They’d been gone for too long. It set me on edge and yet there was nothing I could do about it either.
Jack focused on his knights, seeming to be fixed on keeping them from my pieces until suddenly he downed one of my bishops and sent the black piece rolling from the edge of the table to the floor. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of reaction from him, but that had been no lucky move. No. There was a lot more to this giant of a man than met the eye.
“I was in a gang once,” I said slowly though that wasn’t quite the truth. The Castillo Cartel were so much more than a gang. “Though they didn’t brand me on the outside.”
Jack looked up at me, his grey eyes shifting over my face before he replied. “Lost.”
“Mmm.” I wasn’t buying that bullshit. Nothing in his expression told me he was lost on my train of thought. He knew exactly what I was referring to.
I licked my lips, making my own move and setting up a strike for his queen which I was betting he wouldn’t see coming.
“That ink on your chest is no vanity piece,” I went on. “It’s a stamp of ownership. Which means you’re a long way from home, amigo.”
“Lost,” he replied, meaning in a physical sense this time, and I shrugged.
“Not hard to find a map,” I pointed out. “If you didn’t want to stay lost, that is.”
His eyes flickered with something then and the ghost of a smile shifted around his lips, but that was all he gave me to go on. Sneaky bastardo. I was starting to see through him though.
“I’ve performed a lobotomy or two in the past,” I said as he casually took out my knight with a move that came from nowhere and I found myself down two major pieces already. “Not in a medical setting of course. But my previous employer enjoyed making people watch their loved ones live through all kinds of tortures. Especially when he was in need of information. So I looked into the procedure and did my best at replicating it.”
Jack said nothing, but his shoulders had tensed at my words. Not much, but enough.
“That scar on your temple doesn’t look much like a lobotomy scar to me,” I went on. “So why does Brooklyn insist that that’s what it is?”
“Rook,” he muttered, like even the mention of her was enough to distract him from all else and I could admit, I felt like that about her too. There was something about that wild creature which drew dangerous men in like moths to a flame, but I had to wonder what would happen when the powder keg she was creating around herself finally blew up.
“You going to give me an answer on the lobotomy?” I pushed. “Because I’d put money on that scar being from an entirely different kind of violence. Like…maybe you were skimmed with a bullet?”
Jack lifted his head, looking directly at me through the curtain of white hair which hung down into his eyes from the way he’d been leaning over the chessboard, and I could see that chasm of rage in him there. He had a whole lot of anger bottled up inside him. But then again, so did I. It was why I still hadn’t tried to claim Brooklyn the way I ached to. Why I forced myself to hold back every time she was in reach and my fingers throbbed with the desire to grip her tightly and demand she give herself to me in every dark and twisted way that I could think up.
“A little way from here, by the coast where the sun shines all day and the sea whispers sweet promises to those all around her, there’s a gang who boast tattoos like the one on your chest,” I said.
For a moment I could have sworn I saw something akin to regret in his eyes before he looked away again, his focus returning to the chessboard as he savagely took down my other bishop and moved his knight into a position that put my king at threat.
I muttered a curse, shifting a pawn into his path, knowing I was sacrificing it by doing so.
“Past,” Jack grunted but I wasn’t convinced that men like us ever got the luxury of leaving the things we ran from in our past. They haunted us like ghosts with fingernails lodged deep within our souls, refusing to let go no matter how much we wanted a chance at a new life. That said, there weren’t many men who took the risk of escaping the kinds of lives we’d been given. Organisations like the one I’d been a part of, and the one Jack had clearly sworn into didn’t just let people leave. There was one way out and that was bloody and brutal. Even now I knew that eventually I’d find myself paying for the freedom I’d tried to steal while bleeding out at the feet of a Castillo one day, no matter how much time I managed to escape with in the meantime.
“You have a lot of words for a man who never speaks more than one at a time,” I said slowly, wondering what I might be able to glean from this man and what I might be able to use.
Jack said nothing, focusing on the game and only proving my point that he was no victim of a lobotomy. His mind was sharp and his moves full of a cutthroat kind of cunning. It had been a while since I’d played this game, but it was one I’d won regularly when I used to play it. I knew the rules and strategies well and yet he danced his pieces across the board, concentrating on his knights and taking down piece after piece of mine while barely taking a moment to consider his next move.
Granted, he could have spent a lot of time playing this game in the facility he’d so recently escaped from but even so, there was something about him which was very much off to me.
“This place,” I said slowly. “This house we are in. It was mine before that Irish bastardo came and stole it from me.”
Jack looked up with interest as I reached up to the shock collar which was cinched tight around my throat, trying to find some weakness in the lock that secured it for the hundredth time, but there was none. He touched his own collar, his irritation mirroring mine and a clear demand for me to go on in his expression.
“No one knows about it,” I continued. “No one at all. This place is like a scrap of gold dust among a pile of soot. And I plan to take it back from him.”
“Rook?” he questioned.
“I plan to take her from him too. She’s no more his than this house is.”
Jack considered that, his hand drifting to the board almost without care as he lifted his knight and casually moved it to lock me in checkmate, making my jaw grit as I realised I’d lost.
I knocked my king on its side in surrender, trying not to be bitter over the loss as Jack supressed a smirk.
“I’m going to kill him,” I went on, banishing the memory of Niall dragging me away from my demons when that woman had attacked me during the Eden Heights massacre, because one small act of mercy did not come close to making up for the endless days and nights he’d locked me up and tortured me in my own basement.
Slowly, Jack nodded, his fingers drifting over the collar once more as he clearly found his own motivation to end Niall’s life simply enough.
I watched as he reset the board, wondering if I might have earned myself an ally in my war against Niall O’Brien or not. It seemed, at the very least, that he wasn’t opposed to me ending our captor’s life. And if he could help me to achieve that goal then who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth?
There was nothing to say I couldn’t kill said horse once he was done helping me either. Then all I’d have to do was dispose of two bodies, clean my fucking house, and get back to the life I’d stolen for myself here with mi sol at my side and my freedom restored.