The Kingmaker

Mana Sol Suspense/Thriller

COMPLETED || “Go home. This isn’t a playground.”

“You're right. More like a school choir, the way I had you singing like a soprano. Are your ribs okay?” She grinned when the man pressed his forearm harder against her throat, pinning her to the wall.

“Last warning.”

“Yours, too.”
------
The strongest piece in chess is not the one on the board.

Eden has known this ever since her first game. Not just that, but also to look before leaping and think before speaking, and to engineer each word, each move with care. Chess is a contest of enduring perfection: whoever stumbles first always loses.

And of course, it’s never the pieces on the board, but the mind that buckles and fails.

The night Eden comes home to a dozen police cruisers and the house cordoned off, she knows the game is over. They tell her there’s no way to find the ones responsible for the brutal murder of her family, that her mother the police commissioner had too many enemies in this crime-ridden city.

Eden disagrees. Eden is punished. And by the time she comes back eight years later, she is ready to make every crime boss and dirty cop in the city regret bringing this fight. She won’t play fair, even if it means crawling to depths even deeper and more rotten than theirs. She’ll drag them down by their ankles with her if she has to. And the mercenary who keeps getting in her way over and over again - the strange, thrilling sparks that fly every time they butt heads - none of it matters, in the end. She’ll take him down with all the rest if she has to.

Oh, they’ve taken everything from her.

Now she makes them pay.

“May I have this game?”

Unfold