The Immortal Game (book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sweetness.
    He stared at her. She wondered if he would storm out, still having a tantrum about losing one chess game. To her shock he laughed. The sound was deep and true. It startled her. She felt warm, despite having cooled down from her ride.
    “When were you born?”
    “Huh?” She scrunched up her nose at the sudden change in topic.
    “Your sign?” he insisted.
    She thought it must be a joke. Wasn’t that a bad pickup line from the ‘70s? But he continued to look at her like he’d asked her to explain away the mysteries of the universe and she was being deliberately vague.
    “December,” she said. “Sagittarius. Why?”
    “Fire sign.” He nodded, but he didn’t answer her question.
    “What do you mean?” she crossed her arms. The smug feeling of recounting her chess win was gone. “What are you talking about?”
    “Where did you grow up? Your father was killed; what about your mother?”
    “I grew up here. My mom died in a car accident when I was a baby. Why are you asking me all these …”
    “Siblings? How many? Where are they?”
    “None, nowhere.” She pulled back at the unexpected interrogation.
    He searched her eyes. “Yoga? Meditation? You’re so …” He gritted his teeth. “ Calm .”
    Ruby thought of her life, her intense studying schedule, the laundry everywhere around her house. She ordered dinner out most nights for lack of fresh food and clean dishes. She didn’t feel calm.
    “How about you answer a few of my questions instead?” she said. “How do you know so much about the Battle of Hastings?” She paused for only a split second. “The truth this time?”
    He stared at her.
    “Why is your eye healed? And your hand? Why are you in this coffeehouse? Why do you care so much that I beat you?”
    “You can tell a lot about a person by how they play chess.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Are they guarded and cautious? Or are they bold and stupid?” He picked up the sunglasses on the table between them and fiddled with the folding arms. “Maybe they’re greedy, and all they want is material. You …” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple working.
    “What about me?”
    He shook his head. “I’m not sure about you.”
    She swallowed too and looked to the tabletop, to the window, to the cars outside, and then back to him. “Do you just play chess all day?” she asked, realizing that she never saw him do anything else. “Don’t you go to school, or have a job, or a girlfriend … or something?” She came up short at the implication of her last question.
    “Me?” His head reared back.
    “I mean …” She tried to backpedal.
    “Just chess,” he said, as if it was normal.
    “I have to go. I have a study group.” She began to stand.
    “Sage is the only ambitious one of us,” he said, as though she weren’t about to leave.
    “Sage?” she asked, confused at the connection. Her messenger bag dangled in midair.
    “Langston worked once. He was an EMT for a little while, but …” He paused. “It didn’t work out.” He put the glasses down and looked out the window again.
    “Langston?” she asked. “The poet who reads at Athenaeum?” She remembered the shared look between Langston and Sage when Ruby thought Ash was married and Sage had laughed.
    “We don’t need money,” he said absently. His eyes shot to her from the side. “I mean … We have money. Our family does. We don’t have to work.”
    She lowered her bag back down to the floor and sat again. “I didn’t know you were related.” She thought of Langston’s white-blond hair and Sage’s unusual grey eyes. “You don’t really look alike.”
    “Half-siblings. Different mothers.” He twisted the dark metal ring on his healed hand. “My family’s pretty … complicated.”
    She thought that most families were pretty complicated, though her family wasn’t complicated at all. It was only her. She picked at the plastic wrap of her uneaten sandwich.
    “My father wasn’t always faithful,”