Her eyes narrowed, and she snatched the slip of paper out. A lot of nerve Williams had, claiming with that sente to be on the offensive, to have the initiative, when the play had only just begun. She dug around in her handbag until she came up with a pencil. Using the empty space in the middle of the board as her table, she drew a line through Sente and wrote Moyo. Prepare to be gote.

The plays were all potential now—moyo. But she didn’t ever play on the defensive. She would not be gote—she’d force him into it. After anchoring the paper again, she touched a finger to a white stone. Cold. Hard. And slid it to her opening position.

Then she left the park and went home without a backward glance.

Das Gespenst waited until her figure had vanished from sight. Until her footsteps had faded into the night. Until the cold, damp English breeze had snaked for another long minute through his jacket. Then, for the first time in ten minutes, he moved. Away from the tree against whose trunk he’d been leaning, in whose shadow he’d been hiding.

If other people were out tonight, they weren’t in the park. He hadn’t been sure, of course, that she would come this way either. More often than not she didn’t. But when he saw where she’d gone earlier, rather than stopping by for a game . . . well, he hadn’t wanted to wait for another day to get a read on her, and this had seemed like an easy enough way. And if she’d gone straight home after her dinner at the Eltons’, he simply would have packed up the board for now and set it up again tomorrow afternoon, waiting for her.

Eventually she would have come. But he wouldn’t complain that eventually was now.

Gliding over the meters without a sound, he remained, as always, on alert. But no one else watched or walked or waited here. It was just him and the board and the slip of fluttering white.

He plucked the paper out even as he took in her move. Then he glanced down at the sheet, and his lips twitched. She had kiai—fighting spirit. It would serve her well in Go, if she had the skill to match it. And their first game had indicated that she did.

But that wasn’t what he’d really needed to know. What he’d needed to know was if she had kiai in life. And her note proved she did far more adeptly than one move possibly could on the game board.

She would prove an interesting enemy.

After another glance around, he tucked the paper into his pocket, swept the black and white stones into their pouches, and packed up the game. He pursed his lips.