Chapter 48 Zion
ZION
Icouldn’t deny there wasn’t a reason why I hadn’t questioned Gedeon’s decisions, why I’d protected him at all costs, why I hadn’t run away. Conall or Damia would’ve welcomed me with open arms, but something would stop me any time the notion of relocating sprang up in my mind.
So throughout the years, I’d absorbed Gedeon’s grunts he considered proper responses and used them as fuel to get through my days.
I’d collected his smiles so scarce they’d permanently etched themselves into my memory.
I’d made my peace with the fact that I could feel him against me only during the sessions in our training rings, the chalk-drawn circle the sole place rules didn’t exist in.
So as we lay in a bed in Conall’s compound, hearing Gedeon speak so openly, having him map out my facial features, lightly tracing from my temple to my chin, it transformed my bones to stone. Unease murmured to me that he would withdraw if I so much as twitched.
Only our pillow had twisted me into a knot. Conall had to have given it to us as a prank. Probably a hundred inches long, it resembled a narrow strip barely fitting my head and pushing my left shoulder so high it strained my neck.
“Zion.” Gedeon drew a line from my hairline to my nose, then to my jaw, up to my ear and into my hair. “Say something.”
Each drag of his nails across my scalp leached my being, reducing me to rubble, the fragments of my thoughts disintegrating into wisps of pure pleasure.
I hummed as his scratches climbed a bit higher—
Tingles exploded all the way to my toes, and a garbled noise vibrated out of my throat.
“You’re practically purring.” He chuckled, the sound adding to the shower of warmth bathing my limbs.
“Hmm.” I slurped in my saliva about to soak into the pillow. He’d turned me into a pool of drool with the simplest of caresses.
Now I finally understood why Shadow enjoyed scratches so much. Pure satisfaction had encased me in a bubble I wished to never pop.
Gedeon paused. “Please talk to me.”
My lungs skipped a breath. He’d said “please.” I didn’t think his vocabulary included words like this one.
“I’ve wanted you for so long, Gedeon.” Wary, unused to this, I stroked his waist, the contour blazing under my palm, the fire so hot I yearned for it to ravage me.
“The games I played…” I swallowed. “I figured if I could have you for one night, it would be enough, but I doubt it would have.” My knee burrowed deeper between his legs.
“I always hated waking up to others in my bed, but with you…I don’t want to get out.
” My thumb dug into his relaxed muscles, carved out to fit my hand perfectly. “I don’t want to let you go.”
“You don’t have to.” His lower ribs expanded and contracted under my touch. “You are mine, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So say it. Say it.” Desperation laced his voice. “Say it, Zion. Say—”
“I’m yours.”
He sighed, his eyes fluttering closed.
Mapping out the small bird tattoos, the inked silhouettes climbing up Gedeon’s sides, the marks for the fallen, I deciphered what freedom was at last—honesty.
I swiped a few dark strands away from his forehead. “Will you bleed for me?”
His eyebrows drew together. “Why do you need it?”
The day Ilasall’s military had drawn out our parents’ torture, made a show of it, was also the day blood became my fascination. And the river of crimson pouring out of my sister’s stomach had solidified it.
The scarlet liquid streaming through a person’s capillaries had taught me many things.
How slowly you had to drain someone to ensure death lingered across the threshold, but never stepped over it.
How red cells carried a different flavor depending on my doll’s origins: the cities or the compounds.
How slicing the tubular membranes open, exposing the fluid responsible for distributing oxygen, could convince anyone to reveal their darkest desires and secrets.
It all led to control. Once you gained access to someone’s blood, they belonged to you, fully and irreversibly. Exchanging it with someone meant you traded your life for theirs.
I brushed the vein protruding from Gedeon’s temple. “I want to have all of you.” Then I’d know how that darkness in him tasted. Would it melt on my tongue or choke me to death?
“If blood is what you wish, I will give it to you,” he said, and lunged.
My reflexes blared within me to resist, to grapple, to come to blows—
Gedeon’s weight on top of me crushed me into the mattress. My instinct to fight receded, and peace took its place, promising…safety. Not a whiff of potential harm.
The combination of his hips pressing into mine and his forearms bracketing my face enclosed me in a cage of secureness, the concept so foreign I resorted to clutching his back as a tether to keep myself in check.
“I will bleed myself dry to satisfy you,” he vowed. “I’m not running from you anymore, Zion, regardless of what you ask of me.”
His forehead dropped to mine, the gesture so familiar yet not enough. It never was with him. So I splayed my hands across the expanse of his upper back, over the hundreds of wings inked into his skin, and hauled him closer.
As his mouth collided with mine, I pressed into him, chasing the inhale he tried to take. Bending my knees, I invited him to settle between my thighs. His cock rubbing against mine cast a net woven out of hunger onto me, charring its pattern into my flesh.
I groaned into him, and his teeth hooked over my bottom lip, dragging it away—
A twinge obliterated my nerve endings. Flames exploded as heat trickled to my chin.
He’d bitten me.
“You taste so good,” he growled, catching the drops of blood before returning to my lips, crashing into me.
His tongue wrapped around mine, trapping the flavor of iron between us. He sucked on my bottom lip, drinking me in, and it fried my brain.
Because he didn’t treat me like one would a figurine of glass. No, he just completely, utterly, absolutely, beyond any recovery, ruined me.
And all I wanted was to roll around in the wreckage with him.
“Zion.” He laid a kiss on my left lip corner. “Zion.” My cheekbone. “Zion.” My under eye. “Zion.” My forehead. “Zion.” My nose. “Zion.” My temple. “Zi—”
“Gedeon.”
