“Glass,” Damia shared, squeezing Dain’s shoulder as he rested his forehead against the window, his wild brown strands pulled into a bun, you would be better off calling a nest. “Zion said she was drinking water when they ambushed them. The soldiers blew up their windows from the outside instead of creeping inside for a closer fight.”
So Coriattus’ military had waited for Conall, Aanya, Dain, and Nissa to return home and then had sneaked in after them, utilizing the opportunity to rain fire on the unsuspecting targets.
I had to give it to them. They’d chosen to employ a smart tactic.
Only, it hadn’t been enough. Two bodies boasting pairs of black cargo pants, dark green shirts, and helmets strapped under their chins lay in a pile in the farthest corner of the room, obviously kicked away by an outburst of agony Nissa seemed to be harboring inside her.
Because there was no way she and Dain could be that unruffled, collected,coldwhen their partners had been brutally murdered.
That state of peace? It had to be the quiet before the storm.
Mute, Zion finally entered the room. I feared his legs would give out as he took a tentative step, but they held, and he took another. And another. Closer and closer to Gedeon kneeling beside the bed, fisting the bloody sheets, tracing Conall’s tattoo marking him as a leader, and then doing it all over again. And again. And again.
Zion lowered to the floor beside Gedeon, the former’s expression one of stone, inscrutable,blank, and the latter’s so twisted it resembled…the state I’d been in after I’d learned of Alora’s death.
I’d been deeply intimate with the emotion shoving my men to their knees. Although it showed in different ways, it was a nightmare that ravaged you beyond recovery, nevertheless. Even if you healed, if someone smoothed out the lacerations inside you, the scars would remain. A part of you would always hurt.
You could only hope someone would anchor you, nurse you back to life. Like Gedeon and Zion had done to me. And how now Zion pulled one of Gedeon’s fists away. How he laced their fingers together. How the simple gesture was enough to yank Gedeon out of the loop he’d been stuck in.
A thump shocked me out of my frozen state, and I swiveled in search of a disturbance.
My breaths stalled at the sight of Dain collapsed under a window. Wetness gleamed on his puffy cheeks, the paths his tears had left as distressing as Nissa’s impassive?—
No, not anymore. Trembling, she inhaled and exhaled, in and out, in and out.
I instinctively moved toward her. “Are you okay?” I asked, then cringed at the dumbest question a person could’ve asked in this situation.
Ignoring Damia’s soothing whispers, Nissa schooled herself. Squared her shoulders. And then bared her teeth at me. “No.”
Although she was taller than me, her build screaming of fighting experience, the fake smile she flashed me exposed how small she felt right now.
“I’m sorry?—”
Damia caught the small of my back, silencing me and spinning us away from Nissa and Dain, the two remaining partners of what mere hours ago had been a foursome celebrating their forever.
“I know you mean well, but this is not the time for offering solace,” Damia murmured. “Nissa will break down when no one is looking.”
I dug my heels into the floor. “But?—”
“She thinks displays of weakness are something to be avoided.” Damia stopped us ten feet from the bed, from the two corpses, from my two men. Before I could interject, she sighed. “When you’re part of leadership, everyone expects you to be strong, no matter what or who your adversary is. Your people expect guidance, and so Nissa will provide. But in private, that’s where she will lose it.”
I willed myself not to look at the ink wrapping around Damia’s forearm. “And you?”
“When the war is over.” She pulled the sleeves of her cream cardigan down, concealing her tattoo. “Until then, I have no choice but to keep going. I can’t afford to look weak. Not now. My people need me. And I don’t mean just my compound, Kali. They…” She surveyed Nissa stoically lingering beside crumbling Dain, then moved on to Gedeon and Zion hunched over Conall’s body, and settled back on me. “You—are my people too.”
Hearing her confirm I was part of their group, it…
It was going to take some time to sort out my feelings. The more than two decades of indoctrination Ilasall had subjected me to was still messing me up sometimes, despite everyone assuring me of their intentions at every turn.
But I wasn’t going to allow the city to stop me from eradicating the beliefs ingrained so deep in me I couldn’t find the roots of them. I was going to chop them off, one by one. Like you would axe the branches and twigs off an oak’s trunk.
“I may not show it,” I said, fiddling with my shirt’s neckline, “but you have become my family too, Damia. I’m still struggling to figure out what it—afamily—actually is, but…thank you. For everything.” Without her and Conall’s support and guidance, I doubted Zion and I would’ve pulled through the first few weeks of Gedeon’s absence. One he hadn’t received a proper ass-kicking for.
Yet.
“I know those two…” Damia trailed off as we observed Zion rub Gedeon’s back. “They can sometimes act like fools. Like them drugging you so you wouldn’t resist them when they kidnapped you.” Her brownish lips tilted upward. “But the moment they had set their eyes on you, you became one of us.” Her warm palm squeezed my shoulder, the skin-to-skin contact zapping me like the destructive energy of lightning.
Perhaps it was those volts of nature’s force that beckoned me toward my two…partners—people of my choice and not thrust upon me by the city.
