“Is that so?” Zion slowly pulled his knife out of its sheath. “Then we better do it properly.”
“Zion.” I backed away, the floorboards giving way to the plush carpet drowning out my steps and?—
My upper thighs collided with something solid.
Ignoring the slight ache obliterating my nerve endings, I clutched the edge of the kitchen table. Adrenaline drenched me as my blood roared and my palms grew clammy. I was all too familiar with the wicked things Zion could do with that knife. “No.”
He tapped the shell of his ear. “Such a beautiful ‘yes’ you just gave me.” Smirking, he threw the knife into the air. The blade gleamed in the dim moonlight flowing through the three large windows. Catching it by the handle, the trick I couldn’t learn for the life of me, Zion stalked closer. “Let’s have some fun.”
Oh, no. No, no,no.
How long had it been since Zion had a plaything in his underground? Days, a week?—
Shit. It’d been half a month already. No wonder he was so wound up.
Navigating around the chairs, their legs clattering as I staggered around them, I slunk along the length of the kitchen table?—
A loud rattle stopped me in my tracks. Zion stilled. The longest second ever ticked by before the wood creaked again. The door’s handle twisted, left and right, the rattling softer this time, but not a soul managed to walk through the entrance.
One, two, three blinks of a hush passed, and the silence grew disquieting. Foreboding. A heavy fog set on suffocating you.
Pushing through the dread dousing—no,stokingthe flames low in my abdomen—I swallowed the dryness in my mouth. “What did you do?”
Zion’s grin slowly spread. “Upped the game.”
43
GEDEON
Iglared at the door handle. The knowledge that a few brass cylinders, a few tiny tubes, were all that blocked my entrance rubbed my powerlessness in.
Although the door was far from thick, the house more reminiscent of a large cabin than a concrete apartment building built to sustain harsh weather, I restrained myself from kicking the door in.
Conall would give me shit for the destruction. Zion would not sleep a minute with the entrance point not secure. Kali would shiver half the night from the cold. And I would surely meet the dawn with a flaring migraine.
Roaming down the right side of the veranda, I scoured under the navy cushions strewn across the bench, under the clay pots of two dozen different plants littering the wobbly railing, under an iron lantern so old spiderwebs had claimed it, but a spare key was nowhere to be found.
The search down the left side of the porch, weaving around the house, brought the same results, and I returned to my spot in front of the door, the solid block of wood an obstacle of an irksome kind. Not the stopping-you-dead type.
Zion had to realize this would not prevent me from entering. Kali too.
I licked my upper teeth, combing through my options: breaking a window or taking down the door. The first would cause a rain of shards that could hurt them, so the second it would be.
Digging my left heel into the floorboards, I drove my right foot right below the handle. My bones ground against each other from the hit, but the splintering sound made up for the discomfort.
The lack of reinforcements in the door had caused the wood to fissure around the brass cylinders.
But not a scream permeated the night.
I tensed my core for the next kick. The slab of wood fractured, splitting apart, and the door whooshed into the house. The dangling handle rebounded off the wall, smacking my outstretched hand.
Two statue-like silhouettes lingered in the corner of the kitchen, not a squeak escaping them as I felt for the light switch.Click, and two sconces on either side of the door illuminated the scene before me.
Utterly naked, Kali sat on the kitchen table. Crimson trickled from the hollow of her throat to the valley of her breasts—a nick.
Kneeling between her legs, a shirtless Zion held the knife embedded near her pussy. A pile of shredded clothing pooled around his calves.
My movements controlled, I closed the door as gently as I could. With a broken lock, it refused to stay in place, and I used the iron shoe rack as a makeshift lock of sorts.
