Page 104 of Legacy of Chaos

“So, what do you propose we do?”

She thought about that for a minute as she looked idly around his lab. The equipment was interesting, sure, but she’dworked with most of it and was familiar with the rest. No, what caught her interest were the personal touches.

Nowhere else in the house had them, aside from maybe the liquor cabinet and the dart board in the living room. But even those didn’t reveal much about him.

But down here, in his obviously beloved lab, he’d revealed a lot.

Like the chess board. Maybe she should challenge him to a game. She was pretty good.

“How are you at chess?” she asked.

“Very few people can beat me.” He worked at removing his boxing gloves.

“And by few, I mean only one.”

She laughed and then realized he was serious. “Okay, but I don’t recall seeing you on the list of world chess champions.”

“I don’t want the attention.” He carefully placed his gloves on a rack near a set of free weights. “But I’ve played with every living champion, and I’ve beaten them.”

She gaped. “Every one?”

He shrugged. “Money gets private games.”

Wow. “Who is the one person who can beat you?”

“Ares,” he said. “He can take a game off me now and then. But he’s also thousands of years old and a master tactician.”

So…chess was not an option. She kept looking.

One wall featured all his degrees and awards, interspersed with framed magazine covers. But the other three walls, lined with shelves, held a wide array of items, from a crystal skull…probably one ofthecrystal skulls…to models of NASA space shuttles and rockets. What appeared to be ancient artifacts from all over the world and Sheoul took up a lot of real estate as well.

Maybe they should visit a museum. He’d probably been to them all, though. Her gaze moved back to the space shuttle.

“I saw pictures of you at NASA headquarters a long time ago,” she said, remembering the photos of him surrounded by security that had been plastered all over the cover of a sleazy tabloid. The hit piece had questioned why a government entity with highly secret tech and sensitive information would allow a demon anywhere near one of its facilities, let alone work with one. “Is that where you got the models and patches?”

He strolled over to the shelf and ran his finger fondly over one of the rockets. “The NASA director sent them to make up for not hiring me. Or paying me for my designs and research. They couldn’t be seen collaborating with a demon, you know.”

“You sound a little bitter.”

One shoulder twitched in a dismissive shrug, but he couldn’t hide the wistfulness in his expression. “Growing up, it was my dream to work there. But that was a long time ago, and I have more money than they do, so that takes a lot of the sting out of it.” He smiled before dropping his hand to his side, his expression turning sad. She knew he was thinking about Chaos. “Besides, my life went in a different direction.”

She hated that he’d had so little joy in his life. A couple of months ago, she’d have thought his existence was basically nothingbutjoy. He had money, fame, power. Females wanted him, and males wanted to be him. He had everything.

Everything except happiness.

Meanwhile, she’d led a charmed life, but her recent losses had made her focus on her grief instead of the joy of the years before.

She wanted that joy back, and she wanted it for Stryke too. But how?

She contemplated the model rockets. Obviously, she couldn’t get him on a real one, but she did have an old friend at Kennedy Space Center who owed her a favor. A big one.

And Cyan was ready to call it in.

“I can’t believe you’ve never been on a private NASA tour,” Cyan said as they arrived at her apartment.

“I can’t believe you have a high-level contact who owed you a favor,” he said. “What did you do to earn that big of a payback?”

“I helped her bury a body.” She eyeballed the biometric scanner.

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