Chapter 29 Gedeon
GEDEON
Thud.
A loud slump to my right peeled my eyes open.
Muscle memory alone carried me out of my bed, the thin bedsheets sliding off my form like water and pooling on the floor.
The polished wooden floorboards chilled my soles as I tensed in a defensive position: my knees bent, fists half-curled, core tight, feet grounded, and my toes clenched to stabilize my balance.
Calculated breaths delivered oxygen to my brain, dissipating the last shreds of sleep, and my ears strained for any sounds. The night’s heaviness had buried my bedroom in total darkness, my vision limited to the tip of my nose.
A sudden burst of bright light blinded me, and I lunged sideways to avoid becoming an easy target. Someone had turned on the lamp on my bedside table.
I squinted to adapt to the overwhelming illumination, and a silhouette came into focus on the other side of the bed.
“He’s dead,” Zion announced, scratching his abdomen. Only tight, thin fabric hugged his hips, the rest of his toned body exposed, full of lines begging to be explored in a way that would make his muscles twitch.
A clear sign I had to fuck someone.
It had been too long.
Not since I had found her in that clearing.
A month.
Her tattoo celebration was in a month.
A fucking month.
He surveyed my naked form from my face to my toes and back up again—at least the bleariness prevented me from getting fully hard. Amusement danced on his upturned nose and high cheekbones. “Not going to ask?”
I took, not asked.
So realization had delayed its arrival.
That was not what he had meant.
Sleep. I had to be still hung up on sleep, my brain refusing to do its job properly.
Clearing my throat, I walked around the bed.
An unfamiliar man with his neck in an unnatural position lay on the hardwood floor near Zion’s bare feet.
Dressed in black cargo pants and a dark green, skintight shirt with a standard issue chest strap with two knife sheaths, the top one full, and the bottom one empty.
A combat knife glinted inches away from his paling face.
Ilasall’s military.
“Who is this?” I did not bother checking for his pulse. If Zion said he was dead, he was more than that. Erased from this life and the next.
“I’m guessing a soldier sent to kill you.” Zion rolled him onto his back and searched his front pockets. “Shit.” He handed me three pieces of paper he had pulled out.
Photographs of her, him, and I.
“Where is she?” I rushed out and down the hallway, Zion’s footsteps thudding behind me. If he was in my room, it meant she was alone and unaccounted for. I yanked on the door, the handle bouncing off the wall with a loud bang, and extended an arm to prevent it from bashing my face in.
The bed in her bedroom was untouched, the sheets unrumpled, no usual sight of the cocoon she liked to tuck herself into.
“What are you doing?”
The sound of her curious voice drained the tension from my chest, and my shoulders relaxed as I spun around to her standing in the doorway. A few strands had escaped the messy bun atop her head and framed her angular face.
She slapped a hand over her mouth to hide her smile. “And why are you naked?” Her eyes bounced down and up, down and up.
She had not seen me without any clothes yet. I had no wish to elicit fear. From what she had shared, sex was something she endured, not enjoyed. And her thinking I would force myself on her was the total opposite of what I wanted.
I pulled her into my arms. “Little death.” She was alive. “I assumed you were gone.” The smell of dew and musk coating the wild mess of her hair slowed my pulse. She must have been in her clearing in the surrounding forests.
“I told you both I wasn’t going anywhere.” She rested her palms on my chest, stroking me so slightly, tentatively, and five heartbeats later, pushed away. “But I will if you don’t hold up your end of the deal. Now what’s going on?”
“A soldier from the city slunk inside Gedeon’s bedroom. I snapped his neck before he got too close,” Zion explained.
Another bout of delayed realization dawned on me. He had handled the soldier. While he was in my room. Lurking while I slept.
Disbelief lowering my tone, I asked, “You were watching me sleep?”
“Sometimes, when I can’t fall asleep, I go to your room. I’ve done it for years. You’ve never noticed.” He shrugged like it was a frequent occurrence, not a hint of discomfort in being caught. “You’re a very heavy sleeper. Kind of like a baby kitten.”
Lacking words for an answer, I stared at him like an idiot. This was beyond his usual insanity.
