His eyes dipped to my lips, his own parting, the pinkish flesh chapped, matte in the shadow cast by me blocking out the sun.
His throat bobbed.
Warmth gushed from my hand trapped underneath him, his buzzed hair poking my fingertips, yet I didn’t move. Not an increment.
A second ticked by, or two, or perhaps they were minutes. Sneakers ground against the ground as he bent his legs, the right one coming between my thighs. His bare abdomen burned underneath mine, the sweat plastering our bodies together, and I dropped an inch closer to him.
His breath coasted alongside mine, the scent of exertion wafting off him, heady and dizzying, and?—
“Gedeon!”
Conall’s shout shocked my system.
I scrambled to my feet. Shaking myself off, I marched to my childhood friend hovering not that far away, surveying Zion and I with a curious expression.
I ignored it.
“What is it?” Delving into the pile of clothes covering the bench, I pulled on my hoodie and used the cotton fabric to wipe the cuts weaving a pattern on the back of my hand.
Conall gestured toward the opposite side of the training rings, where Damia had hopped out of one of the two vehicles. “We’ve finished packing, and she wanted to say goodbye before we left.”
Flexing my fist, all five knuckles split, the gashes revealing the red tissue, I followed my friend to his car, oblivious to his mutters.
But a gust of wind lashed at my sweatpants, whipping the material, pushing me back, and I glanced over my shoulder.
Head thrown back, Zion sat cross-legged in the center of a chalk-drawn ring. With sweat glistening on his forehead, nose, and chin, his chest rising and falling, his red shorts slung low on his hips, he resembled a picture of peace—a frozen blip of light in the darkness painting the gravel.
4
ZION
For the seventh time in the last twenty minutes, Kali lunged at me. Aiming a knife at my throat, her wrist, at last, was straight instead of awkwardly bent, her hold on the rubber handle proper.
Finally, she’d given in to her instincts.
Only the rigidity in her steps betrayed the calculation going on in her mind, and I leaped aside, effortlessly avoiding her strike by blocking her forearm with my own.
“Don’t overthink it.” I quickly kissed her nose, well aware of how it irked her when I guessed her moves and peppered her with kisses as punishment.
Hilarious.
Yet also teaching her the necessity of patience. She was still too prone to lashing out, regardless of the fact that we’d been training daily for months.
Though I did love watching her snap and then lose the fight against me. I would pin her underneath me and glide my favorite knife along her fair skin, drawing lines of scarlet and licking them up while she writhed in surrender, tugging the ends of my hair and gifting me those addictive whimpers.
Those cries were even better than the imprints that chains and cotton ropes would leave on her flesh whenever I tied her up. And the combination of both… A road straight to the point of no return.
“Easy for you to say.” She rubbed her nose, her glower popping back up. “You’re the one who showed me the moves. I’m just copying them.”
Gravel crunched under her black leather boots as she retreated to the chalk rim of our training ring and took up a ready position: knees slightly bent, core tensed, and feet apart.
Rule number one in physical confrontation: you engaged your muscles or lost the match in the first seconds of combat. Or, in more exciting words, you died.
Well,excitingif it meant their deaths. Not Kali’s. No, if someone so much as cut a strand of her dark and fluffy waves escaping her high bun, death wouldn’t serve as their sentence.
That would be me and Gedeon.
No.
