Chapter 43 Gedeon
GEDEON
Iglared at the door handle. The knowledge that a few brass cylinders, a few tiny tubes, were all that blocked my entrance rubbed my powerlessness in.
Although the door was far from thick, the house more reminiscent of a large cabin than a concrete apartment building built to sustain harsh weather, I restrained myself from kicking the door in.
Conall would give me shit for the destruction. Zion would not sleep a minute with the entrance point not secure. Kali would shiver half the night from the cold. And I would surely meet the dawn with a flaring migraine.
Roaming down the right side of the veranda, I scoured under the navy cushions strewn across the bench, under the clay pots of two dozen different plants littering the wobbly railing, under an iron lantern so old spiderwebs had claimed it, but a spare key was nowhere to be found.
The search down the left side of the porch, weaving around the house, brought the same results, and I returned to my spot in front of the door, the solid block of wood an obstacle of an irksome kind. Not the stopping-you-dead type.
Zion had to realize this would not prevent me from entering. Kali too.
I licked my upper teeth, combing through my options: breaking a window or taking down the door. The first would cause a rain of shards that could hurt them, so the second it would be.
Digging my left heel into the floorboards, I drove my right foot right below the handle. My bones ground against each other from the hit, but the splintering sound made up for the discomfort.
The lack of reinforcements in the door had caused the wood to fissure around the brass cylinders.
But not a scream permeated the night.
I tensed my core for the next kick. The slab of wood fractured, splitting apart, and the door whooshed into the house. The dangling handle rebounded off the wall, smacking my outstretched hand.
Two statue-like silhouettes lingered in the corner of the kitchen, not a squeak escaping them as I felt for the light switch. Click, and two sconces on either side of the door illuminated the scene before me.
Utterly naked, Kali sat on the kitchen table. Crimson trickled from the hollow of her throat to the valley of her breasts—a nick.
Kneeling between her legs, a shirtless Zion held the knife embedded near her pussy. A pile of shredded clothing pooled around his calves.
My movements controlled, I closed the door as gently as I could. With a broken lock, it refused to stay in place, and I used the iron shoe rack as a makeshift lock of sorts.
Finished, I leaned against the door, hoping the damaged wood would hold my weight, and folded my arms. “So.”
A beat of silence.
Two.
Zion rested his forehead on the edge of the table, the furniture painted in a milky shade. The hue drew my attention to the pink lines Kali had gouged on his upper back.
Five.
The longer Kali gaped at me, the more her eyes widened. Her toes twitched.
Seven.
I raised an eyebrow. “One of you going to tell me what this is about?”
Her gaze snapped to Zion watching her, his back to me. Whatever passed in the silent conversation between them made her glimpse back at me. And gulp.
Tapping my bicep to distract myself from the seams of my too-small t-shirt digging into my armpits, I fixed her with a stern look. “I believe I asked a question.”
“Ahm.” Her reaction came out as more of a shriek than an actual response. Clawing Zion’s shoulders, she tried to haul him closer, his head an inch from the blade stabbed right between her legs.
His back rippled as heavy, choked noises echoed in the space.
Laughter.
He was laughing.
Kali’s sputtering spurred him on, and although he invested much effort into masking his mirth, he kept cracking up. Again and again.
“Zion,” she fumed, but it only amplified his chortles. Ignoring how he held on to her ankle, Kali huffed to me, “It’s his fault.”
Zion yanked the knife out of the table, and the shaped steel clattered on the other side of the kitchen. Gripping her hips, he hauled her closer to his face. “You little traitorous—”
He muffled the last word by licking her slit.
“No,” she cried out. He settled on sucking her clit, and she squirmed in his hold. “No, Zion— We can’t— Oh—”
Once he set his sights on something, he did not relent.
Neither did I.
As I marched over to them, my boots smeared dirt on the floor. Willing the climbing tension up my spine away, I seized Zion’s nape, wrenching him off Kali, and leaned into his face. “Did I say you could taste her?”
Unflustered, he licked the glistening layer of her arousal off his lips, and I mimicked him on a reflex. “You didn’t say I couldn’t,” he drawled.
Allowing my strength to break the dam, I tightened my grasp on his neck. If he kept playing games, he was going to wake up with bruises in the morning.
He shifted on his knees. A bulge strained against the thin material of his loose pants, making me wish he had not thrown his knife away. I would have used it to slice off the offending fabric.
I released him with a shove, and relishing his grunt, pulled out a kitchen chair. Kali’s pants mixed with the screech of the wooden legs as they dragged across the floor.
