Page 451 of Lodestar

“No. Of course not. But she probably read between the lines anyway. She’s canny like that.” He shot me a look loaded with warning. “Aurora’s good people. The streets around her base are riddled with the homeless and she took us in, gave us food, put a roof over our heads, gave us a place to wash ourselves and our clothes?—”

“She gave you the basics to allow you to pick your lives up again.”

He nodded. “Good people, see?”

“I see.” I wouldn’t have expected that of Aurora either. Not when she exuded ‘stone-cold bitch’ vibes. “So you got a promotion?”

“I did.”

“Do I wanna know how?”

He smirked at me, and Jesus, it was good to see that smirk. “Nope. Anyways, are we playing?”

“We’re playing. I’m glad you’ve found your feet, Chad.”

“Me too, to be honest. When I said I was in a bad place, I meant it.”

“You willing to work with me?”

“In what way? I won’t betray Aurora, Star.”

“Not asking you to. If you didn’t realize at the Summit, we’re allies.”

Snickering, he shook his head. “You and your prickly ass attitude, I swear. You reverse psychology the fuck out of people.”

“That’s not a verb.”

“It is for you. But yeah, if you don’t expect me to feed intel from the Sicilians back to the Irish, I’ll work with you.”

“You’re going to let Aurora know?”

His gaze was measured as he took in the first move I made on the chessboard. “Yes.”

I hummed. “Interesting.”

We played for a while, and I scoped him out, trying to see if he’d changed his strategy. I was unsurprised to learn that he had. I figured I had too. He was more cautious; I was less. Fitting considering our pasts. They shaped us, after all.

“You still talk to Cin?”

I thought about what Conor, Troy, Cin, and I had gotten up to recently. “I still talk to her, yeah.”

“Don’t tell her you saw me,” he said as he made a questionable move on the board.

Taking his knight, I replied, “If you think I’m getting on her bad side because of you, you’re mistaken.”

He hissed under his breath. More at my comment than at the piece I took. “You already texted her about our meeting, didn’t you?”

“Yup. You’re lucky she’s busy or she’d have been here herself.”

His mouth tightened.

“Never understood why you fought it, to be honest.”

“Fought what?”

His growl used to do shit to my insides. I guessed that was the power of Conor if he could make a hunk like Chad unappealing.

“You and Cin would be perfect together.”

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