Chapter 21

Cain is so mercurial. Sometimes, I want to punch him, and sometimes, I want to give him a long hug.

Currently, it’s the former option.

After he leads me to his cell, we sit in a long, potent silence. I know he’s gazing at me as intently as I am him. While he may be focusing on the physical characteristics, I’m focusing on other things.

Like his heart that I can hear beating erratically. The uneven draws of his breath. The smoky scent emitting from his body, combined with something floral from his shampoo. The tap, tap, tap of his fingers against the armrest of his chair. He’s tense. Anxious.

But he doesn’t want anyone to know.

After a long, unnerving moment of silence, I jump to my feet and begin to trail my fingers over the table. Numerous boxes greet my searching hand.

“What’s this?” I ask softly. I could always slip inside his head and see for myself, but I would rather hear the answer from him. Right now, he’s barely holding himself together. I don’t know if my curiosity will distract him or send him teetering over that steep edge.

“Game,” he responds scathingly. “Have you played?”

“Well, I can’t answer unless I know what game it is,” I reply with an eye roll.

“Monopoly,” he spits out.

Does he really hate me so much that we can’t have a cordial conversation? For reasons I don’t care to define, that hurts tremendously.

“Never played,” I answer, caressing a second box.

“Chess,” he names, almost reluctantly.

Smiling, I jiggle the box in front of his face enticingly. “Let’s play!”

“You know how to play chess?” His voice is heady with disbelief and scorn. When I continue to smile, not answering, he relents with a disgruntled sigh. “Fine. Whatever.”

“Perfect!” Clapping my hands together, I feel my way back to the chair and sit opposite him at the table. Kai’s words from earlier volley around in my head like a loose basketball.

No one can know the truth.

“You’ll have to tell me which square you place your pawn on,” I decide quickly. “A6 or B2 or whatever. That’s how Kai played with me.”

And it was…until I mastered my gift and learned how to slip into his head with ease. For now, my powers are a closely guarded secret. I’ll keep them under lock and key in an impenetrable coffin, buried miles below cement. No amount of digging can uncover it.

“Got it,” Cain bites out. I’m beginning to believe the demon only has two moods: angry and very angry. It’s such a contrast to sunny Abel that they’re as different as night and day. Maybe that’s not a bad analogy for them. Abel embodies an inner light, while Cain has an internal darkness. Yet, they need each other, each one intricately intertwined with the other.

Shaking my head to clear my thoughts, I watch through Cain’s eyes as he sets up the board. He’s black, unsurprisingly, leaving the white for me.

He moves his pawn first.

“Pawn to B5,” he announces, sitting back in his chair and forking his fingers together just at the edge of his vision.

Absently, I feel for my pieces, memorizing the board, and move my own piece up two spaces. I remember from Kai’s lessons that the first time you move a pawn, you’re able to move it up two spaces instead of one. I know this game so well that I don’t need someone to move my pieces for me—I can easily feel the ridges of the king’s crown and the curve of the knight. I can play and win this game without eyesight.

Once more, Cain surveys the board before moving a different pawn forward. “Pawn to C5.”

“So, Cain,” I begin conversationally as I move my knight. “You don’t like me very much.”

“I never said that,” he huffs. “Pawn to D5.”

“You didn’t have to,” I point out. “You can’t stand to be in the same room as me.”

“Because you’re an unknown,” he sneers without preamble. “You just waltz into our prison, claiming you’re innocent, and already, you have the most powerful males at your feet. What are you, Nina?”

It takes me two tries to swallow around the apple-sized knot in my throat. My hands tremble slightly. “It’s your turn.”

He doesn’t even look at the board; his focus is fully, intently, on me.

“Bishop. C8 to F5.”

I nod once before considering the pieces with an almost clinical detachment. It’s all about moving the pawns to fit your needs. Destroying your enemies. It takes strategy and patience, both of which I have in abundance. Or you can seek to eliminate the opponent’s most important piece—the king.

Win the game.

We play a few more rounds in silence. During that time, I’m able to capture two of his pawns and one of his bishops, and he’s able to capture my knight.

“I don’t know what I am,” I admit at last, twirling his captured piece between my fingers. “I thought I was human with a strange and uncanny ability to heal. I only recently learned that the supernatural exists.”

“Kai told us about the Compound,” he says at last, once the silence contaminates the air like a sickly poison. My muscles lock together at his words as my breath leaves me. No. No. No. All I have ever wanted was to escape the Compound and the connotations that went with it. I don’t want Cain’s pity or his suspicion.

I thought, maybe, that coming here could be my chance to start over. A chance to reinvent myself without the threat of the Compound hanging ominously over my head like a sharpened blade.

If Kai told him about my past, what else did he tell him?

“So, you know that I’m not exactly the most socially apt person,” I say, only half teasing.

“And it was only you and Kai there?” Cain presses, ignoring my attempt at a joke. A rather pathetic one, if I am being honest.

I move my second knight and sit back, waiting for him to take his turn. “That I know of. There may have been others, but I was kept apart from them. Kai was the only other prisoner that I met.”

