Page 44 of The Knight (Endgame 2)
He moves before I’m ready, fixing my clothes and leading me downstairs.
Damon Scott waits for us, wearing a forbidding expression.
Through the link of our hands, I feel Gabriel tense. “We’re leaving.”
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” Damon asks.
The temperature drops by twenty degrees. “Clearly I don’t, since I’m taking her home with me. Since when are you the police around here?”
“Since I found out I failed her.”
The question strikes a chord in me—curiosity mingled with expectation. Something is happening, pieces moving into place around me. Not quite understanding the choices of my opponent but trusting that they have meaning. Which means the final blow is coming.
Exhaustion weighs down my limbs, my eyelids. The shock of my father’s involvement in my downfall, the blissful respite that Gabriel’s mouth offered. They lay a blanket over me, shielding me from the world.
“You have nothing to do with this,” Gabriel says, voice tight.
“I think I do. I’m the one who sold her to you. My—”
“No, Damon. She’s mine. And I don’t think you want to get between me and what’s mine. You aren’t suicidal.”
The threat is delivered with cold certainty, between two men who are friends. I don’t want to get between them. My family’s secrets are a dark vine, winding its way through the city, thorns leaving marks everywhere it goes.
“Please,” I whisper. “Don’t fight.”
The ticking of the grandfather clock marks the tension in inexorable evenness.
Damon studies me, dark gaze impersonal but thorough as it takes in my weariness. “There’s a week left of the thirty days, but I don’t give a fuck about that. Not anymore. Do you want to go with him?”
Gabriel’s hand tightens on mine. Clearly he’s willing to fight his way through, fight his friend. My heart has been cracked and battered ever since the auction, but the final blow is this—realizing that Gabriel still thinks I’ll say no. That he has to buy me, to force me, that I could never want him on my own.
“I want to go,” I say, my voice clear.
Damon’s expression reveals he still doubts the truth of it, but he doesn’t stand in our way. I don’t know what change of heart made him auction me, as emotionless as if I were a Persian rug, and then suddenly decide to help me. But I don’t need his help. Not about this.
Without another word Gabriel leads me past Damon, down the hallway and out the front door. A black limo waits in the damp air, raindrops glittering on the glossy tinted windows. Then we’re pulling away from the Den, heading toward Gabriel’s home, side by side in the deep shadowy interior.
A shiver works through me, and Gabriel changes the settings to warm me. I feel hot air blowing on me, but it can’t touch the coldness inside me. Only Gabriel’s hands do that, his body as he curves around me, his lips as he murmurs against my temple.
“Thank you,” he says.
“It’s coming apart,” I whisper.
“What is?”
The carefully constructed tangle of lies my father has built. And I’m afraid to see what thread appears next. Afraid to find out the rest of my mother’s story. “Did he really sell me?”
“I’m sorry, Avery.”
Pain can’t touch me now. Grief. Fear. “Keep me,” I say softly. “The rest of the thirty days. Don’t send me away again.”
His arms tighten around me. “I won’t.”
“The pictures.”
“I’ll find out who took them. Who vandalized the house.” Gabriel’s voice is grim. “He’ll wish he hadn’t.”
My eyes close against the possibilities. “I don’t understand. Why now?”
“I had security on the house. When you came to get your photos taken, you mentioned someone had been at your house at night.”
Old terror tightens my chest. “I convinced myself I had imagined that.”
“That would have been the best-case scenario, but I put security on the house anyway. Even after you were with me.”
“Because Daddy was still there.” And I realize that part of the weariness I saw in his eyes was from my father’s injuries. “And you didn’t pay for his care just because of me.”
“Some people think the point of chess is to kill the king. You know the truth.”
“Checkmate. It comes from the Persian verb for to remain. It means he’s helpless. Trapped.” My lashes lower. “Is that what you wanted to do to my father?”
“It’s the ultimate victory. Not that he should die, be made a martyr, mourned by a daughter he doesn’t deserve. I want him trapped in every sense of the word, unable to make another move, but alive and fully aware of his loss.”
“That’s disturbing.”
“That’s chess.”
Realization dawns. “And you stopped security after the auction, after I lost the house and you were no longer responsible for it.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s when someone vandalized it.” Someone who had pictures of me naked. Possibly the same person who had tried to break into my house while I was home. “But why didn’t they come after me directly?”
