Chapter 52 Zion
ZION
Budding forests framed the desolate road we were flying along.
The sun beat on my neck through the rolled-down passenger’s window.
Ear-plugging wind carried Kali’s faint snoring from the backseat.
All of it was…disconnected. Separate fragments, not elements of a coherent whole.
Like the two drawstrings of my sweatpants. The plastic aglets hung loose between my thighs, the inch between them a distance too great to cross. They couldn’t find each other. Twine into one. Make sense.
Like the universe without Conall.
Someone had flicked the light switch on him, and everything had ceased functioning.
I had ceased functioning.
“Do you need me to stop for a break?” Gedeon’s hands flexed on the wheel, the leather as dark as the early morning hours of today, when we’d helped Nissa and Dain to arrange the funeral fires. “Zion.”
It took conscious thought for my tongue to work. “Huh?”
“It’s been three hours.” Gedeon switched the gears to a lower setting. “Do you want to stretch your legs or eat the sandwiches Damia gave us?”
Whenever life hurled a challenge at her, Damia resorted to busying herself with anything she could get her hands on. This time, it’d meant packing the leftovers from the celebration and handing them out to anyone who passed her.
Gedeon swerved around a giant fissure in the asphalt, the jagged edge rising up, up, up to the sky, to the feathery clouds and beyond, to the stars Kali believed to be deities, to the—
“Zion.”
For some reason, him saying my name served as a lifeline.
I rolled the window back up, cutting off the air current mid-whoosh. “What if it’s too soon?”
As he glanced at me, two stray locks of black fell on his temple. “What is?”
“The war.” I swiped the strands away, enjoying the silkiness of his hair. Kali’s and mine weren’t like his.
And we’d tried. But sneaking into the shower and using all of Gedeon’s hair products before the wedding hadn’t helped—the heaps on our heads had refused to listen to reason.
“We are out of time,” Gedeon muttered. “Ilasall will either expect us to retaliate hastily for Coriattus’ ambush, or take weeks, maybe months to plan and prepare. If we hit them sometime in between, we can utilize the element of surprise.”
My fists curled. “We’ll see what Ezra says.” Ava had to have apprehended him by now. Hopefully, the rattle of chains securing him to the table in our underground kept him company while he considered his life choices.
A freaking brother of Gedeon’s. Not confirmed, but still.
Worthy of my blade’s caresses in spite of potential blood ties.
A disintegrating vehicle glinted in the daylight, the skeleton resting in the middle of the road, battling the vegetation sprouting from the cracks and climbing up the frame.
Gedeon squinted as he maneuvered around it.
He was pushing himself too far. Again.
“Stop driving.”
Instead of responding to me, he glanced at Kali stirring up in the backseat—her light snoring waned. “Hungry?”
Rubbing her eyes, she adjusted her seat belt. Yawned.
Clearly, his question hadn’t registered.
“Gedeon, stop.” I twisted in my seat. “Your migraine will eat you alive.” As usual, he wouldn’t allow any breaks for himself.
A scowl so mighty it could shatter cement carved lines across his forehead. “I don’t have a headache.”
“Not yet.” After all this time, I could recognize an approaching attack as easily as one could differentiate between day and night.
“You’re squinting at the road, blinking as if there’s something in your eyes, and keep licking your lips like you do when you’re thirsty.
I give it two hours tops before the dull ache festering here”—I tapped his temple—“flares into pain.”
His frown morphed into a glare.
“Yeah, I know you.” I shrugged. “I’ve known you for years.”
“Zion’s right,” Kali said as she unscrewed the bright pink water bottle she’d borrowed from Jayla.
The glass was going to shatter from Gedeon’s glower directed at her in the rear-view mirror. The man specialized in exuding very specific wavelengths of emotions: from dirty looks to death stares.
“I would listen to him,” she added between gulps of water. “I wouldn’t want to crash into another tree on our way back. We have a scheduled war to attend.”
Gedeon looked like he couldn’t settle between strangling me right now or waiting until we returned home and restraining me next to Ezra.
An entirely new emotion in the spectrum of his daily ones.
I also might have enjoyed how his murderous intentions made my pelvis spasm a little too much.
He gritted out, “You told her.”
About his terrible driving skills when he was a teenager? “Of course.”
I patted his thigh, savoring how he adjusted his foot on the speed pedal to nestle his leg into my touch. The muscles in his leg flexed so hypnotically they melded my palm to him, and I moved the task of ripping holes in his jeans to the top of my priorities.
The offending pair of pants could suck it—they were going to lose their fight of harboring Gedeon from me. And the reward for my victory? Feeling Gedeon up any time I wished to do so.
He was the most appetizing trophy you could win.
“She needs to know the important bits about your driving experience if we’re getting into the car with you. Why do you think we fastened these”—I tugged on my seat belt—“before you even had the chance to twist the ignition key?”
If thunder could be a sound people made, then Gedeon’s grumble as he dragged a hand down his face would have been it.
“Please stop the car.” Kali pulled the waistband of her leggings away from her belly. “Or I will pee my pants and soak your seats.”
A sigh so heavy it could collapse buildings betrayed Gedeon’s acquiescence. He engaged the brakes, gently bringing our car to the side of the road—an utterly forsaken, deserted stretch of asphalt.
Kali practically tore the backseat door off its hinges in her rush to get out and sprint toward a cluster of birch trees. The black stripes on the white trunks failed to conceal her as she dropped her leggings and squatted—
I chuckled at her glare. She and Gedeon, they could start a grimace contest.
