If I wasn’t aware of my surroundings, I would have missed Zion silently prowling around the sunken living room. “Your hand.” Warm fingers enfolded my wrist as he checked my injuries, his scarlet-dotted features scrunching up. “It’s not too deep. You won’t need stitches.”
I didn’t doubt him. He could determine whether someone needed thread to weave their skin back together as well as Eislyn or the doc.
Experience taught you that.
“Can you keep an eye on her while I go wash up?” I didn’t need an infection from the dirt Peter was.
Zion grinned. “No need.” As he kissed my palm, my pulse thrummed. His tongue swept over the wounds, pricking, burning, soothing, twisting my insides until I groaned. Licking my blood off his lips, he closed his eyes. “Delicious.”
“Fuck,” Kali grunted. “Why is this so damn hard?”
Our attention whirled to her. Hunched over the lifeless figure, she rotated Peter’s head in different directions, his throat a bloody pulp. A pool of crimson had gathered underneath him—she had practically hacked his head off with her knife.
Only his vertebrae prevented his corpse from being dismembered.
Straining, huffing, she turned his head all the way around, and a loud snap echoed as the appendage popped free of the body.
“Finally.” Coated in a layer of fresh scarlet, she rose to her feet, Peter’s head in her hand. “He’s disgusting.” She tossedit aside, and the body part rolled across the hardwood floor, leaving a reddish trail.
It bounced off the couch, rolling back a few turns before coming to a stop, the brown eyes glazed over, the mouth slashed apart, the neck boasting uneven edges.
Beside me, Zion trembled. “Pretty birdie,” he whispered, mesmerized.
In the years I’d known him, his hoarseness meant only one thing—trouble.
71
KALI
Istared at Peter’s headless body.
His paleness, the crimson saturating his shirt, the splotch across his groin…
I bit my fist to suppress a gag. The Head of Ilasall had pissed his pants.
But the scarlet river flowing from the rough edges of his neck called to me like a beacon, the leaking arteries and veins reaching for me, seeking to ensnare me with their liquid heat. It already coated my arms, my face, dripped off my chin to my chest, plastered my hair to my temples. The stickiness gradually cooled, lowering my temperature back to reasonable levels.
Slicing off Peter’s—Gedeon’sfather’s—head had required much more effort than I’d expected. An ordinary combat knife might not have been the best choice for the task, but it’d gotten the job done, so I couldn’t complain.
Gedeon watched me wipe the mixture of sweat and blood off my mouth with a smirk, discoloration coloring his swelling right eye from the punch he must’ve sustained on his way to the Spire.
“Pretty birdie,” Zion rasped, gently holding Gedeon’s wrist to avoid hurting his wounded limb.
I still couldn’t believe he’d shoved a glass right into his father’s face. Even managed to break a tooth of two.
Swallowing, Zion ruffled his hair, painting his strands in streaks of red, a pattern so hypnotizing I missed him lunging at me.
He pushed me backward, shoving me into the floor-to-ceiling windows, and my shoulder blades collided with the thick glass. The bruises littering my back yelled in protest, voicing their concern by forcing me to cry out.
With his hips pressing me flush with the window, Zion locked me against him, and his mouth crashed into mine.
Softness didn’t grace his kiss—no, it was violent, as brutal as his crushing grasp. Hedevouredme. Consuming my whimpers, he delved deeper to devastate me, to raze the wreck, to open the gates to paradise.
“Let her breathe,” Gedeon commanded.
With a groan, Zion eased off me, resting his forehead on mine, his chest heaving.
I curled my arms around his neck. “Zion.” The hair dotting his nape tickled me as I caressed him, the hardness poking my lower belly unmistakable.