Yet it did not feel wrong. Not at all. Which was the most unexpected out of all the events unraveling tonight. Including the fact that he had just called me a “kitten.” Typically, he did it to rile me up. Now, shock had removed such an option from the list of possible responses.
“No.”
Our heads whipped to her, white as a sheet, hovering at the head of her bed.
“No. No,” she repeated, then stormed past us and out of the room, her footfalls quickening as she neared the stairwell.
“What was that about?” Zion’s head swiveled, as if he was torn between staying in the room and chasing her.
Moonlight pouring out the windows caught the two wristbands delicately placed in the center of a fluffy pillow and their sparkles guided my legs to her bed.
One green, one black. “They are identical to the bands the cities use.” But if the soldier had left them here, it also meant he had visited her bedroom before coming to mine. “Was he in your room?”
“Not when I was still there.” Zion took the wristbands from me and flipped them over, checking them for anything out of the ordinary. “She always wore the black one. Why would he leave a green one?”
“No clue,” I said before marching down the hallway. I was getting answers one way or another, but first, I had to know if he had been in Zion’s bedroom. The soldier had his photograph too.
“Anything?” Zion popped into his bedroom behind me.
Hooks and metal bars dotted the ceiling, some secured to the walls as well.
A four-person bed—essentially two mattresses pushed together on top of a pale wood frame—and two mismatched bedside tables, one milky colored, like the bed frame, and a dark brown ornate piece with carvings of angels and demons on its drawer, occupied one wall, while the light gray, floor-to-ceiling closet covered the other, except where the door leading to the bathroom stood ajar.
Other than that, not a thing was out of place, not even a pair of socks left to dry on the floor.
He always said he needed lots of space. What for? I restrained from asking. The reason was likely to be disturbing, and I doubted I would want to live with the knowledge.
“Well, here’s your answer.” Zion stopped at the foot of his bed and gestured to the red-streaked sheets. “This isn’t my work.”
“Are they not always like that?” Half the time, he wandered around with at minimum one speck of scarlet somewhere on him. Bloody sheets were the least surprising item in his room. Now what he held in the drawers of his dresser, that would peak the most interest.
“That’s why I have the underground. Less clean-up. Do you know how long it takes to get blood out of white bedsheets? Having a drain installed in our basement was the best decision I’ve made that year.”
A message then. Blood for Zion, wristbands for Kali. What was supposed to be in mine if I had not been in my bedroom?
Unless I was supposed to be the message.
“Let’s decide what to do in the morning. I doubt they have sent a formation of soldiers to do one job,” I said, turning to walk out. “We need to bring her inside before she does something reckless.” Like roaming our territory and forests, an easily reachable target Ilasall had now marked her as.
“Has she told you anything?” He grabbed a fresh pair of black sweatpants from his closet and tossed them to me. “Put these on.”
“Can’t stand me naked?” I quickly pulled them on, unsuccessfully trying to brush off the fact that they were not mine and noticeably too small. “And no. Whenever I ask, she immediately shuts down. You?”
“The opposite,” he said, toying with the thick gray drapes covering his windows. “And same. She always refuses.” Releasing the fabric, he strode to the door before me. “She keeps murmuring ‘okay’ over and over in her sleep.”
“You watch her sleep too?” I asked as we jogged down the dimly lit hallway, only a few of the light bulbs installed in the ceiling turned on.
In most houses and buildings, we maintained a certain level of illumination day and night.
Sight was the main sense humans relied on, and losing it meant putting yourself at a disadvantage in case of an unexpected attack.
He snorted. “That’s the part that’s surprising to you?”
One of the many.
But I kept my mouth shut.
We hurried down the stairwell leading to the main exit out of the building.
Across the street from us, pacing the sidewalk around an umbrella pine growing through the cracks in the concrete, she paused to sink her flipped-open knife into the trunk, and with each thrust of her blade, repeated, “No.” She switched her knife to her left hand, flexing the right from how it must have cramped, and pointed the sharp tip at us as we approached. “No.”
“You are in our compound, Kali. Not in Ilasall.” I took the weapon easily from her quivering grasp, flipping it closed and stuffing it into the pocket of Zion’s sweatpants stretched around my hips. She could hurt herself in this state if she was not careful. “You are safe.”
