Chapter 52 Gedeon
GEDEON
Idunked the flayed head into the iron bucket of water and popped the eyeballs out with my thumbs. Soggy optic nerves and dripping water tickled my skin as I dropped the fleshy tissues in the leak-proof box. It had to survive delivery better than the three from before.
“That’s disgusting.” Ezra gagged above a rusted bucket in the far corner of our underground.
Pulling the skull out of pink water, I began scrubbing it of anything that might have stuck to the bones with an old, mottled towel I used for such things.
The ivory surface gleamed in the dim light as I had already removed the tongue, skin, hair, gums, and any other bits that made up the messenger’s head.
Once you had practiced enough, it ceased to be complicated.
You simply had to know where to make the incisions to peel everything off as efficiently as possible.
“If you are going to vomit instead of helping me, get Eislyn here. She has a better stomach than you,” I told him.
She had my highest respect for assisting Zion in finding creative solutions for his endeavors with his playthings.
Which could not be said for Ezra. He had been with us for over a year, and you would think the fourteen months should be enough for a person to become accustomed to the activities in Zion’s basement, yet sawing a person’s head off and cleaning it up made him nauseous.
Spit hitting metal reverberated off the damp walls of the basement.
“I assumed helping you haul him here would be enough. I didn’t expect you to decapitate his remains and then methodically—” Ezra retched above the bucket.
“This is too much for me, man.” Rubbing his temple, he disappeared up the stairs leading to the first floor of our central building.
I picked off the hanging bits of flesh from the skull in quick succession.
The towel heated under my fingertips from how brutally I scrubbed the bone until the red streaks faded and a whitish color surfaced, identical to the shade of Kali’s cheeks when I had found her in bed three hours ago, her face puffy and her neck bruised.
Realizing how close and yet far away I had been from her during the messenger’s assault because of my foolishness for listening to her ask to leave her alone and not Zion’s insistence that was not what she needed… My jaw ground. Another mistake of mine that had hurt those around me.
“Gedeon? Ezra said you needed something down here?” The chill drenching the vast space carried Eislyn’s question to me, her voice blending with the sound of hers and a second pair’s footsteps. “I brought Eli for help, just in case.”
Taking my trusted serrated knife, I positioned the skull between my knees, so the light bulb above me illuminated the ivory surface clearly. A blank canvas for my message.
“I need you to divide him into pieces so they all fit in this box.” I tapped my knife on the cardboard box lined with layers of plastic sheets. Hopefully, it would look like a normal delivery from the outside.
Eli whistled. “We better get to it. It’ll take a while. Do you have a saw or anything like that?”
“Next to him.” I gestured to the headless corpse of the soldier sprawled on the large mortuary table in the center of our underground.
“Ladies’ choice.” Eli offered the instrument to Eislyn. “You’re the expert in cutting people up.”
“I want the top.” She rolled up the sleeves of her navy sweater and grinned at him. “You can deal with his dick.”
“Fuck me,” Eli grumbled, but dutifully hovered at her side while she sliced through the wrist joint. She triumphantly handed him the barely bleeding body part, and he dropped it into the cardboard box. “You sure you don’t want me to help you?”
“Not yet. But the lower part is all yours because I’m not touching his balls.” She positioned the saw on the soldier’s elbow. “You have a pair of your own, so you can handle his too.”
Ignoring their discussion on who should dissect which part of the messenger’s body, I carved out two precise lines at the top of his skull.
One letter down, fourteen to go.
The blade slipped and pierced my thumb as I engraved the last curve of the third word.
A drop of crimson welled up along with the blooming sting, and I pressed my finger to my long-sleeved shirt.
The black fabric absorbed the liquid, concealing it from sight, and I gripped the handle of my knife firmer.
If Zion had not gone searching for Kali, she would have vanished precisely as my blood had on my shirt.
“My muscles are cramping,” Eislyn complained. She put down the saw she had been using for the past twenty minutes and wiped the sweat beads glistening on her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of red behind.
“You’ve got blood on your face.” Eli indicated his own forehead as he took the saw. Grimacing at the uniform-clad lower part of the soldier, he began dividing the two legs into pieces.
