Chapter 41 Gedeon
GEDEON
Bricks, concrete, and blocks of cream and brown and white and blue blurred into one long smear as we rode across Conall’s compound.
Our driver took a right turn, the thirty-seventh in total during our ride. An eerie quiet met us, not a wanderer in sight. The late night had lured their people to take refuge in the dwellings, the windows dark and glossy. Slumber ruled over its subjects with full might tonight.
A faint cry drew my attention to the flush creeping up Kali’s neck as she squirmed between me and Zion in the backseat, and I dropped the mask I had worn for the last decade.
With them, I had no use for it. They saw right through its cracked porcelain, the fractures like rivers flowing with the story of my past.
But if they thought I would not wield the power I held over them, that I would not use my reins to remind them of the repercussions for their actions, they were greatly mistaken.
Kali gripped Zion’s wrist to stop him from drawing idle patterns on her inner thigh. “Will either of you tell me why we had to leave?”
Again, she had proved patience wasn’t her strong suit.
Adorable.
It had taken us more than forty minutes to pass the seven security posts Conall had established around the celebration’s perimeter.
Add the extra twenty-minute ride to our assigned house on the other side of their compound, and the hour Zion and I had spent toying with Kali had brought her to the brink of madness.
A glance in the rear-view mirror revealed our driver, a woman named Juno, intently focused on the empty road ahead of us. Although Conall, my brother, even if not by blood, had emphasized her discreteness, I highly doubted she had not noticed the torment we had been putting Kali through.
“Two more streets, and you will see.” I brushed higher up Kali’s thigh, pausing my exploration right where she was most sensitive.
She pressed her full lips together to suppress the whimper worming its way out of her. “I hate you.”
“We know.” Zion tapped her pussy, intent on distracting her from trying to figure out what was in the paper bag sitting on his lap.
Her squeak tightened our driver’s hands on the wheel. The plastic ring was missing large chunks, the holes filled with whatever stuffing could be found and covered in leather wraps.
Kali writhed on the fabric seats marred with a multitude of stitches, the thick thread varying shades of gray—probably had been white a long time ago. Our feet hooked around her ankles, preventing her from slamming her legs together.
Her efforts were admirable, but soon, I was going to shatter whatever walls she had built in her mind to keep her relative composure.
And then destroy Zion’s.
He shifted every other minute in his seat, his choice to forgo underwear exposing the bulge my tongue craved to run up.
Both yesterday and today, the suspicion I was a foolish man had gnawed at me, chewing me out for not throwing caution to the wind and seeing the man before me.
For years, I had discarded the notion of allowing anyone to get close to me, due to Ilasall’s attempts to eliminate those around me, but something had snapped in me. Kali’s defiance had peeled my defenses away, layer by layer, until I had no choice but to acknowledge Zion was mine.
My ancestors had to have been territorial bastards because I’d had to resort to clenching my fists to keep myself from scooping out the eyes of the seven people who had ogled Zion during the celebration.
“We’re here.” Smoothly, our ride came to a stop, not the slightest lurch rocking the vehicle, and Juno met my gaze in the rear-view mirror. Fractures in the reflective surface multiplied her eyes as she gave me a curt nod. “All houses were combed an hour ago.”
Clyde, the coward he was, had sunk a bullet into his temple the second he had spotted Nissa coming for him in their shooting range.
Undoubtedly, the prospect of us setting Zion loose to work on him had caused the man to shit his pants, but I had no clue the city castrated the men they sent to do their dirty work.
Because only a ball-less person would prefer leaving the living realm over taking his chances of discovering a way to climb out of the mess dry.
“Thank you,” I told Juno. We still had no leads on what kind of blueprints Clyde had provided Ezra, and without the knowledge, predicting the cities’ next moves was like walking in a forest blindfolded.
As I opened our car door, the chill running rampant in the night lunged at me, burrowing under my t-shirt, the contact a necessity for it to recognize who I was.
Kali hopped onto the sidewalk after Zion. “So?” Glowering, she marched up to me. The thrum of the engine ebbed as Juno rolled down the street, the taillights illuminating Kali blowing a dark strand away from her nose. “Why did we have to return home so early?”
