Chapter Two: CheckMate!

Chapter Two

CheckMate!

Elena

I slept beside my husband that night and did not feel a thing.

That was how I knew something in me had truly shifted. Five years of marriage and I had never once fallen asleep without reaching for him, pressing my cold feet against his warm legs and listening to him groan about it. That night I lay on my side with six inches of space between us and felt absolutely nothing.

Marcus was already up when morning came, showered and dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. And that watch — the one I had gifted him on our third anniversary, saved for quietly, privately, because I wanted to give him something that came from me and not from joint accounts and shared wealth.

He was still wearing it.

I hated that he was still wearing it.

“Morning, love.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “You were out before I even came upstairs last night. How’s the head?”

“Better,” I said.

It wasn’t. The pain behind my left eye had graduated overnight from a dull press to something sharper. The cancer, reminding me it was still there and the days still counting down.

“I have back-to-back meetings until six. Don’t wait on dinner.” He kissed me again and left.

Through the wall, I heard his footsteps pause on the landing. Then the soft knock against another door. Then Sophia’s voice, still thick with sleep, answering. Then his voice, too low for words, only tone.

Gentle. Private. Intimate in a way that had nothing to do with cousinhood.

In my last life I had heard that same pause at that same door and told myself he was checking if she needed anything. I had made myself believe that.

I moved through the house that morning and it was like walking through a museum of my own stupidity. Every room held something I’d missed, some detail I’d filed away as ordinary that was, on second examination, anything but.

I passed Marcus’s study and slowed. The door was ajar the way he always left it — wide enough to suggest openness, narrow enough to discourage entry. Through the gap I could see the edge of his desk, and beneath a stack of quarterly reports, the corner of a magazine.

The same issue a nurse had left on my bedside table near the end of my first life.

Damian Cross: The Man Marcus Blackwood Can’t Beat.

I looked at that magazine corner for a long moment. Then I went and made my coffee and sat down and began making a list.

Sophia came downstairs at 9:30.

“Morning.” She went straight to the coffee machine with the ease of someone in their own home. “Did you sleep better?”

“Much better, thank you,” I said with a smile.

She added two sugars, no milk. I knew exactly how she took her coffee because I had paid attention to all the small details of the people I loved. I wondered if she had ever bothered to learn anything about me.

“You have plans today?” she asked.

“A few errands. You?”

“Studio work mostly. Marcus wants me to look at the new Cross Street development — the interior brief is a mess apparently. He said they might bring me in as a consultant.”

Marcus. Not my cousin Marcus. Just Marcus, offered up casually.

“You’d be brilliant at it,” I said warmly.

She smiled. And then, so small I almost missed it, her free hand dropped from her mug and pressed, just briefly, against her lower stomach.

Flat. Still completely flat. But that gesture. The unconscious, protective, brand-new gesture of a woman whose body had recently become home to something other than herself.

Is she pregnant?

My smile did not cease, not even slightly.

I went upstairs after she left. Straight to her room.

I had never once gone through her things. In my past life I had never even considered it — she was family, she was trusted, she was Sophia. But this time, I had to.

The room smelled like her perfume. Her bed was made with the precision of someone who had grown up being taught that disorder was a character flaw.

Her dressing table held the usual things. And a perfume I recognised because Marcus had once told me he found it overwhelming on me. I had stopped wearing it.

She had not.

In the second drawer of her bedside table: a small white box. The kind that came from pharmacies. The kind with a symbol on the front that did not need words to explain itself. Already opened. Empty. But it told me enough.

I was about to leave when I saw it.

On the far side of the bed, half-tucked under the edge of the mattress — a notebook. Small. Green. Sophia had clearly gone to some effort to make it look like nothing.

I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and read it.

It was not a diary. It was something more deliberate than that.

Dates going back fourteen months. Names. Numbers. Short, clipped notes in Sophia’s handwriting, the kind that meant she had written fast and in private.

March 4th. Transfer confirmed. He doesn’t know I have the receipt.

April 19th. He told them she was already unwell. Used her name.

July 2nd. Asked me to increase the amount. I said no. He said it wasn’t a question.

I stopped on that one for a long time.

So Marcus had pushed her further than she wanted to go. And she had kept a record — not out of guilt, but because she had understood, at some point, that she was standing next to a man who would let her take the fall if it came to that.

She was building herself an exit.

I put the notebook back exactly as I found it. Straightened the edge of the mattress. Walked out.

She was pregnant. And Sophia was going to give him what I never could.

I pressed my back against the wall and breathed until my hands stopped shaking.

“This is actually the height of it,” I said quietly as I picked up my phone and opened a name I had memorised the night before from one of Marcus’s files.

Damian Cross.

I typed out a short, clean message from the anonymous email address I had created at two in the morning while Marcus slept.

I have information about the Blackwood Empire that I believe you would find valuable. I am not a journalist. I am not law enforcement. If you want to meet, let’s meet.

My phone buzzed exactly two hours later. A private number. One line.

Saturday. 7pm. I’ll send the address.