Chapter 8 Kali
KALI
No, it couldn’t be morning already.
Not yet, please, not yet. Five more minutes. I rolled onto my side and buried my head in the fluffiest pillow you could dream of. But sunshine continued its non-ceasing assault on me, irritating my eyelids and nagging me to give up chasing sleep.
I hated mornings. They always meant a new day in Ilasall had begun. And they never brought you anything good. I pulled the blanket over my head and curled into a ball under the sheets so soft they were reminiscent of a caress.
Too soft.
They were too soft.
Yawning, I stretched on my back, and an unfamiliar sensation creeping up my arms snuffed out the last bit of comfort.
They weren’t dangling off the edge of the bed as usual.
This wasn’t my bed.
Wait.
Yesterday, I came back home, ate that mouth-watering puff pastry with the sweetest cream filling, cursed myself for pretending it was what I craved, and passed out.
In my kitchen.
The water. There had to be something in that water. I didn’t drink or eat anything else.
He must have put something in it.
The man who had been hiding in my bedroom.
The man who had stalked me the past two months and forced me to come two days ago. Half-forced me. Okay, I’d enjoyed it. But it didn’t mean kidnapping me was acceptable.
I leaped up to get out, but a thick gray blanket halted my attempt, and I face-planted the mattress.
Great. The freaking bed itself had decided to become my personal jail cell. Utter perfection.
Sitting up on my heels, I brushed the hair out of my face and deliberately exhaled in a plea for my heart to cease racing. I tugged my pale blue, half-sleeved shirt down, so it wasn’t scrunched up between my armpits uncomfortably, and curled my pinkie.
One. The bed I was on could fit no less than two people and was covered in half a dozen gray pillows—the color of concrete apartment buildings in Ilasall—half of them scattered on the ground. Might have been my fault. But I wasn’t going to pick them up. My kidnapper could handle the mess.
Two. The room was much larger than my whole apartment in the city. The bed itself was arguably bigger than my bedroom.
Three. On my left stood a dark wood bedside table, leading to a matching closet fifteen feet away.
Four. Daylight was pouring from the three large windows on the far wall. Now wasn’t the morning. Based on the sun’s position, I’d guess the middle of the day or later. Which meant I’d been out for a night and half a day.
I crawled on the bed toward them, dragging the blanket with me down to the floor, and ran. It took me way too many precious seconds to reach the windows.
Shit.
I was high up. Old ruins and dilapidated buildings filled in the gaps between the standing survivors, surrounded by open fields of verdant greenery. Mountains loomed on the horizon instead of the familiar concrete wall.
I wasn’t in the city anymore.
I yanked the window handle and ducked to avoid the glass hitting me from my rush.
Hot summer air blasted my face and a non-refreshing breeze tousled my hair.
A bout of noise floated from the street below where a mass of people crowded the road, shouting greetings, chatting, and loudly opening and closing doors to what I supposed were shops and stores.
Everyone was beaming, full of life, not contempt, irritation, or arrogance like in Ilasall.
A woman in a white flowing dress looked up and waved at me. I slammed my back to the grayish wall next to the window. Careful not to expose myself, I dared another peek outside, but she was nowhere to be seen. Was she coming here now that she’d noticed me?
I was not willing to wait and find out. I had to get out of here. Now.
A kick of adrenaline dissipated the last wisps of fog clouding my mind, and I searched the stupidly vast room for my target.
There. A black door.
My bare feet carried me across the bedroom, and I cursed as the wooden floor changed into white-and-black marble tiles, chilly under my soles. A massive bathroom. With a bathtub that could fit more than one person.
But there had to be an exit. I scrambled back to the bedroom and noticed another dark wood door.
What was up with all the matching furniture here?
Nobody cared about that in Ilasall. Not in the apartment buildings assigned to the black band wearers.
Now the spaces dedicated to green-banded people… Lavish was an understatement.
As I pulled and pried the door handle, it rattled from the tension, but refused to budge. As if the world was mocking me, using the tiny metal rod in the door to play games with me.
A yell to be let out simmered inside me, but I kept my mouth shut. Never let them know you were awake. Never give them the advantage of knowing your plans.
Ceasing my efforts, I retreated and paced the expansive room. If he viewed me as prey lost in his trap, he was terribly mistaken. I could play his hunting game. Let him think he had me. Because I needed him close to be able to cut him into a thousand pieces from this noose he thought to have me in.
