Chapter 20 Zion
ZION
Their blood was mine. The idiots who’d dared to defy us were going to be drained of it until even my knife wouldn’t paint them in scarlet.
“Where?” I asked Ava, as my trusted team and I marched down the abandoned street drowning in sunshine on the outskirts of our compound. If only the day’s heat could incinerate the abhorrent traitors we were about to pay a visit to. It’d make my job that much easier.
“Up there, third floor.” She pointed to the corner window in the seven-story building and fell in line behind me as we entered the first floor and climbed up the crumbling stairwell, the stairs cracked and missing large chunks, the middle of them deformed from the thousands of feet having left their imprints over time.
Ava knew the rules. I was the first to toy with our targets. I was also the first to get bruised if they were armed.
Not everyone could comfortably function as part of my team. We didn’t care for mercy or pleas. If you risked working against us, we were your certain doom. A slow one.
I kicked down the shabby wooden door, a piece of a decaying lock flying away and hitting the pair of well-worn boots left on the broken metal shoe rack, and we spread out in the half-deserted apartment.
Everyone knew the drill. Ava would weed out anyone who displayed a drop of concern for our targets or a lack of viciousness in extracting information.
A newcomer Ava had selected for our team dragged a kicking and dripping-blood-out-of-his-nostrils man out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.
“He was scrambling to climb out of a window.” She shoved him into a wobbling chair.
“Not sure how it would’ve worked, as we’re on the third floor.
” She directed the last two words at the long-faced man as they quickly tied him to the chair.
The idiot thrashed and pulled on the restraints, repeating that we’d made a mistake over and over. He could try to escape for hours, for all I cared—my team was well-versed on ropes.
“How did you come up with the idea?” I punched his chin upward as a way of introduction. He knew who I was. Everyone did.
Crimson trickled from the corners of his lips, down his chin, and onto his hairy chest. The result of the first stroke of my paintbrush—my fist.
“What are you talking about?” he wheezed out, struggling to free himself.
“You know who I am. Who I represent. You and your friends robbed a number of our stores in our compound and decided to extort money out of them for protection.” I jabbed the nail of my thumb into the cut on his bottom lip and ripped it wide open.
His panting mixed with cries, weaving a prophetic melody of the chain of events about to ensue.
“You are one of the three identified as your meager ring leaders. And as such, you will answer for your whole group. How did you come up with the idea?”
“We didn’t—”
The newcomer punched him in the gut, and a coughing fit racking his lungs cut him off.
His bloodied spit flew on the dirty floor, some dribbling onto his pair of loose, blue-checkered underwear, staining the fabric in reddish-brown splotches. “Bitch.”
She shrugged her sloped shoulders. “Yes, I am. I couldn’t help myself. Your whining was unbearably irritating.”
Ava had chosen well. After a few months of basic training in pain management—in others, not yourself—and with Ava’s counseling, she was going to become an invaluable part of us.
“If you don’t want to chat, we’ll cut this short. Your tongue serves the sole purpose of speech, and if you don’t plan on using it, you won’t need it whatsoever.” My knife explored the dip under his cheekbone. “Who are your friends?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled, his scarce stubble damp from his sobs.
Oh, well.
Stabbing his right thigh, I twisted the blade. Hot blood gushed down his hairy leg, and I licked my upper teeth. Scarlet flowing down a body always painted it in the most heavenly patterns. “Who wants to play?” I asked.
“Seriously?” Ava’s thick, light brown eyebrows shot so high up they were going to fly off from her forehead if she raised them any higher.
It wasn’t often I offered a fresh and untainted canvas for them to have fun with.
“Teach the newcomer.” Pulling a chair from underneath the wobbling kitchen table, I plopped down, folding my arms on the backrest before me.
This was becoming boring. I enjoyed playing with those abhorrent servants of Ilasall. But our own people turning against us churned my gut. Betrayal contaminated their blood and sucked all the fun out of it.
From time to time, some idiots would decide living in our compound wasn’t enough. Gedeon had made sure everyone had enough to live as comfortably as possible, yet fools would pop up here and there, seeking to earn more money at the cost of others.
Disgusting.
This idiot with his friends had been hanging over our heads for months, as none of the shop owners would tell us who extorted them.
