Realization that I’d been lied to kindled my fury.
I’d been deceived. Kept in the dark, throttled by the night.
Eleven circles.
On that roof in Ilasall, Gedeon had to have been just a mirage, a hallucination. Otherwise…
Fourteen circles.
Round and around I went, the laces of my black boots loosening, the rubber soles squelching in the mud.
Thick clouds occupied the sky, harboring the moon and the stars—the gods residing high above. They had erected the fluffy wall of the darkest gray as a shield to protect themselves from the explosion about to burst out of me.
Gedeon had survived.
A withered branch crunched behind me, the sound so jarring in the hush my feet halted their restless pacing. Goosebumps pricked my flesh, and I succumbed to the far too familiar situation: Gedeon stalking the oblivious me, and me yielding to him once he’d appeared from the shadows veiling the woods.
I could swear his eyes, their shade the deepest brown marred with black specks, traced the line of my rigid shoulders, flickedto the back of my head, and seared the path all the way to my toes.
“You’re alive.” My statement came out hoarse, cracked,forced.
Decisive footsteps grew louder, their tempo as steady as the air was crisp.
But I didn’t move. Not even when he halted at my back, close enough for his body heat to bathe me.
My fists balled at my sides, anchoring me to the forest floor. Ants crawled underneath my skin, nagging me to turn around and determine if this was another nightmare or an actual, true-to-my-bones reality.
Whether Gedeon was an image conjured by my desires or an actually solid, palpable presence, and not a wraith floating between the oaks.
“Little death.”
The voice from my dreams furled around my knees, seizing control of my joints and counteracting their need to wobble.
“I have missed you,” he murmured, his breath ghosting along the shell of my ear, infusing me with ire.
He’d missed me?
Missed me.
I’d saidgoodbyeto him. I’d wished him a smooth sailing among the stars at his funeral. I’d spent my days training, my nights at Vice or deep in our underground, observing Zion unleash himself on his dolls, my mornings in war strategy meetings, and my lunches by strolling through the streets and chatting with our people, pretending I was fine, that everything was fine, fine, fine andfine.
That my world hadn’t collapsed.
“You missed me,” I sneered. Not a question, no.
A statement of nothing but the truth.
First, he’d stalked me for months, then he and Zion had kidnapped me, then he’d declared I was his during dinner my first night at our compound, yet I’d grown to care for them.
For him.
But for three months now, I’d had to learn how to exist without him, and all he could say was he missed me.
His fingers threaded through my hair, and my strands wrapped themselves around his hand, melding us into one. “Yes.” He tightened his grip on my scalp. “I do not enjoy straying far from my belongings.”
“I’m not—” I choked on the denial about to spill out of me.
“You are.” Releasing me, he snatched my waist, plastering his front to my back. One of his palms came to rest low on my throat, and the contact seared my flesh.