“Ilasall,” she whispered, hugging herself around her midriff, rigidity locking her joints as she stood as still as a statue. “They know. They know. They know.” Her whispers became an endless loop as she stared ahead, vacant-eyed, lost in her nightmare, eerie and all-consuming.
“What do they know?” Zion asked. “Is it about the wristbands we found on your pillow?”
“I ca— I can’t tell you.” She fixated on the scattered gravel on the sidewalk. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I ca—”
“It’s me and Zion. No one else.” I interrupted her chanting, pinching her chin and raising her gaze to meet mine. “Talk to us.”
The night’s wind breezed past us, and its chill turned her face to steel.
“No.” She staggered a few feet backward, toward the pine tree, its mushroom-shaped needle foliage hovering above like a cage about to encase her.
“You can’t make me. I don’t belong to you.
There’s no law stating I have to tell you anything. ”
Her refusal was like a barbed wire looping around my ribs, its razor-sharp tips cutting into my flesh. She was hiding whatever was causing her so much distress that it was eating her up from the inside and locking her away behind the self-made bars.
I invaded her space, her back pressing against the jagged bark, and cupped her face.
“It’s okay. You’re okay.” My thumbs caressed her cheeks.
If such a possibility existed, I would never stop touching her.
“But you will talk. If not now, then later. You will. Because I will not stand aside and watch you crumble. I will not hold you while you shatter into pieces from how angry you are.” Her skin burned from whatever had happened to her.
Whatever she might have done. “Sleep with me tonight.”
She straightened up with a jolt. “Why would I? I have my own bed. And if you mea—”
“I am not letting you spend the nights alone from now on. It’s too dangerous.
” A soldier with orders to kill had managed to sneak through the maze of streets into the center of our compound, our central building, and our rooms. I was not going to put her life in jeopardy by not providing protection.
“That soldier might not have been alone.”
“He was there for you and Zion too, not just me.” She ducked away from me. “Who says I’d be safer in your room?”
“She’s right. And there’s a corpse near your bed, so she can sleep in mine,” Zion said, and beckoned her with a finger as he walked backward to our central building.
“Can’t I sleep with Jayla or Eislyn?” Dragging her feet after him, she glanced at me over her shoulder. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
“Nope.” He ushered her to the entrance. “My bed is bigger.”
“If I’m sleeping in your bed, then you’re spending the night on the floor,” she huffed. “Try anything and I’ll stab you.”
He slapped her ass in response, and she punched his upper arm, muttering profanities, their string cut off by the door slamming shut.
I rubbed at my face, the migraine’s claws creeping up from behind to dig into my temples.
Alive.
They were alive.
Cold numbed my fingers as I washed up in the bucket of water we kept in our underground, scrubbing myself clean of any residue from the soldier’s clammy remains I had heaved from my bedroom and dumped on the steel table in our underground.
I flicked the water off my hands. How had they gotten intel on Kali?
Tonight was not the first time they had sent someone to take Zion and me out.
It had never brought them the results they sought.
But her… It made things different. They knew she was important to us, that they could get to us through her.
Without even the mark of a tattoo, which was what I had suspected they used to see as a sign of who to target. Not anymore.
I slammed my fist down on the shining metal surface and the soldier’s body wobbled from the force. The rattling reverberated from the damp and moldy walls, the echo a hint of what was about to come—a fucking mess.
She had officially become one of the main targets now.
Breathing through the hammer pounding on my head, I traipsed upstairs, wary to not awaken anyone, and cracked open Zion’s bedroom door. Tangled between his sheets, her lips slightly parted, she had given in to the sleep’s allure.
Zion raised his head, blinked at me, and slumped back on the fluffy pillow. “Join us if you want, but close that door,” he groggily murmured, an arm around her waist.
“Did she not say she would knife you if you tried anything?”
“She fought. I won. We agreed she could stab me in the morning.” His murmurs gradually quietened as he joined her in the dream world. More likely the nightmare world. Hers fueled by the well filled to the brim with a secret, his by a blaze scorching his skin that I had lit up underneath him.
I crawled onto the mattress and threw an arm around her, my hand pressed between her back and his warm stomach. I listened to their steady breaths, in and out, in and out, until the band of pain tightening around my head exhausted me enough to drift away.