We’re already at move twelve. His hand shakes. Sweat beads on his temple. The glasses sit between us, sweating condensation onto the wood.
He’s not playing well.
He’s sloppy. He’s distracted. He’s not playing to win; he’s playing not to lose.
Move eighteen, and his queen is exposed.
Move twenty-two and I’ve forked his king and rook with a knight he should have seen coming three moves ago.
Move twenty-five, and his position is collapsing, pieces falling one by one while I build toward a checkmate he won’t be able to stop. The whole time, his eyes keep drifting to the glasses, to the amber liquid that might be salvation or might be death.
“You’re losing,” I say quietly, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears, distant, the scientist observing an experiment instead of the wife destroying her husband one chess move at a time.
“I know.”
“You’re not even trying anymore.”
“I know that too.” He looks up from the board, and his eyes meet mine. “I can’t focus on the game when all I can think about is which glass you’re going to make me drink. I can’t strategize when every move I make might be the one that kills you instead of me.”
“That’s the point. You have to play not knowing if you’re fighting for your life or fighting to end it.”
His hands flatten on the table, fingers spread wide against the dark wood.
“I’m done,” he says.
“The game isn’t over. You still have—”
“I said I’m done.” He reaches across the board and sweeps his arm through the pieces, scattering pawns and bishops and the black king across the marble floor with a crash that sounds like the end of something.
And then he reaches for both glasses.
“Roman, don’t—”
He drinks the first one in a single swallow, amber liquid disappearing down his throat while I’m frozen in my chair, unable to move or speak or do anything except stare at the empty crystal in his hand.
“Which one was that?” he asks, and his voice is perfectly calm, perfectly steady, like a man who’s already made peace with whatever comes next.
“Stop.”
“Which one, Anya?” He picks up the second glass and holds it up to the light, studying it like he’s looking for answers in the way the lamp catches the whiskey. “Which one did I just drink? The poison or the cure?”
“It doesn’t matter, just put it down and let me—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he repeats, and something in his tone makes me go still, makes me really look at him for the first time since he scattered the pieces across the floor. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter which one was which because I’m drinking both of them anyway.”
“No—”
The second glass empties as fast as the first, the dose in his bloodstream now lethal. He drank them both, not knowing, drank them both because—
“Why?” The word tears out of me raw and desperate, and I’m out of my chair before I realize I’m moving, my hands closing around his face, his jaw, anywhere I can touch him,forty minutes—
“I’m done.” He coughs, wipes his mouth. “I couldn’t watch you choose. I couldn’t risk you picking the wrong one.”
“You fucking idiot.” I’m crying now, tears I didn’t give him in the bedroom finally spilling over while my hands shake against his face and my mind races through the timeline, I have forty minutes to get the antidote, I have to move, I have to—
“Which one was poisoned?” he asks again, and his thumb comes up to brush tears off my cheek with a gentleness that makes me want to scream. “Tell me which one I need to worry about.”
“The first one.” The words rip out of me. “The first glass, the one you drank first, you have maybe thirty-seven minutes before cardiac arrest, and I have to—I have the antidote in the lab, I have to go, I have to—”