For now, I had to come up with a solution. Only the fact that I had no clue where I was complicated the matters.
I had to return to the city. They should’ve realized I was gone by now. I’d just gotten the job I’d worked all this time for and completed the first three stages of my plan. I couldn’t let this…unfortunate predicament stop me.
Shimmers snaked their way into my peripherals. A crystal decanter and a drinking glass set on the light gray dresser sparkled in the sun filtering through the windows.
It couldn’t be.
I lifted the decanter to examine it better in the daylight. There it was, a tiny chip on the rim, right above the top of one of the squiggly patterned lines I ran my thumb down.
He’d had the balls to steal my decanter. The sole possession I valued.
He was going to receive a thousand and seven cuts then. Six extra ones for each pattern line and a bonus one for the chip.
Footsteps sounded behind the door, and I grew motionless, my ears straining. Someone was coming down the hallway.
Would they come in or walk past? Was it the woman who’d noticed me awake? Had she told anyone I had woken up?
Muffled voices paused right behind the door. Were they arguing?
I scrambled to find anything resembling a weapon, but the room hosted nothing of use. And it wasn’t like I could defend myself with pillows.
Familiar shimmers lured me back to my glass decanter. A sufficient enough option. Raising it above my head, I put all my might into throwing it to the floor.
The sudden and sharp thud broke off the bickering outside the door. The following silence carried more notes of menace than whatever things they’d been arguing about doing to me.
Careful about my bare feet slipping in the puddle of water full of tiny pieces of crystal glass, I dove in for the largest shard.
As I straightened, a key clicked in the lock, and the door burst open.
The man ahead of the others was him. A few inches taller than me, with the sharp jaw I wanted to mark, accentuated by thicker lips curled up in surprise. Black waves swirled atop his forehead, as though the wind from the raging hail inside me had reached him.
“You,” I hissed at him, and leaped away from the pool of water, landing on the dry hardwood floor.
“Me?” He leaned on his shoulder on the door frame, and an image flashed of him doing exactly that in my apartment.
“Who are you?” I raised my voice. “What do you want?”
Because I knew what I wanted very well. But my curiosity had often gotten me into trouble, and this was a case of it. I was bent on finding out what he wanted.
He prowled toward me, hands in his pockets, head cocked to the side. Gods, how I wanted to wipe off his smirk.
“You,” he stated, a repeat of my earlier words.
My heart beat faster, hitting my ribs with its thundering force, and my palms dampened. “Do not come near me. I’m leaving,” I spat out.
“Zion.” He nodded over his shoulder.
A second man moved from the door and plopped down on the bed, his white wrinkled t-shirt as messy as the sheets covering the mattress.
Zion. Tall, golden-brown hair, not a care about my captivity.
The man from the street. The one who’d shooed away that abhorrent abomination who had harassed me in the middle of my walk home.
“You have no idea what blood does to me,” Zion drawled.
I trailed his gaze to the shard I was clutching so hard my knuckles had turned white, a stark contrast to the crimson trickling onto the floor and my bare foot. Fire and heat had consumed my nerves, not a wisp of pain registering from my self-injury.
“Drop it.” My kidnapper moved closer to me. One of my kidnappers. I’d bet my life Zion was involved too. “You are only hurting yourself.”
I batted my eyelashes. “For now.” If he had decided to throw me a challenge, I could throw my own right back. “Who says I’ll still be the only one in a minute?”
“Why don’t you try?” Zion offered from behind me. “I’d like to see it.”
My pulse roared in my ears as I twisted on my heels. He’d managed to sneak behind my back without me noticing.
An exit. I needed an exit.
I spotted a third man standing a few feet from the open door. I lunged on the bed to get around all of them, rolled over the mattress, and gunned for the doorway.
An arm wrapped around my waist and roughly wrenched me back into someone’s chest, knocking the air out of my lungs.
“Pretty birdie, don’t fly away from me.” Zion’s warm breath ghosted down the side of my neck, snatching all moisture from my mouth. “I don’t want to clip your wings.”
My wings? Mad, he was mad.
I wriggled to shake him off and his arms tightened around my stomach to the point I could barely move.
But he was holding only my waist. Paying no attention to the pain gradually rising through the dullness of adrenaline, I drove the glass piece down into his thigh.
