by Eva Chase
I recognized a few of the figures already in the park from the Spades—Kip was there, and a couple others from one of the side camps, as well as a few of the city people who’d fully recovered in our care. It wasn’t much of a meeting, though. Really, we all needed to get some sleep at this point. I could figure out where Hatter and Theo had gotten to in the morning.
Kip and the others were moving among the Clubbers who were slumped or meandering here and there across the park’s lawns, most of them hazy but waking up enough to look confused. The bunch who’d followed Chess and me ambled into the park and glanced around uncertainly, their posture wary.
The excitement I’d been able to generate in the battle with the guards had waned, and now there wasn’t much left but fatigue and anxiety around me. That was about all I had left in me, too.
I groped for something to say, some gesture to make, that might put them at ease enough that they’d find somewhere to rest. Nothing emerged from my tired brain.
Chess peered around us and at me, and a wider grin stretched his lips. He bounded away from me and leapt onto a nearby hedge, catching the attention of everyone around the park as he teetered on the landing. He caught his balance and dipped into a bow as if that had been part of the performance—which knowing him, maybe it had.
“What a day!” he called out in his playful tenor. He sauntered along the top of the hedge with a bit of a sway as he found his footing. “Did you see all the exploits of our Red Queen? It’s enough to make you wonder why we’ve been dodging the Hearts’ Guard all this time, isn’t it? The look on their faces when the jabberwocks came trotting into the city…”
He let his jaw drop and clutched his chest in mock panic before scrambling backward so frantically leaves flitted off the hedge from under his feet. A tittering spread through his audience. A smile slipped across my face.
“And then,” Chess said, righting himself, “they think, ‘Ah, well, we can handle a few jabberwocks if we come out with every bit of weaponry we own.” He lumbered forward with shoulders up to his ears in a joking imitation of the guards’ march. “No match for our queen, though. She just hops right up on one of those jabberwocks and sends them running back home like they’ve got fire at their heels. Because they do.” He made a panicked dash across the hedge and spun around with a wink.
The crowd watched him avidly, clapping in encouragement. Chess gave another little bow. “I think we deserve to enjoy ourselves while they’re shivering in their pretty palace,” he said. “Take a load off and make the most of what true freedom can be.”
He tipped over, falling onto his back with a delighted smile as if he meant to fall asleep right there. The second he hit the hedge, he blinked out of sight. Then his grin appeared, gleaming as it floated against the night.
More laughter carried through the gathered Clubbers. Someone found a guitar leaning against a nearby tree and started playing it—not the frenetic music that had filled the city before, but soft strums of a city at peace. People sank down on the grass, talking in quiet voices, their faces light again.
Chess turned visible again as he hopped down from the hedge. He strolled back to me with his light blue eyes twinkling. I beamed back at him, a surge of affection washing away every other emotion inside me.
I might have protected these people from the guards, but Chess was already bringing them back to the joy they deserved. The joy I wanted Wonderland to be made of.
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish by playing a fool,” he said. “Make much of how little our enemies really are, and we feel like a whole lot more.”
“I don’t think there’s anything foolish about that,” I said, and then I couldn’t help myself. I gripped the front of his shirt and bobbed up on my toes to kiss him.
This intimacy didn’t feel as urgent as yesterday’s, that first real coming together after a painful separation. This time, his kiss and his touch was all another sort of joy. I leaned into his well-muscled body, wanting to soak in his warmth and his tenderness with every particle in me. Chess teased his fingers into my hair and tipped my head to claim my lips at an even more enticing angle.
There were people all around us who might be watching, but I found I didn’t care one bit. Wonderlanders didn’t appear to have any qualms about enjoying each other where their neighbors could see. I wasn’t about to do the full horizontal tango in front of dozens of them, but I had no problem with letting them see how much I wanted this man.
They should know their queen had as much love in her as she did defiance.
Desire unfurled through me with the heat of Chess’s mouth against mine. I gripped his shirt harder, the ache of need in my core bringing my hips against his. He hummed low in his throat, his tongue darting out to part my lips, and I knew I wasn’t going to want to stop.
But he might. I couldn’t make assumptions, not when the last woman he’d dedicated much of himself to had torn him apart so badly. He’d told me, the first night we’d come together—when he’d surreptitiously arranged for Hatter to join our interlude—that he didn’t trust himself to be able to offer enough on his own.
I kissed him back hard, my tongue tangling with his, and then I eased back a few inches. It took me a moment to recover my words.
“Is there somewhere nearby we can talk without any spectators?” I asked quietly.
Chess’s eyebrows rose, but after a pause, he nodded. “Why don’t you come see the closest thing I’ve had to a home, for many years past?”
He had a home—near here? I’d gotten the impression he just roamed around, resting wherever he felt like it with whatever company he felt like keeping.
He tucked his hand around mine and led me beyond the hedge and past a stand of saplings. Not far from the park’s fountain, we reached a dense thicket, nearly as tall as Chess and maybe fifteen feet across, the spiny leaves such a dark green they were almost black.
