Chapter 34 Zion
ZION
Whoever had marinated the mushrooms Conall had served for dinner was clearly colorblind. Otherwise, they could spot the difference between edible fungi and the kind with extra properties.
Because Gedeon perching beside me on the bed and scratching the back of my neck had to be a hallucination.
A very, very lifelike mirage. So convincing, his caresses leached the tension from my muscles, reducing me to a blubbering mess of Hmms and Mhms.
Maybe I should ask Conall for a jar of those mushrooms to bring home. For your journey, as people liked to say. A man could get hungry on his way.
Gedeon’s fingers stilled in my hair. “I think Ezra might be my brother.”
The snake. His brother. Family. A chill branched out inside me like a lightning strike.
With my knee pressed to Gedeon’s, I raised my chin. “Wh—”
He resumed weaving his spell on me by scraping my nape, up, up, and up, delving into my hairline, the heel of his palm a leaden weight keeping my head down as my eyes fluttered closed.
They were just nails, but they felt so good, I contemplated stealing his nail clippers.
A new addiction had settled in my bones.
Incomprehensible mumbles spilled from my throat as I fought his thrall on me. “Wh-hrrr-y?”
From the far side of the one-story house Conall had assigned to us for our trip to their compound, slow, deliberately so, stomps of bare feet closed in on us. “What he said,” Kali deadpanned.
“I heard Ezra talking with someone on the radio,” Gedeon explained, his nails abrading the skin between my hair follicles. When he reached that one particular spot, the sounds coming out of my mouth began to resemble Shadow’s purring.
Which was probably why Gedeon’s response had gone in one ear and out another. Exhaustion had snatched me away, one scrape at a time.
He shifted on the mattress, and his bare thigh rubbed against my own. “Ezra’s exact words were ‘my brother won’t change anything. Tell my father we’re still on track.’”
“Your father,” Kali repeated, scratching her shin with her toes, her black cotton leggings ending two inches above her ankle.
She was as tall as the tower of her indignation.
“So how many secrets are you harboring in total, Gedeon? First, your life. Then, the name of the traitor who turned out to be no other than Ezra. Now siblings?”
“It could mean anyone’s father,” I pointed out. “Ezra’s not necessarily Gedeon’s brother. They don’t even look alike.”
“Different mothers,” she ground out. “And still. It doesn’t negate the secrecy we’ve been subjected to.”
She resumed pacing the small expanse of our open-plan dwelling, from the kitchen to the sleeping area.
Back and forth while spewing her fury out in bits and pieces of Thinks he can keep everything to himself, why do I put up with this, idiots, both of them, then a bout of unintelligible mutters, and a finishing note of Ugh.
Out of fuel, she folded her arms, and the white fabric of my t-shirt she was wearing tightened around her breasts.
I debated whether I should concede and buy her the clothing she refused to purchase in fear I would burn it again.
She was right in her suspicions, but it’d been a while since I’d ripped and sliced and shredded clothing off her body. Part of the reason I’d packed more than enough colorful t-shirts Gedeon loathed so much.
I had plans to leave tattered piles of fabric all over this house and the wedding ceremony’s location too, so everyone knew he knelt for us. The idea of my boss looking up at me from below…
I should not be thinking about it right now.
Not when I was sitting on a perfectly sized bed to fit three, with exposed rafters and beams running across the ceiling and taunting me with visuals of dangling ropes and chains, and way too many surfaces not yet desecrated. Or perhaps the better word would be baptized? Consecrated?
My mother had told me of a rite to bless both items and people, to officially claim them as belonging to you. It always began with a poem, or a chant, and then bathing the objects in liquids.
The notion of me massaging my fluids into Kali and Gedeon, painting patterns on them and then having them pass out with me coating them, roused my appetite to do exactly that—to sanctify.
Thank the supposed gods for Gedeon’s unceasing massage or I would have jumped them both ten seconds ago.
“My mother was green-banded, so after she fled Ilasall and died giving birth to me, someone else had to have been assigned to my father. I doubt I’m his only child,” Gedeon mused.
His bare foot shuffled closer to mine until they were lined up from heel to toe.
The way he utilized all opportunities to touch me… Mhm, I could sail in the ocean of his massages, the endless horizon my beacon, not a scrap of land in sight.
I wasn’t sure whether it was this or his caught-in-the-act look whenever I’d catch him ogling me, but one of these dissolved my disappointment at keeping the identity of the rat nesting among us to himself.
Inexplicably, I couldn’t care less about it. The years had done a job on me, our past entwining us like strands of a rope, and I trusted him to make the right decisions.
Some of them did hurt, like not knowing whether he was alive or dead for three months, but something had changed in him during his absence.
Something that had taken root before, and the time apart had been necessary for it to bloom like those daffodils Tarri and Amari had used to weave flower crowns.
One of which I’d chased him into wearing, and which also had mysteriously ended up in a bowl of water on the dresser in our bedroom.
It was as if a toggle had been switched inside him.
Standing before us, Kali frowned. “Who’s your father then?”
“I have my suspicions, but…” Gedeon shrugged, the lack of information surely eating him up. “I do not wish to spread rumors without confirming them first.”
“Spread rumors?” She rubbed her forehead, her fair skin reddening. “Who the hell is he?”
Releasing me from his spell, Gedeon trailed his hand down my back, vertebra by vertebra. “Someone you know.”