“If you want to worship her pussy so much, that’s exactly what you will do.” Seated, I spread my legs and hooked an elbow on the backrest. “Go get out whatever you took from Aria, Zion. I want to see it.”
He scrambled to rise, unaware of my plans to instill a sense of obedience in him. On his feet, he adjusted himself for a tad too long, and I gave him a questioning look of Why are you not doing as I ordered?
Rigidly, he plodded to the brown paper bag he had discarded onto the bed.
“What are you going to do to us?” The whisper in Kali’s question wrapped around me like a full-body caress.
Rising from my seat, I grabbed her knees before she could slam them closed. “What do you think?” I asked, coming to stand between her thighs.
She picked at the paint flaking off the table.
“No.” I tipped her chin up. “Look at me.” Admiring her flush, I nudged her. “Answer my question, little death.”
A loud exhale, and all meekness evaporated from the cells making up her being. “Punish us,” she spat out, her fists balling up, her back straightening. “For things I didn’t even do.”
“But you did.” A slow smirk expressed my satisfaction at how the nickname had snapped her out of the snare her mind sometimes would trap her in. “You were the one who hung my t-shirt in the closet this morning, were you not?”
A huff proved my suspicions.
Oh, how I loved her brattiness. She was a wild beauty I was never going to fully tame.
“Say it, Kali.” I pinned her hips down. The clench of her thighs around my hips told me what a sucker she was for a little bit of pain.
“Fine,” she sneered, scrunching up her nose and imbuing her tone with as much disgust as a person possibly could. “It was me.”
Sometimes I wondered why pulling confessions out of people scratched my itch.
But with her, it was pure allure. It sent my senses haywire and turned me into a savage, barely containing the need to fuck her tight little cunt until the feel of me was etched into each crevice of her memory and she was ruined for anyone else.
“You also wore only black today despite having other clothing, did you not?” My knuckles skated down her pelvis, nearing her pussy, so close and yet too far for the friction she craved so strongly, her lips parted.
When I remained rooted in place, she lifted her chin, as defiant as the day I’d met her, and reached between her legs.
I snatched her wrist. “No.” Planting her hand on the table, I crushed it with my weight, dreaming of being able to consume her whimper. “You do not deserve to get yourself off.”
“Why not? If you won’t do it, then I will.” Her free hand dipped between her legs—
“Kali.” I ripped her limb away. “Do that again, and I will make you come for so long you will plead with me to stop.”
She shoved at my chest. “That’s still better than no orgasms.”
“Are you sure?” My t-shirt bunched up as her palm dragged down between my pectorals.
“And you still have not answered my second question.” I caught her hand, sealing it above my heart.
“But it’s okay. You can admit your two faults together with the third.
” The heat from her skin seeped into me.
“You knew that Zion had tampered with my things before we left, yet kept the information to yourself. Did you not?”
“I—” Her frown sharpened her already angular features, but with a puff of air carrying all her fury, she nodded her confession.
As a reward, I released her wrist from its confines on the table and slid my thumb between her folds. But that was all she was going to get.
My finger hovered right above her clit, the absence of rubbing a lesson in itself. “Do you think I should spare you for your crimes?” I tapped the bundle of nerves, eliciting a gasp. “That they are not worthy of a punishment?”
Withdrawing, I licked the pad of my digit, and tangy sweetness flooded my taste buds. Not a single person I had fucked before had turned me into an addict, not like this, with her juices exploding on my tongue or Zion’s cum flowing down my throat.
Her fists balled at her sides. “I hate you.”
“Hate me all you want, but it does not change the simple fact that you are mine.” I hauled her off the table, catching her waist as she slipped on the shreds of clothing flooding the floor. “And that includes whether you are allowed to come.”
Her face pinkened as she glowered at me—a tall goddess of ire and death. How I had convinced fortune to share her luck with me, I had not a hunch.
I had a boiling beauty standing beside me and an unsuspecting-of-his-punishment demon preparing my instruments.
Unashamed of her nudity, Kali crossed her arms. “Asshole.”
“Is that what you are asking me to fill?”
“That’s not wha—”
A rattling reverberated in the small house.
Startled, she spun around, oblivious to my hold on her body.
In the center of the space, Zion stood with a caught-in-the-act look, a wooden stool laying on its side beside him.
“What is”—she gawked at the scene—“this?”
Zion caught the two loose ends of a swaying rope. He had thrown it over the exposed beam running horizontally across the ceiling, using it as a makeshift hook.
A slow grin emerged as he drawled, “A playground.”