Chapter 8 Conservatory Chess #2
He says, “My father taught me chess. When I was small. He used to say that every piece is a person, and that a game is just a story about who survives and who doesn’t.”
“Which were you?” I ask, not unkindly.
He sets the bishop down, facing me. “A pawn, mostly. Occasionally a knight. Never a king.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs. “I never wanted to be in charge. It’s too lonely at the end.”
I lean in, elbows on the table. “Did you like living here?”
He considers, then moves a rook, pinning my queen. “There are worse prisons. At least the ghosts are predictable.”
“Are your parents still around?”
He lowers his head for a moment. “Killed in a fire. Year after I was sent here.”
“I’m so sorry, Larkin.”
He shrugs. “They didn’t want me anyway.”
“And my aunt?” I prompt.
He advances, takes my rook. His voice is so low I have to lean forward to hear.
“She saved me, after a fashion. Fed me, educated me, made sure I never got too comfortable.” He grins, a flash of teeth.
“She had a gift for keeping people in their place. There were more people around back then. She had friends stay here too, off and on. More staff.” He waves his arm around for affect.
“It wasn’t like this, so stiff and lonely. ”
I sacrifice my bishop, a calculated risk. “And Lane?”
The name lands with a dull thud. Larkin’s hands go still, the bishop forgotten.
“Lane has always been here. The staff calls him a fixture.” He finally looks at me, straight on, and there is something wild in the set of his mouth. “I used to envy him. His certainty. He never doubted who he was, or what the house wanted from him.”
“And you did?” I ask.
He laughs, sharp and metallic. “I never knew what it wanted from me. Still don’t.”
I take the bishop he neglected, roll it between my own fingers. The surface is warm, the indent of his grip still fresh.
“I restore art for a living,” I say, apropos of nothing. I’m taken by Larkin’s honesty and feel like I should share. “Old paintings, usually. Sometimes statues, icons, things that are so broken no one else will touch them.”
He arches an eyebrow. “Is that satisfying?”
I think about it, then nod. “Sometimes. It’s slow work. You learn a lot about patience when you’re repairing something that never wanted to be whole in the first place.”
He absorbs this, then says, “Is that what you’re planning to do here? Fix it?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe I just like seeing how things break.”
There is a silence, deep and mutual, filled with the sound of ice ticking down the windows.
The chess match resumes, but it is more an act of mutual distraction than real competition.
With each move, our hands draw closer to the center.
The gap between us shrinks, and I am acutely aware of the heat radiating off his skin, the way his thumb flexes after every move, as if breaking an old habit.
At one point, he captures my queen, and the moment lands like a physical blow. He lifts the piece and turns it over, inspecting the underside as if searching for a flaw.
He says, “This one always reminded me of your mother.”
I stare at the board, then at him. “You knew her?”
He nods, once. “She visited, when she could. I remember the perfume, the voice. She was kind to me, in a way no one else bothered to be.”
I want to ask more, but something in his face stops me. He looks at the piece again, then sets it down, softer than before.
“She never let me come here.”
“Probably trying to protect you.”
I wonder what that means but decide I don’t want to know enough to ask.
“You miss her,” he says.
It isn’t a question, and I don’t answer.
The game winds down. The world outside has gone almost black, and the only light is the orange shimmer of the fire and the blue refracted through the icy glass above.
There are only a handful of pieces left on the board.
We are both, by now, leaning forward, elbows touching, heads almost level.
The tension is less competitive, more conspiratorial.
We are two survivors, negotiating the rules of a new world.
I say, “Have you ever been to the city?”
He shakes his head, amused. “Once. I took a train. It was—horrifying. Too much of everything.”
“Did you go alone?”
He looks down at his hands, then up at me. “No. Whitby came. She shadowed me for two days, made sure I didn’t get lost.”
The story is ridiculous. I imagine Whitby trailing behind him through crowded terminals and grim cafes, cataloguing his every movement, reporting back to Maeve like some secret policeman.
“You like it here,” I say.
He considers, then nods. “I like knowing where I stand.”
“Do you?” I ask, and I let the question hang.
He leans in, so close I can see the flecks of green and gold in his eyes. “I do, right now.”
We play the endgame in near silence, every move a negotiation, a confession. When he finally wins, it is with a flourish—his pawn, promoted, sweeping across the board to deliver checkmate. He waits, lets the finality of it settle, then sits back.
I feel strangely bereft, like something vital has been removed.
Larkin watches me, face unreadable, then reaches across the board, his hand stopping just short of mine.
“If it’s any consolation,” he says, “you lasted longer than anyone ever has.”
I take his hand, more to prove a point than out of gratitude. His grip is warm, his skin rough at the edges. For a moment, we are locked together, both unwilling to let go.
He squeezes harder. The board rattles, the queen skids, but his grip is insistent and hot. I don’t pull away. The air changes—less oxygen, more fire—and Larkin vaults the game in a single, desperate lunge that ends with his mouth on mine.
It’s not a kiss, not at first. It’s a clashing of teeth and bone, the sharp taste of blood where his stubble grazes my chin, the stink of cold sweat and old smoke. His fingers dig into my wrist, hard enough to bruise.