Eislyn faked a gag and rubbed roughly at her skin with the hem of her sweater. “Ew.”
We both chuckled. She was dismembering a body with no aversion to the job, but a drop of scarlet triggered her.
“I know, I know. Tendons and organs are not exactly something that freaks me out, but he assaulted Kali, and I don’t want him on me.” She shuddered and put her chocolate hair in a high ponytail, blowing upward to get the bangs out of her eyes.
Chopping the legs into smaller parts at the joints, Eli asked, “How is Kali, by the way?”
I glowered at him. How did he think she was? Good?
“Why do you think I don’t even question this?” He followed Eislyn’s example and tied up his blond strands stained in crimson, similar to the gray t-shirt he wore, into a bun. “Eislyn caught me up with everything.”
“She’s sleeping,” I gritted out as I carved out the last letter of my message.
“That’s good,” Eislyn softly said. “She needs to rest. It’ll take time for her to process things.”
Fucking time. Like it had not already messed with everyone enough. The longer it ticked by, the more people succumbed to its grasp on their necks.
I placed the skull on the stool I had been sitting on and strode to the mortuary table. “I need one femur bone.”
Confusion laced Eislyn’s delicate features. “A femur?”
“I ran out of space.” I selected a bone extractor from my laid-out tools on the small steel table and made quick of my work. Taking a small brush, I dipped it in the blood trickling from the mortuary table and carefully painted the grooves in the skull and the thigh bone, so the letters stood out.
Scrubbing her hands raw with the dirty towel, Eislyn scrutinized my work. “You signed your name?”
“I want them to know who is sending the message.” I inserted the skull with the etched text, the femur with my name, and the soldier’s identification chip in a plastic bag and tied it up, so the message would remain intact after placing it into the cardboard box filled with the porridge of the dissected body.
“Give this box to Ezra. He will deliver it to the Head of Ilasall.”
I had made a deal with Kali that the head of the Head of Ilasall would be hers, that she could take the final blow.
I always held my end of an agreement, but the city’s leader did not know that.
He had dared to send a messenger with Kali as a message, so I was sending his puppet back with a message of my own engraved into his bones.
Your skull is next
Gedeon
Late morning light framed Zion’s toned back as he hovered in front of the window, shirtless, the curve of his ass accentuated by a pair of tight black underwear.
My core contracted. He was poisonous. Like that yellow oleander Kali had planned to use. Give in to the allure and it would devour you from the inside out, consuming you until your pulse surpassed dangerous levels and you lost your mind.
I craved it.
Him.
“Is she still asleep?” I murmured to not disturb Kali as I lowered onto the edge of the mattress. Her eyelashes fluttered from a restless dream, the fluffy duvet hiding half of her face as she slept curled up in a ball. Exhaustion had lured her away from us.
Zion surveyed her tucked tightly between the sheets. “She keeps repeating that she’s not a message and wakes up mumbling about Alora every hour or so.”
I swallowed the bubbling pool of emotions, the trickle burning the back of my throat, and breathed out the rage threatening to shatter my teeth.
Snapping and lashing out were not what she needed.
She had been deprived of safety, of trust, of affection, and I would give anything to have the ability to offer her at least one of those things.
Any tenderness residing in me had been uprooted twelve years ago. Since then, my skills consisted of sentencing sinners, executing opposition, and ruling over my subjects.
And scarring those close to me.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Zion crawled onto the bed and leaned against the headboard. “I can’t wait any longer. Ilasall had it coming for years. Enough is enough.”
A heavy sigh slipped out of me. “We can’t do anything right now.
Those months of their security updates disrupted our supply chains.
You know that. Winter is starting and we barely have enough in storage to feed everyone as it is.
We do not have enough. Of anything. We are godsdamn behind.
I will not put everyone’s lives in danger for a slim chance that we might win.
It’s not worth it. We have to survive first.”
Up until my family’s death, I had not known what it meant to be a leader. How much the lives of others weighed on your shoulders. How you had to take calculated risks. Play the long-term game. Predict the outcome. Plan the casualties.
Choose between doing what Kali and Zion wanted and the needs of my people.
Either way, pain was guaranteed.