“Did you just…” Gedeon interjected. His forehead twitched, creasing and smoothing out repeatedly. “Fartstraight into my dick?”
My eyes bugged out.
“Is that what it was?” Zion patted Gedeon’s hand resting on his throat. “Never happened to me before.”
Gedeon tightened his grasp. “I felt itripple, Zion.”
My core contracted, and I covered my mouth to stop my cackle from escaping.
“You should blame these pants.” Zion picked at the loose material flowing from his waist, the black fabric tailored to hug his frame impeccably. “They’re too airy. Can’t contain anything.”
That did it. I cracked up, clutching Zion’s bicep for support as I doubled over.
Gedeon opened his mouth. Closed it. Did it all over again. “You know you are supposed to wear underwear, right?”
“Why? There’s no need.” Zion tapped one of the six buttons securing his pants. “This pair doesn’t have any zippers to protect my cock from.”
“That’s…” Gedeon sighed.
I buried my face in Zion’s shoulder to smother my laughter. My tremors elicited a hum from him, and he stroked my back, from my tailbone to my shoulder blades.
A graying woman skirted past us, catching my attention, her yolk-yellow dress skimming her ankles, her focus set on coiling the bloodied rope from the ritual into a loop.
“Oooh,” Zion exclaimed. “Aria, wait!” Wriggling out from between Gedeon and I, he hurried after her like a child chasing a teaspoon of caramel that the cafeteria in my school had sometimes added to our lunches.
“Where’s he going?” I asked Gedeon as Zion vanished in the crowd. The mass devoured his form, the majority of people here unfamiliar to me, and I rose to my tiptoes, failing to see over everyone’s heads.
“Kali.” Gedeon seized my waist. “He will come back.”
“But—”
“No buts.” He pushed me toward the bonfires forming a circle around the dancers.
The way he cleared a path for me, ensuring not a single elbow bumped into me, made me all giddy.
Sometimes, the brooding asshole could be the most caring person in existence. But only for Zion and me. As self-centered as that sounded, Ireveledin it.
Depositing me near the calmest blaze, the wood mostly incinerated, the flames too minuscule to shoot out unexpectedly and terrify you with their intensity, he brought my palms close to the heat source. “Wait here.”
I wiggled my fingers to encourage the warmth to seep into my flesh. “Why?”
He scanned the throng. “I want to fulfill my promise.”
“What promise?”
“You will see.” Taking my nape, he planted a feather-light kiss on my forehead. The tingles it’d coaxed out doused my uneasiness as I watched him march away.
Everything was going to be okay,I repeated to myself. The light embers radiated drew me in, their pulsing glow reminding me of how little time we had left.
Thirteen days. A tad more than three hundred hours until we invaded Ilasall. Stirred up a civil war. Attempted to convince the residents to dismantle the city’s government.
We had less than two weeks to spend with our lives intact, our bodies warm, our blood a liquid and not a clotted labyrinth of frozen capillaries.
Once a dozen dawns had passed, on the thirteenth, the fifty-foot-high city wall would arise before us, and that would be it. Death or survival. Not a chance of a fate in between.
For twenty-six years, I’d dreamed of nothing more but to annihilate the vileness permeating Ilasall, to unshackle the poor souls trapped inside the city.
Less than six months had ticked by since my world had been overturned by two men, and now, a conflict had found its home inside me. Now, I questioned what was worth more, my dream or…
