Page 101 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

I nodded. My stomach churned, digesting their story, as he gently cleansed my cheeks. “Your gunshot scar. You said you got it during the war, hours after you became the leader. How?”

“Lift your chin.” He wiped at my neck, so softly, so carefully, so… My throat bobbed at the tenderness. “A soldier shot me when I was hauling Zion out of that military truck.”

I took the cloth from him and rubbed at the splotch of crimson right in the middle of his forehead. “How old were you?”

“Twenty. He was nineteen.” He glimpsed at a passed-out Zion. “We were young and reckless. I acted foolishly. Made a mistake I have regretted ever since. It was not his fault others died while he sought to rescue her. I would have done the same.”

“For him or for your parents?

“Yes.”

I paused erasing the red specks along his jaw. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is. When I woke up here, I asked what you wanted. You said me. I’m asking again now.”

Silence enshrouded him like a shadow.

“You pushed him away, didn’t you? After everything, after stupidly punishing him, you pushed him away.”

What did you do?I’d questioned him at their bar.

Something I should not have,he’d admitted.

“You’re an idiot, Gedeon, a fucking idiot.”

The click of the adjoining room’s door cracking open interrupted us. A yawning Ava emerged with Eislyn. “I’m off to bed. See you guys tomorrow. Don’t bite each other’s heads off while I’m gone. I want to see it.”

A collision of emotions had made my head spin, and yet Ava pulled a resemblance of a smile out of me.

Eislyn inspected Gedeon’s stitch work on Zion’s abdomen, murmuring her approval, and dug into the shelves of the med supplies closet.

Disposing of the cloth Gedeon and I’d used to clean each other in the sink, I asked Eislyn, “How is Malaya?”

“She’ll be okay. She’s seventeen, and that’s not the best age to have a child. Not including the fact that she weighs barely enough to carry out the pregnancy. She broke down and told me about the fight at the gates. I think talking it out helped.” Eislyn placed a cotton bandage over Zion’s wound. “He can remain here tonight, seeing as he’s out. I don’t want to move him while he’s sleeping.” She whipped up a pillow—more like a bunch of cotton balls stuffed in a plastic package—and a blue-and-yellow checkered wool blanket out of nowhere and covered him up. “Do you need anything else from me? I’d rather go back and stay with Malaya overnight to make sure that she rests.”

“We’re fine,” Gedeon said, looking right at me.

“Call me if things change.” Eislyn disappeared through the door, leaving me and him staring at each other in dead silence, apart from Zion’s faint snoring.

I pressed my lips to prevent my laughter from bursting. The man obsessed with blood and knives wassnoring.

My emotions were spiking all over the place.

“You know you sometimes snore yourself, right?” Gedeon remarked.

“I do not,” I huffed with indignation.

“I have told you I do not like liars, little death.”

I sighed through my nose. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

He prowled toward me. “Because you fight everyone and everything to the end. You do not give up. You are a walking incarnation of death to whoever wrongs you.”

“Fine, I get the death part, but I am anything but little.”

“You are to me. Not in a derogatory sense—an endearing one. A flame ready to incinerate your prey. I adore it.” His knuckles brushed a path along my jaw. “But I’m not the only one haunted by my past actions, Kali. Something is after you. I see it. Zion does too. One night at a time, you are losing your battles and burning scars onto yourself. As invisible as they are from the outside, they will consume you alive. And I want you whole, not just crumbs from the leftovers.”