Page 155 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

Zion’s knee bumped into mine. “I can take care of myself. I’m not saying you can’t, but combat is not exactly in your skill set.”

“I got your tattoo”—I yanked back the sleeve of my pink sweater—“because of trust. To stand as your equal. Not more, not less. My life is my right, even if it means giving it up for what I believe in. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to waitwhile you risk your lives? Itsucks. I might have said I’m yours, but if you think I’m going to sit in a corner with my mouth shut, you’re wrong. I can’t be with someone who refuses to listen to me. I won’t be.”

Turning in his seat, Gedeon squeezed my knee. “We had to make sure you were safe. That will always be my priority.”

My fists curled in my lap. “That’s not a good enough reason. War is coming, and I won’t remain safe. None of us will. You must understand that. People will die. Zion might die. I might die. You won’t be able to protect everyone. Can you accept and live with that?”

He didn’t respond, focused on the headlights illuminating the asphalt as we raced down the endless road.

I had to get through to him. I had to talk him into risking mine and Zion’s lives. Everyone’s lives. We were living at the threshold of war, and I was determined to ensure we emerged victorious.

The question was, would I need to sacrifice the king to conquer the land?

And if I did, what would remain of me?

49

GEDEON

From high up, people often resembled scurrying ants: busy with their days, rushing after their tasks, never pausing, never resting, moving and moving, day and night. But if you were on the same level as the street, you could see their expressions: concern, joy, sadness.

Any and all of them indicated they werealive.Their muscles carried them around, their diaphragms expanded their lungs, and their flesh was warm and soft, not cold and clammy. Though in both cases, it reflected the yellow beams streaking the road identically.

I turned away from the window in my study. “How many did we get out?” A day had passed since the auction, and we finally had the numbers of our losses and new arrivals, the majority in shock from learning of our existence and the rest outright resisting the change in their lives. Despite that they had willingly chosen to come with us.

Sitting on top of my ebony desk, Zion dangled his legs. “Fifty-seven.” The dim table light danced on his relaxed posture, and my fingers itched to run them through his golden-brown hair he had recently trimmed. It suited him. Created an innocent imageof a man I once knew as a child who had always found his way into trouble.

Only I had ruined him. Torn him to shreds. Yet the flow of my thoughts would not cease straying to him every night he slept on the other side of Kali, every morning he trained with me to keep up our skills, every day he wandered into perilous situations, every evening he undressed and his scars called out to me, and every time his lips playfully quirked when he caught me perusing.

Like right now.

Tearing my gaze off his mouth, I leaned on the windowsill. “And how many did we lose?”

“Eight.” Hopping off the desk, he fixed the pile of my notes he had messed up with the movement. He knew crooked edges would nag me relentlessly until I aligned them. “But they all knew what they were going into. It was a risk they took willingly. We expected consequences, and not good ones. We’d prepared for them.”

Eight fewer of our residents in the streets. Kali could have been one of them if we had not left her behind. And when the bullets had almost struck Zion at the auction site, I feared he would become another casualty.

A corpse. No facial expressions, no heartbeat, no teasing remarks. An empty shell.

If his snapping point had befallen him twelve years ago, mine was tethered to their lives.

“No.” Zion crossed the space between us, stopping a foot away, half-inside my personal space. Too close and nowhere near close enough. “You’re not getting more tattoos. If you don’t listen to me, listen to Kali. It’s enough. We’re more than ready for death, Gedeon. We live with a possibility of it looming at our backs every fucking waking moment.”

Perhaps he was right. During the war, there would not be enough space on my body to mark all the losses certain to fall. They would be lost in history, erased from the memories of survivors during the years to come.

But not yet. We had just managed to adapt to their security update and restore our supply chains. Our storage had been depleted, and the sole resource we had enough of was people. In other words, meat for slaughter. If we marched to the city now, the lever would swing to the wrong side of the probability of victory.

There was no point in attacking when it all would come crashing down to luck. Betraying the trust of the thousands residing in our compound to play a game match with the fortune in hopes of a positive outcome was not something I was willing to do.

Ryder strolled in through the wide-open door, pausing a few feet inside. “You said you wanted to talk?”

“Sit.” I situated myself behind my desk while Zion remained hovering near the window. “What did you find out?”

“Where do you want to start?” Ryder took a seat across from me, his tight caramel curls framed by the ebony bookshelves lining the wall. All the tomes had belonged to my parents, most collected by my father due to his love for fictional stories. He used to say reading would imbue you with an ability to view the world from different perspectives, and that it was the most valuable skill a leader could have. The genre or the story type held no sway over him as he had believed all stories were worth telling, all were equal, and your dislike of a character or a plot line could not diminish their worth.

They all depict life, he would say.Whether about a journey of someone’s life, an adventure on another planet, a battle between different races, a clash of religions, or a mix of everything the author could imagine, it all had been inspired bytheir experiences, their life. A book is like a window to peek out of and see the world through their eyes. The eighteen windows in our house look into eighteen different parts of our yard and the street and, similarly, eighteen different books can show you a glimpse of eighteen different worldviews.

After his death, I had read each page, inhaling the scent of old paper as a drug that carried a whiff of the past. Because a leader could not succumb to addiction, a leader could not lose the trust of his people, a leader could not waver when faced with a dilemma of punishment, no matter if it involved the sole person alive they cared for at that time.