Chapter 27 Kali
KALI
“Hands off,” Gedeon barked.
My irritation be damned, I ceased playing with the soft fabric he’d tied around my eyes and clung to him as he led me along what I’d guessed was a hallway.
The longer we walked, the more unsteady my legs became, and I stumbled over the first step down the stairs.
He caught my waist to stabilize my wobbling, and I had to close my eyes despite being blindfolded to push away what had occurred mere minutes ago.
How it’d felt to have them cornering me.
How, for some reason, I’d trusted them with touching me. How it hadn’t been enough.
I lowered my foot onto the next steep step. “Where are you taking me?” I whispered, as if the scarf obstructing my vision would make my voice boom in…this place he was bringing to me to.
“You will see,” Gedeon said, helping me down another step, and the drop in temperature raised the hair on my arms.
I mumbled a curse at this refusal to grant me an actual response.
With each loud and clumsy step down the stairs, my exasperation rose.
Last night had been the first time I’d slept through the night without any nightmares.
Of course, I had to wake up in an unfamiliar room tangled in the smoothest bedsheets of my life.
Because why not? It had become a regular occurrence at this point.
The bedroom had been black in its entirety, from the hardwood floor to the furniture, except for the gray walls and the white, too-thin-for-my-preference bedsheets.
My guess? Gedeon’s bedroom. I hadn’t seen him dress in any color apart from black so far. Not that I was complaining. It suited him.
Zion had likely spent the night there too, based on the scarce splotches of what resembled dried blood on the floor.
How did I know it? I’d smelled it. Sprawled on the floor and brought my nose to the suspicious splotches.
Because I was not licking them. Nope. Even if curiosity was going to kill me one day, it had its limits.
However, my awakening on an as-bouncy-as-a-cloud mattress meant they’d found me in the clearing and carried me back.
As if they cared.
I’d come to the conclusion that as selfish as I was for wanting to stay, I could use everyone here. They were planning to storm the city, and Zion had shared he hoped to do it soon. Gedeon wouldn’t allow it for now, as we supposedly weren’t ready, but who said I couldn’t persuade him otherwise?
He secured his hold on my waist. “Careful, last step.”
My heavy footfalls echoed as I lost my balance and bumped into a damp wall. Careful, my ass.
“Are you okay?” He removed the scarf blindfolding me.
“So far.” I blinked rapidly to adjust to my vision. Two light bulbs hung on strings above us. One illuminated the small steel table with a glass bottle and a syringe on a glinting tray set on top, and the other, the large silvery table with a corpse chained to it.
But something about the human remains was familiar. I shuffled closer and the stench of mangled flesh hit me, together with recognition. This was the body of that sordid guard who’d let me through Ilasall’s gates for a price.
“Do you like your present?” Zion asked, coming up from behind the table, his thumbs hooked in the loops of his well-worn and ripped jeans. Black, similar to Gedeon’s, because “You can’t see blood on them,” as he’d once explained.
“I—” I staggered back, away from that dead abomination.
Iron mixed with bleach invaded my nostrils, singing the tiny hairs inside.
Moldy concrete loomed above us, as disgusting as the person I’d paid favors too many times to count, and I focused on the shadows swarming in corners of what I supposed was a basement.
The illusion of endless space due to the darkness erasing the walls pacified my nausea.
I wasn’t in Ilasall anymore.
There were no walls trapping me here.
“You are free to act as you wish,” Gedeon said.
“To do what?”
He prowled toward me, and his hand slid into the waistband of my shorts. I rolled my lips not to make a sound. Plucking my knife, he offered it to me. “Whatever you want. Or tell us what you dream of, and we will make it happen.”
Zion poked the round stomach of the despicable guard with the knife he carried with him at all times. “I promised to repay you for eating your dinner.”
My throat clogged up. He’d brought me a gift on a shining silver platter in the shape of a steel table for finishing my plate of food the night I’d awakened in their compound.
I swallowed past the knot tying my vocal cords. “But he’s already dead. There’s no point in doing anything to him.”
“Give him a minute and he will come to. We did not want his screams to be what greets you,” Gedeon said.
“What did you do to him?” With the amount of dried-up blood, I wondered how he was still alive. Cauterized flesh marked the guard’s crotch, and I wrinkled my nose in disgust. His dick and balls were gone.
