Chapter 6 #2
“You’re the best player on the planet and you let me sit down this morning and play Karrec with you?”
“Of course I did. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, someone else might think of themselves as so high and mighty, that playing Karrec with a lowly human who might not fully understand the game, was beneath them.”
He shrugs. “That wouldn’t be me.”
“Yes,” I smile. “I agree that’s not like you at all.”
And then he grins at me, and it transforms his whole serious face. “Which means if you ever do beat me —and you will— that will make you the best player on Timbur.”
I stare at him.
He’s just offered me his title, like it’s nothing.
Like he can’t wait to hand it over. Like losing to me would be the best thing that ever happened to him.
He might literally be the most honorable male I’ve ever met in my entire life.
“Finally,” I manage, around the strange tightness in my throat. “A planet to conquer.”
He laughs and hesitates, and then, he says with a hint of shyness, “Do you want to come inside my room and see?”
Maxon’s room is smaller than I expected, and it tells me everything.
The walls are covered in awards, plaques and tokens.
I can see the progression, the cheap early ones giving way to finer and finer work, a whole wall of a life spent quietly being the best at something while no one watched.
Old boards are everywhere. A battered, cheap little starter set on a shelf, the kind a child could afford.
A better one beside it, a beautiful old thing, the wood worn smooth and dark at the corners where his hands have rested for years.
“Maxon.” My voice has gone soft. “This is wonderful. Thank you for sharing this with me.”
“You’re the only one I thought might like it as much as I do. They tease me for it.” He’s watching me look at his walls with an expression I can’t quite read, like he’s nervous? “It’s easier to keep it down here.”
I walk along the wall of awards “My grandfather taught me how to play Chess.” I touch his worn old board, the smooth dark corners.
“He was a pro in his youth. He had an old set like this, his father’s before him.
There wasn’t money for much, but there was always the board.
Rainy afternoons, after school, the two of us.
” I have to stop for a second. “He’s gone now and no one saved that board.
But I have all the memories.” I tap my temple, the same place all the stolen secrets live.
“Every game. Every opening he taught me. It’s the only thing of his I’ve got. ”
We stand in his small room full of his quiet life, and something has changed. I look up and notice he’s now standing quite close and neither of us is talking about Karrec anymore.
I’m suddenly, painfully aware of how near he is, the heat of his body and how good he always smells.
The breadth of him blocking out the rest of the room.
And before I can stop it my gaze moves to his mouth.
And once I’ve done it I can’t seem to stop, can’t stop looking at the shape of his luscious lips, wondering what it would be like to go up on my toes and find out how he kisses.
Would it be his first kiss? Would I be the one showing this magnificent male how to kiss?
He’s a virgin. All Xylan are virgins until their claiming.
Because I’m human I’ve been able to pleasure mate, which has happened a few times in the past. This means if we did perform the ceremony, I’d be the one who was more experienced.
And then I shift on my feet, because I’m so very attracted to him, I can’t handle all the heat and need.
Whether he even knows how. Whether I’d be the one to show him.
The thought sends a slow, traitorous heat all through me.
The thing I want is right here, one bare touch away, and I can’t have it.
Not because he’d refuse me — I don’t think this male would refuse me anything — but because nothing is small with him.
A kiss isn’t just a kiss. Everything is forever, and I came here running for my life, not looking for forever.
I look at his mouth and ache, and yet I keep my gloved hands at my sides and make myself remember all the reasons I can’t have him right now.
Maxon inhales, as if he’s scenting me again. His eyes go gone dark and still. He’s watching me look at him, and I know that he knows, because of course he does — he can probably scent exactly what I’m feeling.
For one suspended second neither of us moves.
Then he draws in another slow breath and eases back the smallest step, giving us both room, the way he always does. And when he speaks again his voice is lower, careful, like a male deliberately steering us both toward safer ground.
“Have you ever thought about staying on Timbur,” he questions.
“When this is finished.” And then, with that absolute certainty he has, the thing I’ve never once heard him doubt, “And it will be finished. I’m going to see to it.
So when you’re safe, would you ever think about making a place like Timbur your home? ”
“These have been the best few days I can remember,” I say, with all the honesty in my heart.
“Genuinely. You know how much I enjoy being here with you. We’ve spent only a small time together and already I feel we’re…
close friends. And of course I want more than friendship with you.
But it’s hard for me to answer that question right now, because I can’t stop thinking that I’m the reason something terrible is going to come down on every single one of you.
That this family survived having their parents murdered and their brother banished, and I’m the next thing that breaks them.
And that if I just…left, disappeared…took it all somewhere far away from these children and these people…
the danger would go with me and you’d all be safe. ”
“No.” He says it quietly, but there’s no give in it at all.
“We’ve been over this before. You need to stop thinking in this way.
The danger doesn’t go with you, Hallie. You proved that yourself, in there, when we were talking with my brother and Ines tonight.
House Vaszneth was coming for this whole planet long before they ever heard your name.
The plan was already moving. The experiments are already out there in the dead field where no one looks.
If you vanished tomorrow, every bit of it would still be rolling toward us, the only difference is we’d be facing it blind, and you’d be alone on a strange world with no one in the universe standing between you and them. ”
He takes a step closer. “There are two dangers. The big one that’s coming for all of us whether you stay or go.
My brothers and I are going to keep that one at bay.
That’s the whole family’s fight now, and it was always going to be, with you or without you.
And then there’s the danger to you, specifically.
The House that wants the one witness who can sink them erased before she can talk.
” His voice drops. “That one’s mine. I’m here to keep you safe.
Not the compound. Not the planet. You. And I will.
That’s not a thing I’m hoping for, Hallie.
It’s a thing that’s going to happen, because I’ve decided it, and I have never once failed to do a thing I set my whole self to. ”
I can’t breathe right.
I have spent my entire life being the one who watches the board.
The one who guards her own king in the corner because there’s no one else who’ll do it.
Three years on Chronos being trusted with everyone’s secrets and trusted with nobody’s care.
And this enormous, gentle, overlooked male is standing in a room full of the trophies he never told anyone about, telling me — plainly, like it’s already settled, like it’s the most obvious fact in the universe — that he’s going to stand between me and the dark.
That my safety is his job. No one has ever told me that before.
“Okay,” I whisper, because it’s all I have, and because I don’t trust myself to say anything else, because all my feels I have for him might come tumbling out, much too early.