.

"Trust me, uncle," Stiles said.

Then he went through the door and the study settled back into its quiet, just Desmond and the board and the ash in the fireplace and the light coming through the window from the garden below.

He looked at the board for a long time.

Then he reached forward and tipped his king over slowly and watched it lie flat on the board and stayed there.