I knew this was coming. Kali and Zion had made sure of it.
“What is it?” Dain paused in toying with the silver rings climbing up his ear. “Is something wrong?”
“You could say that,” Damia drawled from behind me. “I just learned something interesting.”
“Is it the t-shirt?” Aanya squeaked, the wall of her waist-long hazelnut hair swaying as she concealed the pink in her cheeks against Nissa’s shoulder.
Damia snickered. “I don’t know if I would call itjusta t-shirt.”
It wasn’t a t-shirt. More like an atrocity.
Stroking Aanya’s back, the affection creasing her linen shirt, Nissa asked, “Is it truly that bad?”
“You have to see it to believe it,” Damia said. Her amusement charged the atmosphere, and I feared lightning was about to strike.
Conall made a spinning gesture. “Well, turn around then. Give us a show.”
With a deep breath, I surrendered to his request. The bastard could count this as his last gift from me.
“Oh, gods.” Aanya’s mirth chimed like a melody as I spun to face Damia, the woman the happiest I had seen her in a long time.
“This is so much better than I could’ve hoped.” Conall’s shoulders shook. “Best wedding ever.”
“Does it say what I think it does?” Disbelief seeped from Dain’s question, further boosting the feeling I had become an object to be gossiped about.
“Yes, it saysZion’s and Kali’s Strawberry,” I deadpanned. Although the front of my t-shirt looked like any other, the back didn’t. Four words were embroidered under a large strawberry patch, the statement curving around the top of the fruit in bold black letters.
My attention snapped to Kali as she failed to conceal her tremors. Zion stood tall and proud beside her, his grin intensifying at my glare.
No one with a sound mind would have sewn this. It had to have been custom-made.
But if a punishment was what they sought, a harsh one it would be.
Nobody escaped their fate when I held the reins.
37
KALI
“Leading will always be a gray area.” Conall tore the roasted potato wedge off his fork with his teeth.
The ritual of binding was long behind us, but the bonfires scattered in the center of their square blazed in full force, the heat levels sufficient to ward off the late evening chill.
“What isn’t?” I dropped my spoon in the short glass, the snowflake pattern carved into its sides as tangled as my emotions. For the life of me, I couldn’t decipher the mess the last few days had become. “Gedeonchoseto hurt us. It was a conscious decision.”
Ignoring Conall waving a hand in front of his mouth as he tried to chew the steaming bit of food surely charring his tongue, Damia rested her fork on her plate, the white swirls in the navy ceramic as unsteady as my mood today.
“People tend to think that you have tochoosebetween light and darkness, but not many realize that you can’t instigate change without dabbling inboth.It’s a precarious balance. Sway one way or another, and you’ll lose your footing,” she said, dabbing the napkin to soak up the bit of cream smeared above her brownish upper lip.
I could bow to whoever had made the dessert. The cocoa mousse had been so good it had mollified my lingering ire at Gedeon for abandoning me and Zion.
Spending twelve weeks believing I’d killed him had done its job on me. He’d hurled my trust off a cliff and into a bottomless canyon I’d once seen a picture of during geography lessons at school.
But the way Gedeon had silently pushed his dessert toward me after I’d finished mine… It had lessened the whirlpool storming inside me.
Damia went on. “Like Conall said, leading people, as compassionate as you can be as a leader, comes with a cost. Achoice. You or your people. Those close to you or the greater good. You can’t have both.” She rested her hand on mine to stop me from picking at the loose thread in the linen tablecloth.
I ceased fiddling with the fabric. “Priorities.”