We.
Not I, not You made me, not Zion and me.
Sure, the last nine days since my return had not been easy, but I knew her reluctance to believe in goodness was nothing more than a protective mechanism masking her vulnerability. It had become a means of survival for her, and was far from a reflection of who she was as a person.
Like Zion. He teased and taunted, not a serious remark existing in his vocabulary, but it was his body that told me everything.
He would melt any time I embraced him from behind, purred like Shadow whenever I scratched his scalp, switched his grins to smiles in the mornings, and tangled his legs with mine in the nights.
His proclivities, flippancy, frivolity, were an armor of sorts. A shell he had built around himself to survive after the spectacle Ilasall’s military had made of our parents’ demises and the suicide his sister had committed to avoid a fate worse than death.
Yet one touch was more than enough to take his shield down.
Staring Kali down, I warned her, “Because it’s time for you to pay for what you did.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Both of us?”
“You dressed in all black today.” I tugged on the collar of her shirt, loving her feeble gasp. “And you were aware of Zion’s tampering with the bag I had packed for this trip.”
“I didn’t know…exactly what he was doing.” She glanced at Zion hovering at her back and rocking on the balls of his feet. “I learned about it at the same time as you. And this,” she pointed at my t-shirt, “was a surprise even to me.”
“Secrets never go unpunished, little death.” I stepped into her personal space. “You once told me you wanted to kill me for mine. Are you now saying you should be pardoned for yours?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yes, it is. Truth might be a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s time for you to be educated on the consequences of your actions.
So get into the house,” I ordered as I fished out the flat brass key from the back pocket of my jeans.
“Or would you prefer me ripping off your pants to see how wet you are right here, out in the street?”
Her cheeks reddened. Murmuring what one would not be wrong in assuming were insults, she stormed toward the door the shade of coffee with milk and two teaspoons of sugar, precisely how she and Zion enjoyed the overbearingly sweet drink.
“Is this the night?” Zion ruffled his hair, the golden-brown strands too short to reach his ears. “You fucking me?” Restless as usual, he drummed his fingers on the rubber handle of his favorite knife strapped to his upper arm, the habit he had developed to cope with his pounding pulse.
“Do you think you deserve it after what you did?” My tone was as sharp as the icicles dangling off the roofs on those extremely rare winter nights when the low temperatures froze the hairs inside your nostrils.
The quick intake of his breath was a sound so intoxicating it curled around my vertebrae, squashing it into dust.
I leaned in, close enough for my stubble to graze his jaw. “What do you think insolence is rewarded with?” I whispered. “Pleasure or punishment?”
Clutching my hips, the fabric of my jeans too thick for me to properly enjoy the firmness of his grip, he widened his stance. “Both?”
“Is this the game you want to play?” I seized his waist, pulling him impossibly closer.
Having him in my arms was enough to dream of hauling him to the ruins of a white picket fence, bending him over, and having him hold on to the remaining vertical boards while I rammed into him from behind.
“Where you try to deny you need a proper lesson?”
His grasp tightened. “What if I do?”
Seizing the high waistband of his pants, I spun him around, toward the house. “Inside. Now.”
He rolled his shoulders back as he strolled away, and I understood the itch Kali had once described: the sudden need to sink your teeth into those muscles.
He was the dessert I wanted. With whipped cream in the shape of Kali on top.
The oak door shut behind Zion, concealing both the man and the large paper bag he carried. Not a single light bulb flared to life, darkness concealing whatever was going on inside instead of casting the message into the world through the windows.
Savoring the prospect of having my two subjects beg for mercy, I sauntered up the narrow pathway. Rogue pebbles prodded the soles of my boots as whoever had the responsibility of taking care of the property had forgotten to sweep the flat stones.
The brass handle glinted in the moonlight, beckoning me to come closer, and I leaped the four stairs leading up to the veranda hugging the house from three sides.
When the wood creaked under my heavy steps, announcing my approach, nothing but silence welcomed me. Cool metal zapped my skin as I twisted the handle and pushed.
But the door did not budge. Not by an inch.
They had locked me out of the house.