Prologue

POV Coraline

"You know how it works, darling. Make a move."

Darling.

Darling had nothing to do with us.

What we had was hunger.

Hot tears streamed down my cold skin, which curled and agonized under the weight of his gaze, that hungry, disturbed, and uncontrollable look. Although his voice sounded controlled, his eyes and soul leaked excess. I couldn’t see myself, but I knew my body was leaking the same disorder that possessed him, albeit for different reasons: he felt pleasure; I felt fear.

"I don’t want to play."

He smiled at me, but didn’t answer immediately.

His silence heightened my discomfort, forcing me to look away. The problem was, what surrounded us was almost as violating, as visceral, as the darkness in his black eyes.

"If you don’t make a move, I’ll understand it as you giving up your turn to me. Do you understand what’s going to happen if I win?"

I looked at the chessboard. I didn’t want to play, really didn’t want to, but my options were limited. Reluctantly, I examined each of my pieces and thought about what to do. He was great at chess, which meant that if I wasn’t careful, his next moves could destroy me.

Destroy us all.

I bit my lip harder than I should have. I moved the next piece, knowing that any mistake could be fatal.

"Very well."

I received another smile.

In silence, we conducted the game for what seemed like hours. Each of his moves increased my discomfort and fed my paranoia. I couldn’t stop analyzing his plays, trying to understand his possible strategies and traps. My pieces seemed to be well-protected, safe, and well-positioned. I became so focused that, for a while, I forgot where we were and what was happening around us – it was just the two of us at that table, each trying to beat the other, just like the old days. As the game progressed, I managed to capture most of his pieces and gained a numerical advantage.

He was a good player, but so was I.

"That’s the magic of chess," he said before his next move. "You can be an excellent player, but skill alone isn’t enough. You need to predict the other player’s behavior, foresee their actions, act before they can see what you’ll do next."

I furrowed my brow, inspecting each piece once again. He made his move, moving the queen, but I still didn’t understand what he was trying to do with that. Searching for flaws, I tried to anticipate his next move, but I couldn’t foresee any risks for me. The game was practically won.

"Your turn," he reminded me.

He left his bishop unprotected. Smiling, I took his piece, leaving him with only the king and the queen. I still had two rooks, four pawns, a knight, a bishop, my king, and my queen. Ten pieces against two.

I shook my head and looked at him.

"I think the odds are against you."

"You’re a good player, Coraline," he complimented. "My turn."

He moved his queen, putting my king in check. I moved my king to H2, gaining the possibility of checkmate on the black king, which was on H8. He attacked again with his queen, putting me in check once more. Annoyed, I searched for another piece to move, but with the way the board was destroyed, we’d just keep going in endless loops. For the third time, I moved my king to another position.

When I saw what was about to happen, I hesitated.

He put my piece in check again.

"I want to start over," I asked.

He refused, standing up.

"We already have a result."

"No."

I denied more vehemently, but he just stood there, ignoring the humanity in me. Around us, in the vaulted room lit by the dim yellow light, a corpse stained the floor with scarlet while four people watched in absolute horror. Each of them represented part of a result I refused to accept, a condemnation, a sentence.

He had played with me in the dirtiest way, and I, in my eagerness to win, hadn’t realized. His intention was never to win but to distract me enough to do something else – something much, much worse. This was the outcome of a game that began months earlier in that dark room full of books and amidst an unspeakable tragedy. There was no redemption for him, and now, there was no salvation for me. It wasn’t checkmate; it was worse. When I looked at him, I knew I had lost the twisted, piled remnants of my soul, because, even though the game had come to its final end, the game seemed far from over.