Queen's Gambit - Karen Chance

Chapter One

The one-hundred-eighty-degree sweep of floor to ceiling windows would normally have been a little odd for a ball room, but when you’ve got an uninterrupted view of the pyramids, you make sure that everyone knows it. And I had to admit, it was pretty spectacular. The sun was setting, giving the golden hued monuments a salmon, tangerine and navy backdrop, with the latter including a few faint stars overhead. It looked like a postcard, although it was hard to concentrate on it when there was something even more dazzling standing in front of it.

“Some view, huh?” Raymond Lu, my self-described go-to guy, had sidled up with a couple of champagne flutes.

“You mean the pyramids or the man?” I asked.

Raymond frowned. Maybe because he was uncomfortable. His shock of black hair was slicked down and behaving, but he was tugging on the collar of his perfectly tailored tux and shifting from one foot to the other, like his shiny dress shoes hurt his feet. His usual idea of dressing up was a multicolored snakeskin jacket that had fallen off the back of a truck, paired with a black silk shirt and a lot of gold chains.

Ray was out of his element.

Of course, so was I. My work uniform was jeans and a T-shirt, with maybe a black leather jacket thrown over it when the weather warranted. I liked boots with a heavy sole and a steel tip in case I needed to kick down a door, and a duffle bag full of illegal weaponry in case the boots didn’t work.

But no such luck tonight.

Tonight, I was in a slinky black silk number, cut down to here and up to there, and a pair of shiny black stilettos. The get up went well with my short dark hair, giving off a vaguely nineteen twenties vibe, although it would have probably gotten me arrested in the twenties. But it made me have to watch every movement so that I didn’t flash somebody. Plus, the thong it pretty much required had migrated inward.

Again.

I resisted an urge to dig it out and drank champagne.

Raymond scowled. “He needs a scar.”

I assumed he was talking about my new husband, Louis-Cesare, who was standing on a dais at the front of the room, surrounded by beautiful people who looked completely at ease in their clothes. And jewels. And elaborately made up faces that were laughing at something my lover had just said. I saw several women shoot me envious glances and raised my glass to them.

“Die mad about it,” I murmured, despite being pretty sure that they could hear me. We were across a crowded ballroom from each other, but vampire hearing has exceptional range. And they were all vamps, members or high-ranking flunkies of the North African Vampire Senate.

It was a subsidiary of the huge African and Middle Eastern Senate, which had so much land to cover that they’d had to split it into more manageable chunks. But it was all under the control of its iron fisted consul, Hassani. He was here, too, his handsome, bearded face—a glamourie but a good one—shown to effect in a turban and a blindingly white burnoose. He and Louis-Cesare were soon to make pretty speeches about the current war and the great victory that our united front had won us.

Then would come the presentation of gifts, including spoils taken from the plundered capitol of an alien world. They were already on display, in warded cases scattered around the large room. I was supposed to be over there, smiling and schmoozing and explaining the exotic booty to all and sundry, in order to help shore up the tentative alliance between the world’s six vampire senates.

It had been forged after some home-grown enemies joined up with the fey king Aeslinn to wreak havoc, and the only way to get them to stop had been to invade Faerie and kick some ass. Only nobody knew how to fight a war on another world. So, we’d united our forces, for the first time ever, with old enemies forged into reluctant allies by a serious threat.

But that threat was over, right?

So, what happened to the alliance now?

It was a problem, since the threat wasn’t really over. We’d won a battle—a major one—but a battle wasn’t a war. Yet people who hated each other’s guts tended to forget that, especially when they were also worried that the consul of the North American Senate, who headed up the shaky coalition, might decide to make her rule over

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