Naked, obviously.
I would lay on our bed, sprawled on my stomach, my feet rocking in the air as I enjoyed the show.
Such beautiful creatures they were, a juicy strawberry and a ferocious birdie.
Climbing out, I slammed the passenger door shut and raised the tailgate. The minute of digging through our backpacks proved successful, and I emerged with my findings only to be struck by the scene before me.
Gedeon stood leaning against the driver’s side, hands in his pockets, his neck craned, eyes closed—a personification of serenity.
The midday sun doused his face, the sheen of sweat on his forehead a telltale symptom of the approaching claws of a headache, its talons excruciating, as he’d described it once.
A breeze tousled the dark waves clashing around his temples, and his thick lips parted on a slow exhale, collapsing his chest.
Controlled breaths.
It was worse than he made it out to be.
Draping the extra t-shirt over my shoulder, I offered him the sparkling-in-silver bottle. “Here.”
He sniffed the contents, but took a sip, his tongue darting out to collect a fleeing drop. “Is this—”
“Peppermint tea?” I leaned against the car beside him. “Yeah.”
The drink had probably gone tepid by this point, but I’d caught him downing it countless times over the years.
Apparently, its muscle-relaxing properties sometimes helped to alleviate migraines stemming from tension.
Nothing compared to actual pain meds, but when you had none to spare, you did the best with what you had.
I angled my face toward the sun, enjoying how it warmed my skin, drained of the lingering numbness since we’d entered Conall’s house. “Finish this, and I will drive us the rest of the way home.”
His knuckles brushed against my own, and then calloused fingers dipped between mine, twining our limbs together, the act so unexpected yet gentle I shuddered.
All I’d been daydreaming of was coming true. It terrified me more than the prospect of losing the two people I’d exchanged blood with during the blooming war.
Gedeon’s thumb stroked mine. “Thank you.”
If not for the wind retreating, leaving stillness in its absence, I would’ve missed his quiet murmur. He typically ordered, commanded routinely, and as a general rule, avoided any expressions of gratitude, too petrified of exposing his weaknesses.
“What do you think will happen?” I crossed one ankle over the other, the car’s frame chilly under my back, as cold as I’d have to be on the morning we set off to Ilasall. “Can we actually win this?”
He sipped the tea. Once. Twice. “I do not know.”
“What if… What if there’s no future for us after the following few days have come and gone? What if a hundred hours is all we have left?”
“Then it will be enough.” He tipped the thermos upside down to gulp the last dregs of the peppermint drink.
Steel shined in the daylight, the utter opposite of how the ink forming a forest and crawling around his forearm absorbed the sunshine.
“I would give up forever to have one more hour—even a second with you, Zion. But if that turned out to be impossible, just knowing you lived would be enough for me.”
His words dripped down my front like honey, viscous and thick, a balm smoothing out the raised scars littering my torso from innumerable battles, the burn marks on my left forearm, the tattoo on my right.
Ilasall might’ve viewed us as evil, promoted such a lie behind its wall, but the seven people in charge—the Heads of Health, Welfare, Education, Nutriment, Labor, Military, and the Head of Ilasall—had forgotten one essential truth: villains weren’t born. They were forged.
If the city wished to call our trio heinous, wicked, immoral, ignoble, malevolent, or anything worse, it was welcome to do so. We would proudly carve the verbal bites into our skin to bear for eternity.
Because yes, the three of us were fractured, uneven, rough, but there wasn’t a person who was not. And war…
A certainty of shattering a person to pieces, to dust motes, to air particles drifting in the depths of nothingness.
I could attest to that. It’d taken me twelve years—almost thirteen in a few months—a woman with a level of viciousness so high nothing could stop her, and a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders to finally see the light from the bottom of the well I’d been stuck in.
Slow stomps on the asphalt gave away Kali’s return from the bathroom break. Imprints of our jackets she’d rested her head on during her nap colored her cheeks in pinkish lines.
Gedeon screwed the cap of the now empty thermos back on. “Ready to get back on the road?”
“My tailbone hurts like hell, but we can go.” Pulling our jackets from the backseat, she began folding them into one neat bundle.
Gedeon gripped the open door. “What are you doing?”
She turned my jacket over, hiding the zipper beneath the worn leather. “Making you a pillow.”
Such a smart birdie. So lovely, I wished I could run her a bath and wash her wings, feather by feather.
“I don’t know how to drive, so I’ll sit in the front.” She patted the makeshift pillow. “And you can sleep here.”
Softness merged with…something more in Gedeon’s expression.
I clapped his shoulder. “Dream about us,” I said, then hopped into the driver’s seat, Kali climbing in beside me.
Left with no other choice, Gedeon sunk into the backseat. Before our car even rumbled to life, he’d already spread out as much as possible in the small space, his head resting on the cushioning Kali had arranged.
I threw him the extra t-shirt I’d plucked out of the trunk. “To cover your eyes.”
For a minute, he ignored the blue fabric nestled on his abdomen. “Why are you so nice to me?” He scrunched up the cotton. “I have done nothing but hurt you.”
“You have done more than you think.” Shifting into first gear, I pulled back onto the road. “You just refuse to see it.”
If not for him, I probably would’ve died on thousands of occasions.
If not for him, I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet Kali.
If not for him, I doubted I would’ve dared to dream about the future.