As Zion and I marched down the street toward our central building, dawn colored the horizon in yellow and bright blue, not a cloud in sight.
I side-eyed him. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s…pleasant.” He threw an arm over my shoulders, the fresh roll of gauze wrapped around his forearm a stark contrast to the navy shirt concealing his newest…body decoration. “It makes me want to play.”
Instead of responding, I plucked out my strands stuck underneath Zion’s limb. Thankfully, no more than three people roamed the road this early—the fewer witnesses to my blush, the better.
Holding the entrance door open for me to pass, he grinned, stoking the fire licking my cheeks. The madman had tried to drag my pants down the instant Dorrian’s needle had touched me.
But the truth was the truth. I couldn’t deny the last time Dorrian had used me as a canvas for his art had ended up with me fucking Zion, per Gedeon’s orders.
Only this time, I’d made the choice to pay a visit to Dorrian myself, not because of a deal, or a bargain.
I did it as a promise, one I intended to keep.
The round lights installed in the ceiling battled the dimness swirling in the hallway as we trudged past Gedeon’s study, the dining room, the kitchen?—
I grew rigid.
The first of daylight caressed two figures covered in white. Snow-like flakes covered everything, from the silvery counters and appliances to… Was that an apple pie cooling on a rack?
Flour obscured Greyn’s sharp features as he pointed at Ryder. “He’s teaching me how to bake.”
Damia’s second-in-command was at our compound. The impossibly tall man with blond hair pointing in all directions had arrived without informing anyone.
And had decided to spend the night in the kitchen with Ryder—the loneliest person I knew. His caramel curls might have been tight, his freckles—striking, but I’d caught our friend watching couples and families with not composure but with desire. Not envy or jealousy, no; he didn’t harbor resentment. Ryder merely yearned for someone to have a life with.
“To bake.” My lips curled upward. “At five in the morning.”
Blocking the doorway, Zion pulled me into his side. “Greyn wanted to say they’re stuffing their pies with the two sausages dangling between their?—”
“I got it!” I screeched. I didn’t need him conjuring an image that could ruin baked goods for me forever. “As tempting as your offer is, two dicks are enough for me. I really don’t need four.”
Somehow containing himself from pointing out Ryder’s stupor, a rolling pin dusted in flour stuck in his hand, Zion shrugged. “I still want a piece of the pie after you’re done.” Steering us away from the kitchen, he yelled, “One without meat.”
“Did that really just happen?” Ryder’s shock followed us as we neared the stairwell leading to the upper floors, and my snicker echoed up the shaft.
Since the day I’d met him, Ryder would find a way to make anyone smile. Feel safe. Even the last batch of people we’d smuggled out of Ilasall had clicked with him. There was something about him, like…
An aura of kindness.
A type of tenderness no one had experienced in the city. And once you got a taste for it, you craved it like oxygen.
Similar to how I yearned for more time with the two men who could send me into a frenzy with one command or melt me with one look.
While my feet carried me up the stairs, my mind buzzed. Sixteen hours. That was how long Ryder had with Greyn before we had to depart.
Before we offered our lives to the fate awaiting us at the gates of Ilasall.
As Zion creaked open the door to our bedroom, the streak of light spilling inside reminded me of an hourglass—of golden sand trickling to the bottom, each grain one minute out of the nine hundred and sixty I had left with Gedeon and Zion.
His footfalls soundless, Zion headed straight for the dark wood closet. Either oblivious to Gedeon’s aversion to chaos or purposefully messing with him, Zion kicked off his dirty boots and stuffed them onto the lower shelf.
“Here.” He threw me a clean t-shirt from a heap of colorful ones, the garment obviously his and not Gedeon’s. “It’s cotton, so it shouldn’t irritate your skin.”
Following his example, I discarded my clothing into the laundry hamper shoved into the corner of the wall-sized closet, the ebony scuffed and scratched from years of use.
Marveling at Gedeon slumbering in bed, on his back, an arm thrown over his eyes, I whispered to Zion, “How he doesn’t wake up is incredible.” Tension had finally abandoned him, allowing him to sail the seas of his dreams freely.
