Page 30 of Bleeding Outside the Lines

“Remind me why I play this game with you?” I groan.

“Because it keeps our minds sharp?”

Mine has never been as sharp as Garrett’s, but until recently, I’d always been able to hold my own with him. Stress eats at me, so I’m not surprised that I’m not in the right headspace for this right now, besides my mind has been a million miles away since…

I clear my throat and crack my neck.

“Yours, maybe,” I say as I slide one of my pawns forward.

“So focus man. Chess is what we used to do when shit got real. It’s relaxing. Stop stressing,” he says as his knight attacks my pawn, sacrificing itself.

He’s right though; I know he’s right. Using my pawn, I attack his knight. Chess is where we used to hide. It’s where everything was right and safe. When we couldn’t go home, we’d go to old man Forrest’s and play chess. We would sit on his front porch for hours, getting eaten alive by mosquitos and drinking sun tea. The tea was awful, but the game wasn’t. Forrest taught us everything he knew about chess, including how to read your opponent and how to think several moves ahead.

When we started regularly smoking his ass, Forrest taught us poker and, more importantly, how to count cards. Garrett and I can both count, but G can’t mask his features. So while he took to the counting, it was the deceit he struggled with. We owe that old man everything. Which is why he spent the last days of his life in a cushy nursing home, and his granddaughter wants for nothing—even if neither of them knows why or how. It’s better that way. Our past has to stay in the past.

“Did she break your brain too?” Garrett gestures to my face. “Or just your nose?”

“It was worth it.” And it was. I would spend hours trying to read whatever game board her and I are playing on if it gave me one more taste of her. Because this game we’re playing, it far surpasses the ones that came before.

“It’s your turn, jackass.”

My fingers rest on what has quickly become my most important chess piece, and I consider her move.

My queen. Ruby. Are they not one andthesame?

My phone buzzes on the table with an incoming text.

“Saved by the vibration,” Garrett mumbles and leans back in his chair, crossing his arms in clear annoyance. “Let me guess, it’s the crazy bitch looking for a booty call?”

Nate: Package delivered.

“Actually, no. But it’s something almost as good. And besides, we both know you were going to win.”

I leave him to his sulking.

twenty-two

“The girls are alreadyspeculating.”

I do not turn to face Riley. Instead, I keep my focus on the training mat, where the Amelia’s practice hand-to-hand combat with Rawlings. Alice ducks, barely avoiding a fist.

“I just thought you should know,” she continues. “She’s very bright and an excellent student. She seems to pick up on everything easily. Like it’s in her nature. Part of her physical and emotional make up.”

Turning my head, I look at Riley.

“Like you, I mean.” She casts her eyes down, unable to hold my gaze.

“Like me.”

“I just, Ruby… you might not want to wait. That’s all I’m saying.” Riley’s voice drops to a barely audible whisper, “Unless you do, and Ruby, I’d stand behind you on that.”

I turn back to the girls, the sound of Riley’s steps getting further and further away.

We speculated too. Well, the other girls did, for years before I was named. Rowan and I never offered our opinion, but we listened to the others. We couldn’t decide if me being Ruby was a good thing or a bad thing. The older girls seemed jealous of my skill, but it also seemed like so much pressure to put on a young girl.

And Rowan and I were both so young. Young enough to be afraid of what was going on around us, and old enough to understand it was a better alternative than where we came from. We held each other those first few nights when the shadows crept in and settled around us, cloaking us in their darkness. It was one we were unfamiliar with, but we quickly realized that we could hide there. Our pasts, our pain, could stay in the darkness where nobody else had to see it. It was just us. Us against the world.

It didn’t take long to see why Rowan was recruited to be a Red. If the high court knew how good she was on computers back then, I imagine she would have been shipped out to serve under another Ruby as a young teen. She had far surpassed her instructor’s skills by then. Computers are Rowan’s second, if not first, language. But I think Ruby wanted Rowan for herself, just like she wanted me. Or maybe in some sick way she wanted my only friend to be nearby but just out of reach. The friend I was no longer allowed to have, allowed to confide in. We were separated, only allowed to speak to each other if another red commanded it. Ruby’s own special form of torture, just another way to break me.

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