Chess prodded his fingers into the brambles and opened up a gap with some careful shifting. I followed him through the narrow gap into a hollow in the center of the thicket. The brambles pulled back over a stretch of grass only slightly larger than Chess would have been lying down.
He sat on the thin grass at one end of the hollow and motioned for me to join him. I sank down tentatively. A faint glow from the nearest lamp seeped over us.
“This is where I’d taken a mind to sleep the night the Queen froze time,” Chess said, his gaze drifting over the brambles around him. “I suppose it was for decades I woke up here every morning. Not a bad bit of shelter, as shelter went in times like that.”
Oh. That was what he’d meant about it being his “home.”
My throat tightened in sympathy. Hatter might have ended up in his armchair every morning rather than a bed, but at least he’d been inside his apartment, on a cushioned surface. Theo had managed to arrange a bed of his choosing inside the Tower. Chess had cycled back to a bit of ground in the middle of the park every morning.
Maybe it wasn’t so surprising he’d had trouble believing he deserved better than the Duchess. Or that he’d been tempted by the extravagances of the palace in the first place.
I took off my sword and set down my scepter at the far end of the hollow, and then scooted closer to him. Chess wrapped me in his embrace from behind. With his intoxicating licorice-and-wine smell making my mouth water, it felt perfectly natural to tilt my head back against his shoulder so he could recapture my lips. He kissed me so easily I started to think we might not need to talk at all.
Chess claimed my mouth slow and sweet, deeper with each kiss, his fingers trailing along my jaw. Fresh desire quivered through my body. I turned in his arms to face him, just slightly taller than him when I knelt between his thighs. He ran his hands down my side as I kissed him again, but only a hint of that contact carried through the woven metal of my armor. That definitely needed to come off.
As I leaned back and pulled the vest up over my head, hunger darkened Chess’s eyes, but his shoulders stiffened at th
e same time. I tossed the vest over to join the rest of my royal equipment and hesitated. When he leaned in for another kiss, I stopped him with a gentle hand on his cheek.
“I want you,” I said. “I want— It’s been good, before, with Hatter and Theo joining in. I’ll be happy to do that again. But I want us to have our moments that we don’t share with anyone else. I love you, Chess. Every bit as much as I love them. You don’t have to give some perfect performance. I want you, nothing more or less. If you’re not ready to be with just me, that’s okay. It’s up to you how far we go. I just thought you should know.”
Chess stared at me. His throat worked. For a second, like in the moment weeks ago when I’d first asked to kiss him, I thought he was going to turn me away. Then in one swift motion, he slid his hand over my hair and tugged me to him, rising to meet me at the same time.
We kissed with a hot tangle of tongues, his other hand roaming under my shirt, searing my skin with need. When he tipped me over on my back, looming over me, I settled into the grass eagerly. He gazed down at me, the light in his eyes giddy if a bit frantic.
“My queen should have everything she desires,” he said, his voice gone smoky with his own desire.
Something in me balked at those words. “I don’t want you to have sex with me because I’m your queen.”
His gaze softened. “No,” he said. “You’re right. I’m here because you’re my lovely. My Lyssa.”
Then he was kissing me again, urging my hips to arch toward him. The hard length of his erection fit against my core through our clothes, and an eager noise burst from my throat. Chess smiled against my mouth. He pressed against me with soft, rhythmic hitches that sent pleasure and longing sparking through every inch of me. I scrabbled at his shirt, needing more of him.
Chess peeled his shirt off and eased up my dress. As he reclaimed my lips, one of his hands traveled over my chest with a teasing flick over my breasts, across my belly, to settle between my legs. He stroked over my clit with a more precise pressure than the bulge in his pants had offered and then dipped his fingers beneath the fabric of my panties, lower, until they could slick right up inside the place where I was most wanting.
I whimpered into his mouth. He groaned in response at the feel of me, already soaked with desire. His fingers worked deeper, the heel of his hand rubbing my clit. I squirmed as I ran my fingers over the planes of bare muscle down his back, solid and smooth and coiled with effort focused completely on me in this moment.
“Mmm,” he murmured, and ducked his head down to kiss my neck with a scrape of his fangs. A gasp escaped me, and his fingers plunged right to the sweet spot inside me. I came with a burst of bliss and a cry I couldn’t contain.
Chess beamed down at me, looking the very picture of satisfied, as if it didn’t matter to him at all that his cock was still straining for attention.
“Happy with that, are you?” I asked, breathless and teasing.
He chuckled. “I think it’ll do for a start.”
“In that case…”
I yanked at the button on his pants, and he kicked them off. Somewhere in the middle of another scorching kiss, I lost my panties. Good riddance. I slid my hand between us and gripped his erection through his boxer-briefs. Chess growled, and a moment later his undergarments were no longer in the picture either. I raised my legs to his hips instinctively, and he drove into me so hard and fast I saw stars.
“Chess,” I gasped, and he chuckled again, rawer this time. We rocked together in a blissful muddle of stuttered kisses and shifting limbs, his cock thrusting deeper with each brilliant pulse, his heat and his scent engulfing me. If it wasn’t perfect, then it was perfectly Chess, unpredictable and jubilant. Another wave of ecstasy built up inside me sharp and swift, as much as I wanted to linger in this pleasure.
