Page 1 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood
Chapter 1
Aurélie shifted in the chair meant to be comforting, but it was too much like her favorite reading chair, the one she curled into when she needed to disappear into a book, but she was here to bare her soul.
The disconnect was a low-level dissonance.
Her knee throbbed, reminding her of its huge presence in her life, but she’d spent decades not showing pain. It was easy to keep her face smooth. Neutral.
It didn’t matter, though. Dr. Woods knew. He always knew. Nothing escaped him in these sessions.
“Have you been pushing too hard with your physical therapy?”
She shook her head. “It’s at the healing stage where I have to force flexibility on it. I need full mobility before I can build more strength.” She steered them back on track before he could veer deeper into her body’s betrayals. “I know you’ve read the police transcripts of my initial retelling, and you’ve listened to the audio of me going through it with my first psychiatrist. Why do I need to go through that horrible night again?”
“We know how the child Aurélie told it, but it’s important we understand how the adult Aury remembers it. You no longer walk with the limp you’ve had all your life. You no longer feel the kind of pain you used to feel with every step. You’ve told me youunderstand you’ll be walking forward with a new identity, but there are…”
He shrugged. “You’re paying me for my expertise, and I’m telling you we need to go through that night together, second-by-second, minute-by-minute, terror by terror. If you’re to step out in this new identity, we need to put the past where it belongs, in your past. Let’s deal with the trauma in your new adult identity as a woman with two good knees, walking into your future.”
That leg hadn’t grown properly, injured so badly when she was five years old. Now, after a total knee replacement, her legs were the same length, and she’d had to work on her spine and hip as much as her fucking knee. It wasn’t just that she had two good knees now, it was the fact the rest of her body wasfinallyaligned.
“There isn’t much to tell. The bad guys came in, Maman ran to my room to get me so we could go into the saferoom, but they got to us before she could get us to safety. One of them threw me away from her and was on the bed with her while the others were asking how to open the safe. They knew where the diamond was, just not how to get into the safe.”
“What did they look like?”
“I have no idea.”
“Tall? Short? White? Asian? Black?”
“Sometimes I see blond hair in my dreams, but I can’t remember anything when I look back on it. Just the terror, the pain.”
And then the lack of pain. Somehow, in the experience, she’d figured out how to turn her pain signals off.
“Tell me about your dreams.”
She’d kept a dream journal for most of her life, and the nightmare, however it twisted, always led to the same terror.
Dr. Woods had heard it before, so she didn’t argue with him. “A bad guy, evil, doing horrible things to my mom, and agood guy ripping his head from his body, and when I screamed, doing something to make me not hurt and not able to scream.” She shook her head. “In my dreams, he takes care of me, and I know the official psychoanalysis is that I figured out how to turn the pain down or off or whatever, and I created some kind of scenario around that, and that’s probably right, since I remember a whole bunch of bad guys and no good guys.”
But it had neverfeltright. Someone had shown her how to turn off her pain sensors. She was certain of it in her gut, whether her brain could explain it or not.
“And you don’t remember when your mother’s arm was severed?”
“No. That isn’t in the dreamorthe memory.”
“Which feels more real to you?”
“The dream, but I was five fucking years old. Who the hell knows why my subconscious created this other version, but I’m inclined to believe it knew what it was doing, giving me a less-horrible version of events.” She parroted back what she was supposed to, about the memories being real and the dream being her mind protecting her, but it didn’t change the fact the dreams felt morerealthan her memories.
“I know you’ve always said you didn’t know how many men were there, but try to count.”
She closed her eyes and tried to focus, but it was just mist. “More than four, possibly as many as six or seven? I don’t know. Faceless beings, wearing caps so I can’t see their hair. They all wore black. Black caps. Black gloves. No skin, no hair, no faces. Just shadows.”
* * * *
Marcus Woods looked at the clock when his patient left, and sent a text to the local Master Vampire.
I need to speak with you regarding one of my patients.
Marcus belonged to the Chattanooga Pack, which made him an obvious choice when the new Master Vampire went looking for a therapist who understood the supernatural — a werewolf who could work with flock and employees alike, and keep their secrets, so the vampire had brought Marcus in on retainer to be both confidant and clinician to anyone under the Master’s roof.
