Page 28

Then she crawls up to snuggle with me and I kiss her, tasting myself on her tongue. She’s mine. My omega.

arrow

I FIND KNIGHTcrouching in the woods near a little pond. He’s watching some old guy set up a chess board on a table overlooking the pond.

“Lotus wants you to come back,” I say to him.

He doesn’t look at me. “I know.”

“You know?”

“I could feel it from you,” he says. “It’s weird, because it’s not like I can read your thoughts, right? Just that I get this sense when you have a strong motivation of some kind or other. Are you getting the same thing from me?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I am. I knew you were doing something and you didn’t want to be dissuaded from it.”

“This thing with us, it’s, uh…” He blows out a noisy huff of air. “Anyway, that’s why I’m going to talk to this guy. To hopefully find something out.”

“So, what? You’re just ignoring the fact that our omega wants you to come home?”

“I am,” he says. “But it’s for a good reason.”

“Can you even do that?” I say. “How can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not like we have to do what the others order us to do, at least not always. This is why we need more information. I’m going to go play chess with that guy.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” he says, and then he gets up and walks away from where I’m crouched in the woods.

I consider going after him, trying to argue with him, but I get a sense through the bond that he’s not going to bend on this, and I sense it would be futile.

So, I just stay where I am, and I watch.

I finger the bite mark on my neck and I watch him shiver as I do it.

I don’t even know what Ithinkabout it. There hasn’t been time to think, not since we left the facility, really, but since we left my family’s house in New Jersey, things have been moving really quickly. Having Acker in our basement is a big problem. Having her be able to make us attack Lotus—twice—is horrifying.

Knowing that I almost attacked her on my own, just because I started thinking about her blood makes me feel entirely unstable.

I had thought that Knight’s bite would steady me, but it didn’t do a damned thing when Acker triggered us last night.

Now, I wonder why I’m thinking about this instead of watching Knight with this guy. I wonder why I didn’t ask who the hell this guy even was or why he’s playing chess or what Knight is doing here.

The hell of it is, I used to be a police detective.

I was good with details.

What’s going on with me?

More and more, it feels like that life belonged to someone else and that I’m not even that guy anymore.

Which begs the question, who the hell am I, then?

The old man is seated at a small table still rooting around in a wooden box to set up the chess pieces on the table. He is working on the black pieces first, though he has already put the white queen in place. He catches sight of Knight and he looks up at him, his expression curious.

Knight raises a hand. “Hey there. I hear you’re the man to find if someone wants to play chess. Theodorus?”

The old man chuckles. “That’s me, all right. You must be one of those alphas that Penelope let in, hmm? I’ve never seen you before.”