I open my mouth to protest, or maybe to draw breath, but he’s already there: tongue, teeth, the acrid tang of wine and defeat.
My own hand comes up, instinct, to press him back, but I find myself curling it in the fabric at his shoulder instead, pinching hard enough to make him hiss.
His knee slams into the table’s edge, shoving it back, and in the next motion I am wrenched off my chair and onto the floor, my heels skidding and my balance stolen.
The chessboard crashes down with a convulsion of ivory and ebony; a handful of pawns roll under the radiators, scattering like startled rodents. My head knocks hard against the flagstone, a bright spike of pain lighting up my awareness.
There is no confusion about what is happening, only how quickly and greedily his hunger has decided to announce itself.
His hands—one on my throat, the other braced by my hip—are all I know, the rest of the world receding into a thin, cold blur.
His breath is an exhale of greenhouse heat, honeyed with the memory of last night’s liquor, sharp with the mineral tang of need.
He pins me, but not with the full force that I expect—a restraint, a pressure meant as much for demonstration as dominance. The tension is a filament stretched between us, humming with electricity and threat.
His mouth finds my jaw, then the base of my ear, and for a second I forget every coherent objection I might have rehearsed.
He bites down, just above the pulse, and the skin lights up with a bright, animal shock.
I’m not sure if I gasp or snarl, but I twist underneath him, and he laughs—a sound so low and private I feel it in the space between my ribs.
“Larkin,” I say, but it’s a warning only in form.
“I’m not stopping,” he says, biting a path along my neck.
“I know you want this.”He unzips my sweater with the same precision he used to set up the chessboard: quick, neat, no wasted effort.
His hand glances my sternum, an electric slide of skin against skin, and all my breath pools shallow and sharp at the base of my throat.
I try to make a joke, something to puncture the enormity of what’s happening—“So this is what losing feels like”—but he’s already kissing me again, swallowing the words before they can surface.
His palm traces my ribs, then pries my hips up off the stone with a single, insistent grip.
We skid together across the cold floor. His knees pin both sides of my leg, and every shiver of protest is recalibrated into a new hunger, a kind of mutual violence turned back on itself.
My fingers lace the back of his neck, anchor there.
I want his weight and I want his heat and I want to open myself to him in every way I can.
The cold bites where our skin is exposed, measuring out the increments of pleasure and pain in perfect, freezing symmetry. He’s not gentle, even when he tries; every motion is intention layered over accident, every touch sharpened by a history of having none.
My mind flickers back to last night, to Lane’s instruction at the fire, the warmth of his hand over mine, patient and sure.
There is none of that patience here. Larkin is all insistence, every movement a dare, a negotiation with no interest in compromise.
I try to leverage my knee into his ribs, but he grabs my thigh and pins it flat, lips hot on my collarbone, his breath skating down the length of my exposed skin.
The gamesmanship is still there, but it has mutated—a chess match turned bare-knuckle brawl. He hooks his fingers in my waistband, dragging the fabric down my hips without ceremony; the cold licks at my skin, a shock so exquisite I almost arch off the floor.
He slides further down, mouth pressing urgent, wet heat to the inside of my thigh, and then I realize—his hands are shaking.
Only a little, but enough that I want to reach for him, anchor him as much as myself.
I don't. I let him have his way, let his teeth find the sensitive seam just above my knee, let the anticipation bloom and then crash into the real thing.
His mouth on me is not what I expected; it's rough and greedy and relentless, but then—so is he. I dig my heels against the cold, slip my hand into his tangle of hair, scrape my nails along his scalp until he groans into me, and the vibration almost untethers my bones.
He works me methodically, tongue insistent, fingers spreading me wider. It builds, the pace crueler, all teeth and want, until he finds a pulsepoint with his tongue and does not let go. Every sound in the room turns to static.
The ache starts at the base of my spine and spreads outward, fire and ice, fighting for supremacy.
I hear myself gasp, a fractured thing, and I’m almost humiliated by how quickly I’m undone—but Larkin only pushes harder, thumb tracing impossible circles, tongue mapping the edge of pain and pleasure until my vision whites out.
I come with a shudder so sharp I think I might snap, my hips bucking up to meet his mouth, my hands crushing his hair to my skin. I don’t recognize the sound that escapes my mouth.
He holds, rides it out, relentless as gravity, until I sag and the world folds back into color and shape.
At last, silence. Or rather, the silence of breath, of nerves rewiring, of heartbeat finding its way back to steady rhythm.
He rests his forehead against my thigh, the heat of him branding the inside of my knee as his breath steadies, deepens. When he looks up, I see the mask stripped away . . . lips swollen, hair a mess of deliberate ruin. My pulse is a riot.
"You always this obedient when you lose?" he says.
I don’t have the strength for words, so I make a noncommittal grunt.
He peels himself off the floor with a violence almost equal to what put him there, and for a minute I think he will say something—something raw, or real, or impossible to admit. But he only sits back on his heels, forcibly calm, hands neatly folded over his knees as if reciting penance.
He fishes a single black pawn from under the table, spins it in his fingers, and gives me a look so leveled, so calculating.
“You’re starting to learn what the house wants from you. It’s best if we all play our parts.”