by Toby Neal
Connor turned over the hourglass timer for the tea to steep, and set up the chessboard.
The Master came out of the bedroom, knotting an embroidered silk robe. He scratched his belly, his bronze, chiseled chest gleaming. He resembled any man who had recently arisen, satisfied, from the bed of his mistress. “I’ll have tea before we have our game.”
“I thought as much. I have prepared it.” Connor kept his eyes lowered respectfully. “Will Pim Wat be joining us?”
The Master’s gaze sharpened on Connor’s face. “You don’t want her to, do you?”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Connor said.
“You lie, but I know why you do.” The Master smirked, and seated himself on the stool in front of black. He always chose black, and not for the first time, Connor wondered why.
He had to ask now. This may be the last time he had a chance to. “Why always black?”
“The best strategy is to allow my opponent to show their initiative first. A smarter game is in reacting. In chess, and in many other things.”
Connor felt a chill. He narrowed his eyes at the Master. “You didn’t answer my question about whether or not Pim Wat is joining us.”
“She is, but when she is good and ready.” The Master stroked his chin, studying Connor. “Make your move.”
Connor wrenched his attention back to the board. He had to care about this match.
“You’re thinking about something else, already. I’ll beat you that much faster if you don’t focus,” the Master said.
Connor raised his gaze to meet the Master’s. “You are correct. I have something on my mind.”
“Tell me. Perhaps then, we can have a decent game.” The Master leaned back and yawned. His rich silk robe fell open to expose his ripped abs. How old was he? Connor still had no idea.
“I’ve heard from Sophie. She told me that the task force wants me to find a way to capture Pim Wat. They’re offering me immunity in the United States if I do.” When lying, always tell as much of the truth as possible. One of the Master’s earliest lessons; one Connor hadn’t needed. He’d always been good at lying with the wide-eyed gaze of honesty, lending truth to what he was saying.
The Master leaned forward, resting an elbow on the table, his jaw on his hand. “What was your answer?”
“Pim Wat is too important to you to be captured.”
“She is too important. In that, you are correct.”
“Too important to whom?” Pim Wat’s husky voice came from the doorway of the bedroom. She walked down the couple of steps into the living area. Her loosely-knotted robe parted to expose her perfect upper body. She seemed completely unselfconscious of that, but Connor knew better.
He kept his gaze on the chessboard. “The multi-agency team is offering me immunity in return for returning you to them. I told the Master you are too important to him for me to take that deal.”
“Interesting. They are getting desperate.” Pim Wat approached the tea things. “How long has this been steeping?”
“The timer just ran out.” Connor indicated the small hourglass that he had flipped over. Pim Wat removed the metal strainer, setting it in a waiting bowl; she picked up the pot, and poured three cups of tea.
In all of their afternoons or evenings interacting, Pim Wat had never waited on Connor and poured him so much as a glass of water. A good deal more than three drops of poison per person had been dissolved in the pot. Connor’s heart beat with heavy thumps.
“How do you take your tea?” Pim Wat asked, with a glance at him over her shoulder.
Connor swallowed. He had to find a way not to drink the beverage—but even if he had to, would that be so bad? If his life were forfeit, wouldn’t that be just? “Only a little honey.”
The Master indicated the chessboard with an impatient gesture. “Make your move.”
Connor refocused with an effort. He moved his first white pawn forward.
The Master countered quickly with a knight. Connor moved his next pawn.
He was executing a pawn wall. At least this play was something he could do somewhat automatically, once he had initiated the opening.
Pim Wat presented him with his cup of tea on a saucer, complete with a small silver spoon on the side. The tea, an aged Darjeeling, smelled wonderful. “I thought you could add your own honey.”
“Thank you, Mistress.” He took the cup and saucer but set it down quickly because his hands were shaking.
The Master frowned. “I see the shift in your energy field. You’re considering taking their offer.”
“I would never betray you that way, Master.” Connor reached for the rose-embossed honey bowl.
“Yes, you would, if Pim Wat’s daughter was in the offing.” The Master accepted his teacup from Pim Wat. She seated herself on one of the slender gold Louis XIV chairs across from their table, her lips curved in a smile that did not bode well.
“What do you mean?” Connor folded his arms and rested his elbows on the table, studying the board and containing himself with difficulty. They were baiting him!
“Jake is dead, and you still want Sophie,” Pim Wat said baldly.
“I won’t discuss this with you,” Connor snarled.
“Oh, your lapdog has fangs,” Pim Wat told the Master, laying a hand on his sleeve. “He doesn’t like me.”
Connor pulled his self-control together—he was in a far deadlier game right now than chess. “I respect you. That is enough.”
“That is enough,” The Master echoed. He gestured. “Drink your tea. Make your move.”
“No.” Connor’s heart pounded; his mind scrabbled. “I won’t drink anything that woman’s hand has touched.”
Pim Wat’s laugh was sexy, musical and all a woman’s laugh should be. Worst of all, it reminded him of Sophie’s laugh. “You’re wise, Number One.”