My peak shuddered through me, and my core clamped around him. As I rode out the wave of bliss, my head tipping back against the grass, Chess let out another groan. He came with me, his face buried against the crook of my neck, his hand clamped on my thigh to lock us even more tightly together.
He stayed braced over me as I came trembling down from that high. A grin I suspected looked rather goofy curled my lips. Chess grinned back at me.
“Now I’m happy,” he said, in a voice that held nothing but joy.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chess
Somehow the Tower apartment looked more familiar with its owner in it. Although perhaps Theo wasn’t truly its owner anymore. I supposed the city would have to sort out the matter of whether a Prince of Hearts could also be the Inventor once we could say the city was fully ours.
Theo rifled through the drawers of his worktables and the bins on the shelves with the efficiency you’d expect from a man who could construct a bomb—a small one, anyway—in fifteen minutes flat. The contacts rattled and clicked. We’d already filled one sack, now slung over my shoulder, with materials he thought he could make good use of. All the rifling had sent a sharp metallic sent into the air. Familiar as they were, the blank white walls around us left me uneasy.
All right, it might not have been just them causing my uneasiness. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The pleasure I’d shared with Lyssa yesterday night had started my thoughts off on other tracks, some more welcome than others. But even as I’d dodged the memories of less pleasant intimacies, it had occurred to me that tools used once could serve fresh purposes.
“Theo?” I said. His claimed name tasted odd on my tongue after all those years referring to him by the title White Knight, but I’d noticed he got a bit twitchy when anyone directed that label at him since his return.
He swiped his dark curls back from his face and fixed his gaze on me, puzzled but with his full attention. That was why he’d made a good White Knight—and a good Inventor, I supposed. No matter what else was occupying him, he could pick up on how important a matter was to someone else, and then it became important to him too.
He could have been the Prince of Razorweed Town for all I cared, as long as he was still that same man.
“Is something wrong, Chess?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Possibly the opposite. I only—I got thinking last night… Do you remember, quite a lot of years ago, Hatter asked you to make a device that could siphon a memory from a person’s mind?”
Theo straightened up. “He told you about that? It was an experiment. It seemed to work somewhat on the Spades who volunteered for testing, minor memories I constructed and then removed, and I assumed it ended up working well enough, since Hatter was never arrested for the crime he said he had to wipe, but I wouldn’t have tried if he hadn’t said the situation was dire. I don’t like meddling with minds.”
Ah. I supposed it was too late to retreat from this line of inquiry now.
“The dire situation was actually mine,” I admitted. “One of the Diamonds, one who had shown an interest in hurting me, knew something about me that would have made me a very wanted man if she’d chosen to share it with the Queen. Hatter said you might be able to help.” I had the cat-like urge to swipe my hand across my face in embarrassment. “I would have come to you myself, but we hadn’t exactly moved in the same circles back then.”
And then, as our lives had shifted, I’d ended up one of the White Knight’s most regular companions, and Hatter had withdrawn from the Spades into domesticity. Funny how these things turned around.
Theo considered me for a long moment. “I have to wonder what you had to hide before you were involved with the Spades, but I’d imagine if you wanted to tell me, you would have. It doesn’t really matter who used the device. I’m glad it helped you. Why do you bring it up now?”
My innards unclenched. Part of me had been expecting him to ask the question he’d just dodged for me. That wasn’t how Theo usually operated, though. He wasn’t his mother’s son, not really.
“I just thought—there was a lot of power in that device. And what Lyssa wants to do is change people’s minds, not
bludgeon them into submission or slaughter dissenters. I’m not sure what other ways you could use the general concept, but perhaps there’s something useful there.”
Theo’s expression turned thoughtful. “That’s a good point. Let me make sure I have the supplies I used for that. I think there were a few things Dum had to pick up specially…”
He rummaged through the drawers and then wandered off to his other rooms. When he returned, the sack he’d been carrying was bulging even larger than mine. His mouth was curved in a subdued but pleased smile.
“I think we’ve got everything I’m likely to use in the next few days.”
“You don’t expect to move back in here any time soon?” I asked as we headed for the elevator.
Theo grimaced. “We’ll see what the future holds when we get there. For the time being, the people I want to be helping are down on the ground. I spent too long watching over the city from afar up here, I think. I’ll be back to visit Mirabel, since I think she’ll be happiest here for now, but otherwise I’d like to stay close to the streets.”
When we came out into the warm mid-morning sun at the base of the Tower, Mallo was waiting for us. She darted over with furtive twitches of her eyes along the road, even though there’d been no sign of a renewed attack from the palace since the one Lyssa had pushed back last night. The only sounds I could hear were relaxed voices of recovering city folk chatting with each other down the street, but I braced myself for bad news all the same.
“The Otherlan—The Red Queen already knows,” she said, looking at Theo. “But I thought you should be part of the discussion too. A representative has snuck out of the palace to try to strike a deal with us—between us and the Diamonds.”
At the word “Diamonds,” my blood ran cold. “What representative?” I said, even though she hadn’t been directing her comments at me. “Who came?”