“And you don’t think that’s suspicious?” he questions, voice rising marginally. When I flinch, he works to keep his tone at a controlled volume. “It’s just kind of odd, that’s all.”

My anger festers low in my stomach, like a swirling ball of heat. His accusations sting—gut me—more than I care to admit.

“What are you saying, Cain? Just spit it out already.” I ball my hand into a tight fist, and Cain’s gaze drops to it immediately.

“I…I don’t know what I’m saying,” he admits at last. “Rook. H8 to H5.”

“How about we make a deal?” I place my hands beneath my chin and tilt my head to the side. Cain’s gaze lowers briefly to my lips before snapping back to attention. My heart flutters, but I keep my face blank.

“What kind of deal?”

“If I win, you have to at least try to be my friend.” Acid forms low in my stomach, tangling with the ball of lead and nerves already present.

“And if I win?” he counters with a dismissive scoff.

“Then I’ll leave you alone.” I try to ignore the current of dread spiraling through my mind at the prospect, but I’ll do it. If it’s what he wants, I’ll do it.

Cain considers me silently for a moment. A long, stifling moment that feels more like an eternity.

“All right,” he agrees at last, nodding. “You have yourself a deal.”

Hands sweating, I manage a frail, weary smile. “Be prepared to get your butt kicked.”

“Butt kicked.” He snorts once. “Do you really not swear? Not even ‘ass’?”

I make a face, moving my pawn across the game board and capturing one of his. “Not really. I mean, not if I can help it. That’s literally all I heard back at the Compound. I’m sure Kai told you, but it wasn’t really a nice place.” Understatement of the century. “I don’t like things that remind me of there.”

“Like loud noises and sudden touches,” he deduces. My face gets hot at how much he observed in such a short time. And this is coming from someone who hates me. I can’t even imagine what a person like Kai has noticed.

“I could say the same about you,” I muse as he announces and then moves his queen.

“I don’t want to talk about me.” His voice is curt, a crack of a whip, but I can sense an underlying pain beneath the surface. There’s a part of his story that he doesn’t want to talk about with me. A part of his story that made him the bitter man before me. Maybe, with time, he’ll trust me enough to share that vulnerable piece of him, but I doubt it. At the moment, he’s merely tolerating me, but that tolerance is as fragile as finely spun glass. One wrong move from either of us, and it will shatter into a thousand pieces.

“Then, we’ll talk about me.” I capture his rook with my bishop, barely managing to hide my squeal of excitement. “Ask me anything. I’m a book that is open.”

There’s almost a smile in his voice when he speaks next. Almost, but not quite. “I believe the saying is an open book.”

“Book that is open. Open book. Is there really a difference?” I wave my hand in the air dismissively. “Either way, you can ask me anything.”

He doesn’t hesitate. “Did you kill Raphael Turner?”

“Of course not!” I protest immediately, adamantly. “I never even met the guy.”

His vision dips once as he nods, almost as if he’s confirming something to himself.

“How did you escape the Compound?”

It’s the first time one of them has asked me that question. Not even Kai has bothered to ask. My throat is suddenly unbearably dry, while my hands become slick with sweat.

“They were moving me to what I called the torture room. It’s a big room full of windows in the Compound, a few hallways away from my cell.” My heart is doing somersaults in my chest as the memories bombard me—memories I have tried to keep dormant. But like with any ghost, they creep up and haunt you when you’re least expecting them. “The usual guard and torturer was on duty that day. I don’t know his name. Everyone just called him Man.”

“Man?” Cain interrupts.

“I know. I thought it was a stupid nickname too.”

I visualize Man the last time I saw him, through his own eyes as he stared at his reflection in the window. Body hunched over, with blood erupting from his stomach. Eyes flashing with pain and fury. Lips pulled back into a snarl.

“What happened?” Cain’s voice is softer than I’ve ever heard it before. It travels over me like a lover’s caress, as light as a butterfly’s fragile wing.

“I fought back.” My hands tighten around the edge of the table, knuckles turning white in Cain’s vision. “I broke apart my wooden bed and used a prong to create a makeshift weapon. When a different guard—the weakest—tried to take me, I stabbed him and ran. Man came around the corner, no doubt hearing the commotion, and I attacked him too. Scratched his face, bit him, punched him. I wanted him to hurt the way he always made me hurt. I think I took him by surprise because, for some reason, I was able to overpower and escape him. I remembered my plan with Kai…our escape route. And I did it. I actually escaped. At least, I thought I did.” I remember the fear of waking up in an unknown hospital room. William’s visit and his accusatory voice. The month in a dirty prison cell, awaiting my inevitable fate.

That sense of security had been wrenched away from me only seconds after I’d found it.

“That doesn’t seem fair,” Cain points out as he stares down at the board. To my horror, I note that his queen now has easy access to my king. Checkmate.

“It’s not,” I whisper. And neither is your own pain.

My heart continues to pound a daunting rhythm inside my chest.

Cain is silent for a moment, fingers tapping against the table, before he moves his king one spot over.

In direct line of my queen.

“King to E8,” he says softly.

My lips curl into a smile before I can stop them. “Checkmate.”