The Master turned to her. “I’ve chosen him, Pim Wat! This wasn’t the plan.”
Pim Wat pouted. “We cannot trust him. You need a new Number One.”
Connor slowly released a breath. She was trying to poison him, too! Where was the poison? In the honey? In his cup?
But maybe the two of them would still drink their tea . . . he had to buy time.
Connor gripped his knees because the tremble in his hands had increased. “What have I done to displease you, Mistress?”
“You love my daughter more than you love the Master. Your loyalty is to her.” Pim Wat set her teacup aside.
Connor looked at the Master, and discovered that the man’s penetrating purple gaze was intent upon him. “My Beautiful One has a point. Perhaps I do need a new Number One.”
“No. I am loyal to you alone, Master.” The words tasted like sawdust. Neither of them was fooled. Connor reached for his cup. He had to take a risk. “Together, the three of us make the Yām Khûmkạn strong. Let us toast to our partnership. I will show my loyalty.” He raised his teacup. “But I won’t drink this tea without knowing you believe in me enough to drink, too.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Connor
Connor held his teacup aloft, waiting, staring into the Master’s deep purple eyes. He felt the man’s extraordinary abilities sifting over and through him, searching for any weakness, for the secret he was desperately hiding.
“I, for one, have no problem with this bargain. To health.” Pim Wat lifted her cup to her mouth and took a sip.
The Master moved so quickly that Connor scarcely registered it as he smashed the cup away from Pim Wat’s lips. She cried out as the teacup hit the wall and smashed, and the hot liquid spilled over her open robe.
The Master lunged across the table for Connor. His hands gripped Connor’s throat, squeezing. “You tried to kill us. You are no longer my Number One.”
Black dots closed in, encircling Connor’s vision.
From deep inside Connor, a wellspring of will, determined not to go down, boiled up and strengthened him. Connor slowed time, just as the Master had sped it up seconds before. His hands p
ushed up between the Master’s arms, breaking the hold on his neck.
Connor sprang to his feet, employing all of his strength and abilities as he leaped up with a kick that tossed the chessboard into the air, and caught the Master on the side of the chin. The man flew backward and did a flip, landing on his feet in a ready position as the chess pieces bounced and crashed around them.
Pim Wat, bleeding where the cup had caught against her mouth, stumbled toward the bedroom.
Connor had never done anything but spar with the Master in the past; those bouts had been intense, and he’d always lost. But he couldn’t think of that now; there was no room to concentrate on anything but coming out of this fight alive.
Connor circled the Master, chilled by the smile that curved the man’s lips, by the intensity of his hungry gaze on Connor’s face.
“You don’t really want to kill me. You want to die,” the Master said in that hypnotic voice—he had always been able to plant a suggestion with just a word.
Connor closed his senses to that seductive voice and speeded up time so that they circled each other in a spiral with the force of a tornado’s vortex, a whirl of kicks and punches.
Still the Master was supreme. Blows came out of that corkscrew of spinning energy faster than Connor could even perceive.
He absorbed them. He would not let anything register as pain or damage. He glanced briefly around the room to orient himself, and, like the last time they’d fought, they were circling above the ground at least eighteen inches, nothing but motion and energy.
He had to mix it up; surprise the Master, or the outcome was a foregone conclusion. This wasn’t a fight he could win.
Connor flipped, and as he spun through the air, reached for a throwing knife hidden in the custom-sewn leg pocket of his simple drawstring pants.
Nine had created that pocket for him and concealed the slender blade inside it. “You might need this,” he’d told Connor, handing him the pants. “A hidden weapon.”
“No honor in that,” Connor had said, frowning.
“No honor when you’re dead, either,” his friend had responded.
Connor pulled the simple, deadly weapon, brought it up underhand in his fist, and dove forward. He thrust blindly and hit something in the wild spin of energy. He felt a warm liquid gush over his hand.
And the next moment, he was falling.
Connor landed heavily on top of the Master’s legs as both of them hit the floor.
The knife was buried in the Master’s gut. Connor still held it. He and the Master lay there for a moment, gasping for breath.
Connor put his hand up on the Master’s shoulder, holding him down. The Master spread his arms in surrender.
“You don’t have to die. I don’t want you to die,” Connor said. “We can fix this.”
“Do you think there is anywhere in the world that I can’t reach you if I’m still alive?” A bubble of blood formed at the corner of the Master’s mouth. “Do what you set out to do.”
“I don’t want to!” Connor cried in anguish. He pulled the knife from the Master’s abdomen as he sat back on his heels. Blood welled immediately, and Connor covered the wound with his free hand. “I will call for the Healer. You’ll be all right.”
A ghost of humor lurked in the Master’s remarkable eyes. “I thought I’d have more time, but that’s always how it is. This is your final graduation as my Number One. Finish me, as I finished the Master before me.”
Connor felt his chest tighten and his eyes fill. “Please. There must be some other way.”
“Duality.” The Master said. “You have to take my place, or die trying.” His teeth bared in a bloody grin as he went for Connor’s throat.