His gasp fueled my resolve to fight. Because this was what you got for taking me without asking. The shard hadn’t gone in deep but enough to tear his black jeans and pierce his flesh. A splotch spread around the impact point.
A wound for a wound.
“You have played enough. Now be a good girl and drop it.” My kidnapper’s insinuation that I was a child in need of being praised pulled me out of my dreamy state.
I yanked the glass out and sneered at him, “I am not your girl or your fucking bird. Now let me go.”
“I’d listen to him if I was you.” Zion released my waist, yet I didn’t have a second to get my wits together before he seized my wrist. He licked the bottom of my palm, lapping up the welling drops of blood around the piece of crystal glass embedded in my flesh.
Each lick burst into a tiny flame, climbing up my nerves and dripping down my spine.
My kidnapper closed the distance between us. “Drop it,” he ordered.
“Sure.” I yanked my wrist out of Zion’s hold and used the inertia to guide my weapon toward him. I could do as he’d asked. Not like I’d need the shard anyway when it’d be stuck in him.
He leaned backward, but I was faster, my shard flying down and slashing right above his right hip.
Damn it. Missed his face.
“Oh, now you’re in trouble.” Zion reinforced his hold on me.
My kidnapper snatched my wrist in an iron grip.
“Drop that shard right now or I will pry your pretty little fingers open one by one, take this piece of glass, and use it to mark you the same way you did me.” He laid a feather-light kiss on my knuckles.
“Your screams will not stop me,” he said, squeezing my joint.
I willed myself to grasp the shard as if my life depended on it. A wave of fresh blood ran down both of our hands, red droplets painting the water on the floor in pink swirls.
“Your choice.” He pried my thumb away, and I instinctively clasped the glass firmer. Ignoring the ache, I bared my teeth at him and thrashed in Zion’s grip.
“Enough of your games. Can you calm her down? I’ll have to stitch her up,” the third man piped up, opening a white plastic box at his feet. Brown locks curling around his shoulders obscured his face, but not his intentions. He wasn’t going to help me.
Suddenly, my wrist was squashed so brutally that a string of arrows of pain shot up my arm, destroying my nerves along the way as I screamed.
My fingers relaxed against my will, allowing my captor to prise them apart.
The shard clattered to the floor, opaque from my blood, and the puddle of water turned red where it’d splashed.
But the fury for ridding me of my weapon summoned an idea. I leaned backward into Zion and, using his body as leverage, kicked at my abductor’s chest with my heel. Pain shot up my ankle from the improper strike, and I blinked rapidly to will the tears away.
He stumbled back, his thick lips parted in shock. Yet his smirk floated back up as he cracked his neck. “Such a fighter.”
“If you don’t stop moving, this is going to hurt.
” The third man popped up at my right, tapping the half-full syringe to check for air bubbles.
“And I’d rather not injure you any more.
” His caring words shouted innocence, compelling me to let him wipe a spot on my upper arm with an antiseptic-soaked cotton pad in a practiced motion. Alcohol permeated my next inhale.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my hand quivering from the deep cut the crystal shard had left across my palm.
“Something so you don’t get an infection.” Quieting right at the end, he jabbed the needle into me, and his lie flowed from the thin steel tube into my muscle. I strained to get away, cursing him out, but to no avail.
The man—a doctor?—released me, and I spun, driving my elbow into Zion’s stomach. He crouched, and both surprise and hunger lit up his eyes.
I wobbled back, out of his reach, and turned. There he was, my kidnapper. Hands back in his pockets, coldly observing my handling of Zion.
A wet line on his black t-shirt caught my attention and another idea formed.
I half-ran the few steps to him, feigning a punch to his jaw and letting him catch my wrist—again—distracting him enough to shove my uninjured hand in the cut above his hip.
Warmth drenched my fingertips, and his pained grunt caressed my ears like notes of the most exquisite melody.
“Yes, Kali, fight me,” he gritted out.
I faltered. How did he know my name?
Fuming, I kicked at him, twisting free and staggering backward. It was getting hard to keep my balance. A blink, and my eyelids grew too heavy. Another blink, and weakness compelled me to yield, buckling my knees. Someone snatched me up as I slumped, my limbs refusing to cooperate.
Two sets of eyes, one as dark as the night and one so bright as if sculpted from the early morning sky, loomed over me, watching me drift away.