Thank the gods Ava’s friend had caught one of them in the act and followed him back to this apartment, where he now cried and begged our newcomer to cease carving his face.
Ava was instructing the newcomer woman, barely over twenty or so, how to cut and stab someone to maximize pain without them losing consciousness or leaving us too soon. A peculiar skill. Took time to learn. The man’s wails mixed with her squeaks of joy and Ava’s praise for a job well done.
“Stop, stop! Please, I’ll tell you everything,” he pleaded.
I rose from my seat and stalked to where he’d ceased resisting the restraints, having surrendered to the ropes securing him to the chair.
Calculated cuts crisscrossed his cheeks, flaps of his prickly skin exposing the inside of his mouth to the air, the lines as precise as the ones deepening the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.
They hadn’t so much as started on anything below his chin yet.
“Nice job,” I praised our newcomer, a tall woman, her russet hair weaved atop her head like a crown. Obviously, a tip she’d picked up from Ava. “Name?”
“Amari,” she said, wiping her knife on her denim shorts and leaving a stain behind.
“Train her,” I told Ava. “We’re keeping her.”
Ava embraced Amari in a quick hug, whispering something in her ear that made her smile wide.
Amari had passed her trial. All newcomers in my catch-and-play team had to survive one. You couldn’t know how you’d act faced with inflicting pain on others without trying it. Some threw up and had to go work elsewhere, but others, like Amari, were destined to be more than great.
“Talk.” I yanked the man’s head back.
His yelp morphed into a cry as the incisions at the corners of his lips tore apart. His salty tears streaming in rivulets burned his wounds, and his wailing intensified.
If he wished to become his own torturer, who was I to say no?
“Everyone lives in the central district.” His snot trickled into his mouth, and he choked, sniffling. “We meet here once a week before visiting the stores’ owners.”
“Who are they? I need full names. And where exactly do they live?” I asked, as Amari returned from the bedroom and secured a strip of the white bedsheet around the stab wound in his thigh to staunch the bleeding.
Couldn’t have him dying on us.
The man choked out the names and locations, spilling additional details even without being asked. What kind of a ring were they hoping to run if they gave up so easily?
“We’ll round them up,” Ava assured me. “Any ideas on punishment?”
“Keep them all alive. Including this one. We’ll go public and use the main square.”
Alive didn’t mean intact.
Leaving my team to handle the mess, I strode out of the building.
Red was the most beautiful color, but I wasn’t scrubbing it out of the floors.
I wiped my favorite blade clean on my jeans, returned it to its sheath strapped to my right upper arm, and wandered down the streets toward the shops they had extorted.
What was she doing right now? Gedeon had forbidden me from taking things further with Kali, understandably, but I was still going to stab him for keeping me away from her. And then paint his chest in crimson pouring out of him and lick—
Nope.
Not going there.
Yesterday, I’d kept an eye on her from outside the restaurant where she’d eaten and laughed with Eislyn, Ryder, and Jayla. She could sing with her laugh, and I craved to taste the sound of it. Would it be sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or a combination of all?
Eislyn had nagged me to let her take Kali away for the day.
I would’ve made my way, but Eislyn was so tiny and yet so feisty.
Like a cat after a bowl of milk. She was truly the cutest addition to us, but the snapshot of how she’d looked walking down the Ilasall’s street, adorned by multiple bruises and a green wristband, had compelled me to concede.
She deserved to get what she wanted. But this would be her wish for the week.
I turned a street corner and melted into the shade to hide from Kali resting against Lucia’s shop window. What was she doing here?
Perspiration had glued the white t-shirt to her curves, and I hit a rough wall to expend my pent-up energy. Gods, how I wanted to tear it up. She lifted the hem to wipe her forehead with it, and the shape of her belly made my mouth water.
Crossing the distance between us, I dreamed of marking her with strokes of cold steel and watching her lose her mind over it.
She registered me coming a few feet away and straightened, standing up taller.
“Did you like my gifts?” I asked.
She didn’t wince at the sight of blood on my knuckles or the splotch of blood on my jeans, instead holding my gaze, her head held high. “What gifts?”
Her back pressed up against Lucia’s window as I closed in on her. My tongue itched to collect the sweat glistening on her collarbones.
“You in my clothes.” I leaned in, torturously slow, and her throat bobbed. “Excruciatingly beautiful.”