Kali gripped Zion’s wrist to stop him from drawing idle patterns on her inner thigh. “Will either of you tell me why we had to leave?”
Again, she had proved patience wasn’t her strong suit.
Adorable.
It had taken us more than forty minutes to pass the seven security posts Conall had established around the celebration’s perimeter. Add the extra twenty-minute ride to our assigned house on the other side of their compound, and the hour Zion and I had spent toying with Kali had brought her to the brink of madness.
A glance in the rear-view mirror revealed our driver, a woman named Juno, intently focused on the empty road ahead of us. Although Conall, my brother, even if not by blood, had emphasized her discreteness, I highly doubted she had not noticed the torment we had been putting Kali through.
“Two more streets, and you will see.” I brushed higher up Kali’s thigh, pausing my exploration right where she was most sensitive.
She pressed her full lips together to suppress the whimper worming its way out of her. “I hate you.”
“We know.” Zion tapped her pussy, intent on distracting her from trying to figure out what was in the paper bag sitting on his lap.
Her squeak tightened our driver’s hands on the wheel. The plastic ring was missing large chunks, the holes filled with whatever stuffing could be found and covered in leather wraps.
Kali writhed on the fabric seats marred with a multitude of stitches, the thick thread varying shades of gray—probably had been white a long time ago. Our feet hooked around her ankles, preventing her from slamming her legs together.
Her efforts were admirable, but soon, I was going to shatter whatever walls she had built in her mind to keep her relative composure.
And then destroy Zion’s.
He shifted every other minute in his seat, his choice to forgo underwear exposing the bulge my tongue craved to run up.
Both yesterday and today, the suspicion I was a foolish man had gnawed at me, chewing me out for not throwing caution to the wind and seeing the man before me.
For years, I had discarded the notion of allowing anyone to get close to me, due to Ilasall’s attempts to eliminate those around me, but something had snapped in me. Kali’s defiance had peeled my defenses away, layer by layer, until I had no choice but to acknowledge Zion was mine.
My ancestors had to have been territorial bastards because I’d had to resort to clenching my fists to keep myself from scooping out the eyes of the seven people who had ogled Zion during the celebration.
“We’re here.” Smoothly, our ride came to a stop, not the slightest lurch rocking the vehicle, and Juno met my gaze in the rear-view mirror. Fractures in the reflective surface multiplied her eyes as she gave me a curt nod. “All houses were combed an hour ago.”
Clyde, the coward he was, had sunk a bullet into his temple the second he had spotted Nissa coming for him in their shooting range. Undoubtedly, the prospect of us setting Zion loose to work on him had caused the man to shit his pants, but I had no clue the city castrated the men they sent to do their dirty work.
Because only a ball-less person would prefer leaving the living realm over taking his chances of discovering a way to climb out of the mess dry.
“Thank you,” I told Juno. We still had no leads on what kind of blueprints Clyde had provided Ezra, and without the knowledge, predicting the cities’ next moves was like walking in a forest blindfolded.
As I opened our car door, the chill running rampant in the night lunged at me, burrowing under my t-shirt, the contact a necessity for it to recognize who I was.
Kali hopped onto the sidewalk after Zion. “So?” Glowering, she marched up to me. The thrum of the engine ebbed as Juno rolled down the street, the taillights illuminating Kali blowing a dark strand away from her nose. “Why did we have to return home so early?”
We.
NotI, notYou made me, notZion and me.
Sure, the last nine days since my return had not been easy, but I knew her reluctance to believe in goodness was nothing more than a protective mechanism masking her vulnerability. It had become a means of survival for her, and was far from a reflection of who she was as a person.
Like Zion. He teased and taunted, not a serious remark existing in his vocabulary, but it was his body that told me everything. He would melt any time I embraced him from behind, purred like Shadow whenever I scratched his scalp, switched his grins to smiles in the mornings, and tangled his legs with mine in the nights.
His proclivities, flippancy, frivolity, were an armor of sorts. A shell he had built around himself to survive after the spectacle Ilasall’s military had made of our parents’ demises and the suicide his sister had committed to avoid a fate worse than death.
Yet one touch was more than enough to take his shield down.
Staring Kali down, I warned her, “Because it’s time for you to pay for what you did.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Both of us?”
