Even death couldn’t make you immune to the cold.
20 YEARS OLD
The scissor blades sliced through the brown duct tape sealing the cardboard box effortlessly. Finished, I placed the instrument on the ebony desk in my new workspace—my study.
A leader required a dedicated space for their work, I had been told, and as the damned fortune had placed me at the top of our people’s hierarchy chain, I had free rein, including usurping any location in our compound.
Situated in the center of our compound, atop a small hill, accessible to all, this partly renovated building seemed like the perfect choice to set up my base of operations.
Particularly when I doubted sleep would be a luxury I could afford for the foreseeable future. Having an apartment upstairs I could crash at between endless hours required to recover our compound from Ilasall’s attack seemed a prudent thought.
The door swung open without a single rattle of knuckles against the wood as a warning, and Zion stilled in the doorway, the pair of bright blue shorts doing nothing to hide the grime clinging to his torso. “Ava has finished moving in. She’s on the floor below yours.”
Nodding in acknowledgment, I reached inside the cardboard box filled with my father’s books. Mystery, strategy,religion, fantasy, folklore—his collection spanned a wide array of genres. Giving away my parents’ house to others had been easy, but losing the stories my mother had helped my father to amass would have been like spitting on their grave, if one existed. Realistically, more like dousing their funeral fire.
Zion scanned the room, from the flat boxes resting against my desk, to the packed-to-the-brim ones in the center of the room, to the dark wood bookshelves.
Without a word, he ripped into the box closest to him, taking out the books and lining them up on the top shelf. Frowning, he removed three tomes with taller-than-usual spines and set them aside, so the rest sat in a neat row.
I delved back into the box I’d opened. Not a sentence passed between us in the time it took us to unload two dozen boxes, the utter silence a comforting companion.
Once all the written stories, their covers dull and fraying, stood in their rightful places, I ran a hand over my shaved scalp. Regardless of how many times I had washed my hair, the suds had felt like blood soaking through the strands, running down my body and pooling at my feet. Cutting off the locks had seemed the most efficient solution.
Grabbing the steel water bottle from the windowsill, I downed half the contents. The liquid rushed down my esophagus, the freezing sensation so different to hot blood spurting from a slit throat that it pulled me back to reality, and I dabbed the condensation onto my nape.
“Thank—” I grew motionless at the sight of Zion.
Leaning against the bookshelf, with a smear of dust alongside his hairline, he studied me, his gaze trailing from my toes to my face. His eyebrows drew together, more and more?—
With a huff, he stuffed his hands into his shorts’ pockets and strode out of my study, pausing in the doorway with his backto me. “I got a room in the same hallway as yours,” he gruffly stated, then vanished down the hallway.
As I had guessed, there was not a chance in a million that I was going to get any rest.
22 YEARS OLD
“Come on.” Zion circled me in the corner of the square, near a grassy field leading to the forest. Sunset gilded the red, orange, yellow and the eighty-hues-of-in-between leaves clinging to the branches with all their might.
Although the gunshot wound under my collarbone had fully healed, I still rolled my shoulder out of habit. “Looking for a fight? Because Iwillput you down, Zion.”
His grin resurfaced. “Aww, my kitten has some fangs.”
Hiskitten. The nickname he had used time and time again to test my composure, ever since Dusk had wandered off to never return.
I cracked my neck. “Call me that again.”
“What? A kitten who has nice claws?” Zion scratched his naked chest, his nails creating a spider web of red lines on his sandy skin, now a deeper shade from the lingering summer tan. “Should I run and bring you a bowl of milk so you can lick your wounds?”
Instead of a response, I used his jab as a distraction, charging him head-on and ramming my shoulder into his sternum.
He gripped my shoulders, choking on a gasp?—
We tumbled, air whooshing around us, and I instinctively cradled the back of his head as his back slammed into the ground. We slid a good foot before stopping, the short trip marked by the gravel slicing my skin and flaying my knuckles.
With my left forearm bracketing his head, the sole thing keeping me from fully collapsing, I stared at him.
He blinked. Once. Twice.
A sweat bead tickled my upper lip, the drop about to fall, and my tongue darted out to catch it. Simultaneously sour and salty, the liquid exploded on my taste buds.