“It was Eislyn’s idea.” Zion grinned in wicked delight. “Meds that paralyze his muscles, but don’t kill him.”
On the beat, the man’s eyes peeled open, and he fell into a coughing fit, the metal encircling his ankles and wrists loudly banging against the silver table. The rattle reverberated in the vast expanse.
His heaving chest stretched out the cuts in his milky skin, and I cocked my head aside to decode the incisions. “You carved out your name?”
“Gedeon likes marking them.” Using his knife, Zion re-opened the first inch of the first letter, and the guard choked on a cry.
“I enjoy seeing my possessions branded,” Gedeon explained, indifferent to the guard’s croaked voice pleading with Zion to cease deepening the lacerations.
“I don’t want to hear him.” Staggering back, I hit Gedeon’s chest, and he caught me.
Gedeon threw the thin gray scarf to Zion, and he stuffed it into the guard’s mouth, securing the ends around his head.
“Thank you.” I willed the rising bile to simmer down.
The man’s voice had swirled in my ears like poison.
“Do whatever you want to him. As long as it hurts, I’ll be happy.
” The wrist and ankle cuffs restraining him purred to me that he wasn’t going to exit the basement in one piece.
The belief enveloped me in wings of corrupt contentedness, and I leaned into Gedeon.
“As you wish.” His fingers dipped under my t-shirt and began tracing idle circles around my navel. My stomach grew light and fluttery.
Examining the chained man, Zion bit his fist, and I asked Gedeon, “Is this...a thing for him?”
“You mean why he enjoys dissecting people while they are still alive?" Gedeon drew a line up to my sternum. “Why he likes to drain them of their blood, nice and slow? Why he’s fascinated by the crimson liquid?”
“If we can call it that."
His fingers slid down to the hemline of my shorts and back up again.
"Our past was not exactly easy. We grew up learning how to kill and defend, and when Ilasall attacked us years ago, certain things.
..changed. We changed." My pelvis contracted, and Gedeon repeated his caress anew.
"This—let’s call it the study of human pain points—is his outlet when life becomes too much.
A way to take the edge off when memories threaten to overcome you.
" I shuffled on my feet, and he gripped my hip, his tone lowering.
"Call it a game of vengeance. Only his opponents never cross the board to reach the winning side. "
My ass pressing into his not-so-soft groin challenged my focus as I pushed, “What’s yours?”
“Outlet?” He tapped a rhythm on my belly, eliciting a twitch out of my muscles. “The training rings. I particularly enjoy the resistance of my opponents, but anything that inflicts some sort of damage does it for me.”
The experience I had been deprived of. Giving had been what I was coerced into providing to survive and go after what I wanted behind the city’s wall, but here, in their compound…
Taking seemed to be an option you could choose.
Zion sauntered around the guard in search of his next target.
The gag in his mouth couldn’t muffle his screams as Zion flayed strips of his skin from his abdomen and they landed with a wet plop on the cement floor, as he meticulously sawed the man’s ears into thin ribbons like that leather whip from Vice and they hung limply down the sides of the guard’s head, as he made precise crisscrossing cuts in the soles of the abomination’s feet, all the way from the heel to the toes, as he drew parallel lines on his plaything’s inner thighs and scarlet coated his pale flesh.
Each drop of crimson, each cry, each convulsion, only pushed Zion further. Scrutinizing his work, he angled his head to the side and shifted his weight, drawing my attention to the stretched material of his jeans across his hips.
He was into this.
“Would you like to take care of it?” Gedeon teased the underside of my breasts, so close and yet so far from my hardened nipples aching to be pinched, because the way his callouses had scraped at them before—
I cleared my throat. It dissolved the lump turning my voice hoarse, but not the wetness soaking my panties. “I’d like to watch you take care of it.”
“He knows I wouldn’t mind.” Disturbing mirth sparkled on Zion’s wide smile, and my core tightened at the image his words had conjured.
Gedeon grunted—like it was a proper response—and asked, “Do you know how I brought you out of the city?”
“You mean how you drugged me? Water, Gedeon. It wasn’t that hard to figure it out,” I said, tracking how Zion slowly, so damn languidly, left long slashes in the guard’s armpits and inner biceps.
“And I said before, if you do it again, I swear to the gods, I won’t rest until I have you chained on that table instead of him. ”
“Such a fighter.” His low laugh rumbled in my ear. “But I meant after you passed out.”
“Then no,” I admitted.