I wanted to smile, but my lips were one with ice, frozen, unmovable, uncontrollable. I focused my last shreds of clarityinto shattering that ice, allowing me to speak. “I need you to do something.”
“Anything.” The vow tumbled out of him.
My vision rippled, and I failed to discern whether it was tears or rain running down Zion’s cheeks in rivulets.
Hooking two fingers under his jaw, I forced him to look at me. “But you cannot tell Kali. No matter what.”
His eyebrows dipped, but he renewed the pressure around my stab wound and leaned in.
Knowing my time had a limit, I relished the feeling of his forehead resting against mine as I whispered what my freezing lips allowed before nothingness pulled me under.
“Ged…”
His call echoed, reverberating off all those raindrops dragging me underwater. I gradually faded into nothingness, yet Zion’s promise spun like a wheel in my mind, enveloping me in a cloud of serenity.
Certain he would do what I had asked of him, I could rest.
A flame slowly engulfed my soul, the blaze painless—pleasant. The ringing in my ears mixed with a male voice shouting something from miles away, reminding me of the howls of the wind.
A hush devoured me, the quiet peaceful. Surreal.
Calmness flushed my veins, and I awakened on a stretch of sand. The waves pulled me from the shore back into the sea, and the midnight-blue water enfolded my body.
For what seemed like forever, I floated in the middle of nowhere, a void without limits, the dark sky flickering with stars my sole company.
My clumped eyelashesprevented me from peeling my eyes open.
But one, two, three, four seconds later, the rain ceased its assault, replaced by a scorching bright light. My diaphragm spasmed as multiple arms lowered me onto a hard surface.
“Guard the door,” he barked at someone, and the footfalls I would recognize in my sleep grew louder. The sound of his pacing, the speed of his gait based on his mood—it all had imprinted into my memory years ago. “No one can know. No one.”
I blindly reached for him. “Zion.”
Strings of orders and clinks and clangs accompanied the hazy figures dancing around me. Something cold and hard poked and prodded the fire licking my torso. The blaze in my stomach increased, and so did my groans.
“Gedeon? Can you hear me?” A familiar low rumble of a voice trickled into my ears. “We don’t have enough pain meds. And your injury doesn’t necessarily require anesthesia to attempt…” the doc trailed off.
Something wrapped around my ankles, thighs, wrists and elbows, locking them in place.
The doc warned, “This is going to hurt.”
Searing pain buried its talons below my ribs?—
Nothingness took hold of me.
14
ZION
3 MONTHS AGO
The quiet man who’d helped me and the doc carry Gedeon out of the clearing stared at me.
But one crack of my neck turned out to be enough to break him from his stupor, and he gave me a curt nod. He would watch the entrance.
A click signaled he’d closed the door—painted maroon, for fuck’s sake—and took on the guarding position to deter any visitors or curious passersby.
White walls blared their impeccability in the house our doc had begun to set up as a new infirmary at the fringes of our compound. In preparation for a potential fallout, as he’d put it.
