LITMIR.BIZ

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with as much innocence as she could muster. “Fine, sir. Fine. Just a little tired.”

      “You do look tired.”

      She didn’t respond. What was she supposed to say? Thanks?

      “How is your leg, my dear? Do you feel well enough to come back to work officially?”

      “Yes!” The word came out a little too loudly, a little too eagerly. She couldn’t help it. Yes, she wanted to get back to work. Wanted to have something to do besides sitting around her apartment being mocked by the empty walls, by the empty spot next to her on the sagging couch. Wanted something to do aside from avoiding having Lex inside, because she knew if she invited him into her apartment he would expect to be allowed into her body as well, and she didn’t think she could face that conversation.

      Wasn’t even sure she wanted to have it. Why? Why give up a friend and perfectly serviceable bed partner for one who couldn’t be avoiding her more obviously if he’d hung up signs around her neighborhood telling her to stay the hell away from him?

      Elder Griffin didn’t seem to think she was overeager, though. “Excellent. Excellent. Wait here, please.”

      Chess and Dana exchanged mystified looks as he unfolded himself from behind his desk and crossed the floor. In the pale yellowish glow from the gentle lamps, his stockinged calves flashed, dried blood spatters from earlier forming lacy patterns the color of dead leaves against the white. He left the room and closed the high dark wooden door behind him with a quiet click.

      What was he doing? She would have thought he was going to get a new case file for her, but he wouldn’t assign her a case right in front of Dana, not on a whim like that. She had no idea where she even stood in the case queue; two weeks of hospitalization and another two weeks of enforced rest had taken her pretty far out of the game.

      “So, back to work,” Dana said, in the weary, flat tone of someone talking simply because she thought it would be rude not to talk.

      Luckily for Chess, she didn’t have the same concerns, or the same discomfort. She just nodded, pressed her palms together, and glanced around the room. Glanced at Dana, taking in the other woman’s blond curls and expensive rings. Well, why not? Most Debunkers spent their money on actual things, rather than just buying anything they could swallow, smoke, or snort.

      Unlike Chess.

      Speaking of which…Three hours now since she’d taken the Panda and Cepts. She had plenty of time, a few more hours, but it never hurt to be aware.

      The door opened, and Elder Griffin came back in, followed by Elder Thompson and a red-haired woman Chess had never seen before.

      Not that it mattered, because the woman was clearly a Church employee. Her bare arms were decorated like Chess’s, like Dana’s, with one striking exception: the black snake, coiled up the length of her arm from wrist to shoulder, each scale perfectly delineated in a silvery magical ink that gave off a faint shimmer in the dim light.

      A member of the Black Squad. Church law enforcement—Church government, as opposed to Debunkers like Chess and Dana, who were regular Church employees.

      Her blood turned to ice. Had the woman come for her—had they found out? She’d been so careful all this time, all these years, never letting anyone get too close, never letting anyone see her take so much as a fucking aspirin, and now—and in front of Dana, of all people? They were busting her in front of—No. No. She was being stupid, acting like some panicky moron, and she needed to stop it.

      Preferably right that second, because the red-haired woman was looking at her rather oddly. Examining her, as if she could see the guilt. Not good. Chess tightened her grip on her own fingers to calm herself, and held the redhead’s gaze. The woman wanted to play power games, wanted to have some dumbass little staredown? Fine. Her loss.

      The woman smiled; then, very deliberately, she broke the contact and looked down at the floor. Ohhhkay. What did that mean?

      “Dana,” Elder Griffin said, breaking into whatever the hell was happening, “perhaps you should go back to your cabin. Get some rest.”

      Dana opened her mouth, then stopped. Elder Griffin’s dismissal hadn’t been rude, but it had been a dismissal just the same, and Dana wasn’t stupid. She left in a flurry of muttered goodbyes.

      Chess was alone with two Elders and a woman who probably had the power to throw her into prison just for looking at her funny, and the silence in the room pounded into her skull like a speedfreak with a hammer.

      Elder Griffin sat down. “Cesaria, may I present Lauren Abrams? She just arrived from New York this morning.”

      The woman—Lauren—held out one thin pale hand. Her tattoos went all the way down the back of it, like a fingerless glove; at the end of those bare fingers her nails were short like a man’s, and shiny. “Nice to meet you, Cesaria. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

      An electric hum ran up Chess’s arm when she shook Lauren’s hand. She ignored it. Ignored too the way Lauren clearly wanted her to ask what she’d heard, or make some kind of joke. It wasn’t her job to jump through hoops, and she didn’t like this one bit.

      She’d done some work with the Black Squad before, a few little side jobs, but this was different. This time she wasn’t being brought into a group and given a quick briefing; she wasn’t meeting a gang of lower Squad members. Lauren’s power, her air of command, told Chess more clearly than anything else could have that this woman was a higher-up. Very high. In fact…

      “Abrams,” she said. “Any relation to the Grand Elder?”

      Lauren gave a light, soft laugh. “He’s my father.”

      If Chess hadn’t already been sitting down she might have stumbled. No fucking way. They were sending her on a case—there had to be a case here, either that or they were busting her, and she somehow suspected that if that’s what was going on they would have done it already—with the fucking Grand Elder’s daughter?

      “Oh,” she said finally, since everyone was looking at her as if they expected her to respond. “Okay.”

      Lauren sat down in Dana’s empty chair, crossed her legs with a whisper of nylon. “I bet you’re wondering what’s going on.”

      Chess shrugged.

      “We have…an offer for you. An investigation we think you could really help us with. Interested?”

      “What is it?”

      Lauren opened her mouth, but before she could speak Elder Thompson cleared his throat and leaned forward, his heavy brows drawn together in a solid line. His eyebrows fascinated Chess; they seemed to grow wilder and thicker every time she saw him, while the hair on his head grew lighter and thinner, like some sort of migration process. Someday she imagined the brows would simply fall over his eyes in a wiry curtain.

      Lauren glanced at him, nodded, glanced back at Chess. “It’s a very…sensitive case.”

      “All my cases are sensitive.” What the hell was this? Why were they looking at her like they expected her to explode? “I don’t gossip, if that’s what you’re implying.”

      “Oh, no, no, that’s not it. It’s just—I’m not explaining this very well.” Lauren looked helplessly at Elder Griffin, biting her lipstick-coated lower lip.

      Great. One of those women: tough and authoritative when it suited her, acting like a simpering poor-me baby when it didn’t. So they wanted to bring her in on a case with the Grand Elder’s pampered little daughter, who would expect Chess to do all the work while she batted her eyelashes and took all the credit? Ugh. No, thank you.

      But then…how much money was in it? She fully expected she’d have to start paying for her own supplies again, once the bag she had ran out and she had to tell Lex she wasn’t going to sleep with him anymore. So it wasn’t like extra money wouldn’t come in handy. The payout on her last case would have been huge, but she’d been

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