Connor stabbed him. And stabbed him and stabbed him and stabbed him again, weeping the while. He collapsed over the Master’s body, giving way to harsh, gasping cries of the deepest agony.
He couldn’t look at the body he lay upon; but he could smell the fresh coppery scent of the Master’s blood. That blood would be on him forever, staining him, soaking into his very soul.
The Master had won.
He was now the Master.
Chapter Forty-Three
Pim Wat
Pim Wat’s lips buzzed and tingled, even though she had ingested barely a sip of the tea before the Master dashed the cup away from her mouth. She hurried up the three steps out of the sunken living area, terror making her heart pound as Connor and the Master flew at each other in a confrontation she knew could only end in death for one of them.
Had she been poisoned enough to be disabled? Black spots began spinning in her vision as she headed for the bedside table. She had to get away in case Connor won the fight, and she was in no shape to help the Master.
Just behind the table was a loose stone that opened a hidden exit point from the room, a tunnel so secret that, as far as she knew, she was the only one trusted to know about it. The Master had built it years ago, and had made sure that everyone who worked on it had died.
Pim Wat had just enough strength to push the loose stone. A strange numbness, a lack of responsiveness in her arms and legs had begun to take control as she threw herself across the threshold into the narrow space. The door, nothing more than a panel of three stones identical to those in the wall, slid shut silently, automatically.
Pim Wat lay flat on the cool, rough stone floor of the tunnel.
She lay there, no longer even able to close her eyelids.
Her mind scrambled frantically. She’d barely had a sip. Whatever Connor had put in the tea had been in the whole pot. Damn that trickster, she should have killed him as soon as the Master chose him!
And how had he gotten the poison? Had to be that ungrateful peasant, Kupa. She must have used the same one Pim Wat had administered to the plastic surgeons; it was the only poison the woman was familiar with.
Pim Wat hadn’t taken enough to die, or she’d be dead already—the stuff was fast acting. She was probably going to be fine, but how long would she be paralyzed?
No way to tell, and the stone wall was too thick for her to hear the fight going on in the other room—but it would be fierce, and to the death.
The Master would know where she was, and come and get her if he won.
She could relax. She could let go. She had every faith in her lover.
With repeated effort and total focus, she was finally able to close her eyelids, and it felt like a victory.
Maybe she slept for a time; maybe she was unconscious. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was that sensation was returning to Pim Wat’s extremities, a tingling to her limbs as if waking from being asleep. She wiggled her toes, her fingers; took a great deep breath that pressed her rib cage into the stone, then lifted her back. Air rushed in and flushed her with fresh oxygen. She panted as deep and hard as she could, trying to expel the toxin the only way she had available—through pumping oxygen into her blood, and pushing that through to her kidneys and liver.
The Master had not come.
He had to be dead.
The realization broke over her with a crash like a wave, sucking her under.
Pim Wat had wondered if she wasn’t like other women because she felt no remorse for the things she did. She had tried to learn compassion for the Master’s sake. He had wanted her to, though he accepted her the way she was.
But this feeling . . . this was grief. Pim Wat recognized it, curling herself into a tight ball, the shape she had been in her mother’s womb. If only she could return there and begin her life again. But she couldn’t, and because he hadn’t come for her, they would be looking for her.
She had to get out before they pinned this on her—that’s what she would have done if she had been the survivor of that fight.
There was no way to tell how much time had passed; the passage was completely dark. But Pim Wat knew the way; she had used it before.
She rolled onto her knees, and used her hands, clawing up the rough wall, to pull herself to her feet. She s
tumbled down the pitch-dark tunnel, tightening her robe to protect her skin from the rough stone, her mind racing ahead to the next steps.
She exited at last, near the outer wall of the courtyard and the helicopter pad.
The Master had had escape as his top priority when he created this exit, and it served Pim Wat well as she roused the pilot from the “always-ready” hut built in the corner of the helipad.
“I need to go see my sister,” she told him. “You know the address. It’s a family emergency.” The man nodded, knuckling sleep from his eyes and running to the chopper. Pim Wat looked at the stars overhead, guessing the time. No more than an hour had passed since she had lain in the tunnel—they hadn’t had time to raise the alarm yet.
“Hurry,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat. “My sister is in danger.”
The pilot hastened to obey, handing her a helmet. She put it on and buckled into her harness. She usually rode in back, disliking chopper flights with their noise, fumes, and bumpy air travel—but it was dark out on a windless night, and she was fleeing for her life. “Turn off the radio,” she told the pilot. “I want to rest.”
He flicked the switch without question.
The chopper lifted off. Energy came back into Pim Wat as they hurtled above the black jungle, arrowing toward the city. Her roiling emotions began to settle like the feathers on a bird coming to rest.
She rested her head against the Plexiglas window and planned as they flew.
Pim Wat redirected the chopper to the Bangkok airport, telling the pilot that she would take a cab from there to meet her sister at their lawyer’s. Though he raised his brows in question, used to dropping her off right in her sister’s neighborhood, she smiled and told him he deserved to have a night on the town on the Yām’s expense account.