His glare widened my grin.
“You can save the seventh time of saying my name for another time. It’s my turn now.” Gripping his lower ribs, I flipped us. The mattress bounced from our weight, and our gazes snapped to Kali.
But slumber had hidden her under its wing, and her eyes remained shut. I tucked the loose corner of the duvet around her anyway. She always awakened if her nape became exposed.
“Wait here,” I whispered to Gedeon as I hopped off the bed and headed to the kitchen. The chill from the rubber handle seeped into me as I located my knife on the floor.
The two sconces by the door bathed our house in a dim glow, but I ignored the switch beckoning me to turn off the lights, lest one of us needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Easier to navigate the unfamiliar terrain if you could actually see where you were going.
The mattress sunk under my knees as I crawled back to Gedeon and straddled his hips. His cock wasn’t exactly soft, and my snicker earned me a quirk of his eyebrow.
He hooked an arm behind his head, his bicep bulging. “Something you want?”
I positioned the tip of the knife right over his heart. “Maybe.” The blade scraped a pink trail as I drew a horizontal path. “Are you offering?” The honed edge ghosted over the curve of his nipple, not cutting but not caressing either.
Two lines deepened above Gedeon’s nose. “Zion.”
“I like the sound of my name on your lips,” I divulged the secret I’d buried for so long it had verged on festering.
His pectorals rose, lifting the knife, and I gripped the handle firmer to keep the blade in place. The sharp tip punctured where his brown skin darkened into a richer shade, and his hiss accompanied the red droplet pooling around the steel.
“I wonder if I’ll like sucking the life out of you.” Discarding the knife on the pale wood bedside table, I closed onto his injured nipple.
The sweetest note of iron flooded my senses as I sucked on the tiny wound, his blood as rich as I’d imagined. I could feed off of him.
He seized my hair. “Fuck.”
“I don’t think that’s my name.” I pressed the flat of my tongue over the hardened bit of flesh and slowly dragged it up, eliciting a rumble out of his chest. “That wasn’t my name either.
” Sitting up, I dabbed the shallow cut and then licked the dot of scarlet from my finger.
“So I guess that means we’re done for tonight. ”
Throwing myself off him, I purposefully brushed his cock, from the base to the crown. His not-exactly-soft state had become a full hard-on.
“You cannot be seriously considering going to sleep now.” Gedeon stared at me failing to find a comfortable position on the unbelievably flat pillow.
I shrugged the best I could. “Well, we have to be up in five hours for our ride home, so yeah, I am.” Snuggling closer to him, I bopped his nose. “You should too. Can’t have you driving into a ditch because you dozed off.”
“I have never ended up in a ditch.”
“A tree then.”
“Never happened.”
“I was in the car with you, Gedeon.” The rear-view mirror had reflected the oak in perfect clarity. Witnessing his groggy ass forget to check his surroundings when switching gears to reverse had become the highlight of that day.
Maybe even of the week.
To be frank, probably of the month.
His scowl intensified. Smoothed out. Repeated the circle once, twice. Thrice. Eventually, he scoffed, “It was your fault.”
My core tensed, and he slapped a hand to muffle my laughter, his palm dry and warm. The only thing I could be held accountable for was almost pissing my pants after he’d hit that tree—his dumbstruck expression had been too hilarious to ignore.
“Go to sleep.” A smothered smile was evident in his grumble.
And just like that, the constant storm in my mind dissipated. As if the winds had calmed down. As if the sea had leveled out. As if I could actually see the water gleaming in the sunshine, the ripples surrounding me in peace, all whooshing gone from my ears.
It felt as if I could finally…live.
A sharp pitter-patter grew into a steady roar—
I launched, sitting up straight, instinctively reaching for the sheath I usually had secured to my bicep. The mattress sunk as I angled myself in front of Gedeon and blinked the drowsiness away. On reflex, my muscles flexed in preparation as our one-story house came into focus.
Or more like burned the focus into my retinas. Those two light sconces framing the door threatened to make me blind.
The deep, continuous sound cut off, and I zoned in on the dimness clouding the kitchen.
Holding a glass of water, Kali leaned against the limestone-colored laminate counters. From the check I’d run, the navy doors of the cabinets concealed nothing more but dry and canned goods. And the three coffee bags Conall had dropped off the day we’d arrived.
Well, more like one golden bag. I hadn’t told Gedeon about the other two I’d already hidden in the trunk of our car. Figured he could work for it. He did make good scrambled eggs.
And as breakfast was the most important meal of the day, he could spread Kali on the table and eat her as an appetizer while I fed her forkfuls of eggs straight from the pan.
She blushed from my open exploration of her body. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
I swallowed the dryness in my mouth. The well of my fantasies was bottomless, and last night had spurred my imagination into overdrive. “You didn’t.”
Hugging a pillow instead of one of us, Gedeon didn’t move, too caught up in the land of dreams and nightmares. A building could collapse outside, but the heavy sleeper that he was, he would snooze right through it.
Which also helped me whenever I’d crept into his room at our compound to watch him sleep. The rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, the looseness in his jaw, the quiet and peace, they always calmed me whenever slumber failed to exert its rule.
Kali crossed her ankles, and a wince rocked through her.
I threw my legs over the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?”
Not a speck of blood covered her fair skin besides the healing bruises from our training sessions, but what if—
“It’s fine.” She glowered at me over the rim of her glass. “I’m just sore.”
Now that was definitely my doing. Smugness washed over me like the tap water filling—
A crack razed my eardrums.
As if struck by lightning, the center of the kitchen window fractured. A spiderweb branched out across the transparent surface—
The glass in Kali’s hand exploded.