She snorted. “That’s nothing. Our friends are the same, we live in the same place, we talk to the same people. ‘Someone you know’ is not good enough. Why are you so bent on protecting him?”
“I’m not.” Throwing the thickest duvet I’d ever seen aside, he scooched up the mattress and collapsed on the flattest pillow in existence. “Come on.” He patted the sheets beside him.
How could someone look that enticing when clambering across the bed, I had no clue. So I leaped after him, snuggling close, throwing my leg over his thigh and resting my head in the crook of his shoulder.
Was it comfortable? Meh. My neck ached from the weird pillow straining my tendons, but the press of his body against my own and the steady rise and fall of his chest glued me to him.
Yup, this was my new residence. Permanent one.
Now, was there any possibility of convincing him to remove his underwear? The thin cotton covering both his and my hips felt…wrong.
In nature, neither strawberries nor kittens ever wore pants to bed, and as he was both to me, the rule should apply to him as well.
Granted, his order to wear clothing to bed was supposed to be temporary. I understood him trying to assure Kali nothing would happen, that we wouldn’t demand anything. She had doled out so many favors in the city that assurances, or “one-sided deals,” as she called them, still baffled her.
If she couldn’t see it play in action, she wouldn’t believe it.
“I’m not shielding my father from anyone,” Gedeon said.
“I’m not disclosing my suspicions, because once I tell you, neither you nor Zion will be able to act like all is well.
Zion will go on a rampage to catch him, and you—do not give me that look—will join him.
My guess is you both will sneak out in the middle of the night without telling me.
” Tracing idle lines along my side, each brush a chord of a lullaby tightening its embrace on me, he added, “Tell me I’m wrong, and I will share my theory. ”
He was right. There was no point in contesting it. I would do exactly what he’d detailed.
Before he could continue his tirade, I reached for a seething figure looming at the foot of the bed. “Sleep with us.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “I’ll let you off the hook for now.” Climbing in beside me, she yanked the bedsheets off us. “But I’m commandeering the duvet.”
“What about us? Will you seize us for your use too?” I twisted for a more comfortable position as Gedeon rolled on his side. His palm slid up my waist, and his smirk widened at my sigh of contentment.
“No.” Kali stretched out behind me, too far away for me to feel her body heat. “I don’t want your freezing toes.”
I wiggled the mentioned body part. “But they’re so—”
Two cold lumps pressed to my back.
“Fuuu-uck,” I hissed, twitching as she walked up my back, her feet like blocks of ice.
Instead of helping me, Gedeon hoisted his leg over mine, gripping my bicep to lock me in place. “Do his nape too.”
Her toes danced along my shoulder line, and I could swear winter’s rain pattered my skin. Shudders rocked through me, but her giggles were like a soothing balm for the ice burns she was causing.
“Evil birdie,” I mumbled and bit Gedeon’s chin. His end-of-the-day stubble pricked my tongue, like the acidity in a strawberry a day or two away from fully ripening. His grunt of surprise lured my grin out. “And a wicked, wicked kitten.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Do you need a refresher on how I treat foul mouths?”
The said mouth dried out. If the punishment was going to be similar to the one he’d given on the roof back at our compound, then a thousand times, yes.
Gedeon chuckled. “You should see his eyes,” he told Kali. “Like a puppy’s.”
“That’s because you stole the speech from our pretty boy.
It’s the only way he can communicate now.
” Plastering herself to my back, she threw an arm over my waist and squirmed until her leg found its home over mine.
“So this is what it’s like to be the big spoon.
” She kissed my neck, the caress so gentle I hummed. “I like it.”
I finally understood why she claimed to be suffocated any time we sandwiched her between us, yet I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Soft yet toned curves at my back, a hard body at my front—heaven. “It’s like I’m the filling of a chocolate bar and you’re my waffles.”
Gedeon groaned, and I barely contained myself from swallowing the sound.
Kali mindlessly stroked the scars scattered across my abdomen. “What’s a chocolate bar?”
I caught her wrist. “You’ve never had a chocolate bar?”
“No.” Her murmur was as faint as the glow of streetlights pouring out of the two kitchen windows.
I was going to lay waste to Ilasall. Raze it so thoroughly nobody would be able to recognize the foundation afterward. Weed out the ruins like the malevolence they were.
“Imagine the best chocolate croissant in the world and now multiply it by a thousand,” I said. “That’s a chocolate bar.”
Gedeon’s palm came to rest on top of Kali’s, and she didn’t withdraw.
The simplicity of their peaceful co-existence eased the ire swirling in my gut.
I might’ve had peculiar inclinations, certain tastes, “proclivities,” as Gedeon would describe them, but no one slipped my vengeance: nor people, nor cities.
And particularly not the seven Heads controlling Ilasall.
“I will get you one tomorrow, after the ceremony,” Gedeon promised her, and my contemplation flew out the window. Had I heard him right?
“Just one?” To ravage one chocolate bar and not reach for another was a criminal act. And Gedeon had figured I needed treatment for a foul mouth. His own beckoned a lesson on how to enjoy dessert properly. “I won’t ever play with your dick again if you get only one.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Will a dozen be enough?”
“See? You don’t need to make deals with him. Just threaten his cock,” I told Kali, then licked the tip of his nose. He was as delicious as her. Slightly bitter, but like with coffee, you needed a balance. Some sugar to sweeten it, but not too much or you’d lose the flavor.
And his grunt and her giggles were the perfect combination.