Page 26 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

“Why don’t you try?” Zion offered from behind me. “I’d like to see it.”

My pulse roared in my ears as I twisted on my heels. He’d managed to sneak behind my back without me noticing.

An exit. I needed an exit.

I spotted a third man standing a few feet from the open door. I lunged on the bed to get around all of them, rolled over the mattress, and gunned for the doorway.

An arm wrapped around my waist and roughly wrenched me back into someone’s chest, knocking the air out of my lungs.

“Pretty birdie, don’t fly away from me.” Zion’s warm breath ghosted down the side of my neck, snatching all moisture from my mouth. “I don’t want to clip your wings.”

My wings? Mad, he was mad.

I wriggled to shake him off and his arms tightened around my stomach to the point I could barely move.

But he was holdingonlymy waist. Paying no attention to the pain gradually rising through the dullness of adrenaline, I drove the glass piece down into his thigh.

His gasp fueled my resolve to fight. Because this was what you got for taking me without asking. The shard hadn’t gone in deep but enough to tear his black jeans and pierce his flesh. A splotch spread around the impact point.

A wound for a wound.

“You have played enough. Now be a good girl and drop it.” My kidnapper’s insinuation that I was a child in need of being praised pulled me out of my dreamy state.

I yanked the glass out and sneered at him, “I am not your girl or your fucking bird. Now let me go.”

“I’d listen to him if I was you.” Zion released my waist, yet I didn’t have a second to get my wits together before he seized my wrist. He licked the bottom of my palm, lapping up the welling drops of blood around the piece of crystal glass embedded in my flesh. Each lick burst into a tiny flame, climbing up my nerves and dripping down my spine.

My kidnapper closed the distance between us. “Drop it,” he ordered.

“Sure.” I yanked my wrist out of Zion’s hold and used the inertia to guide my weapon toward him. I could do as he’d asked. Not like I’d need the shard anyway when it’d be stuck in him.

He leaned backward, but I was faster, my shard flying down and slashing right above his right hip.

Damn it. Missed his face.

“Oh, now you’re in trouble.” Zion reinforced his hold on me.

My kidnapper snatched my wrist in an iron grip. “Drop that shard right now or I will pry your pretty little fingers open one by one, take this piece of glass, and use it to mark you the same way you did me.” He laid a feather-light kiss on my knuckles. “Your screams will not stop me,” he said, squeezing my joint.

I willed myself to grasp the shard as if my life depended on it. A wave of fresh blood ran down both of our hands, red droplets painting the water on the floor in pink swirls.

“Your choice.” He pried my thumb away, and I instinctively clasped the glass firmer. Ignoring the ache, I bared my teeth at him and thrashed in Zion’s grip.

“Enough of your games. Can you calm her down? I’ll have to stitch her up,” the third man piped up, opening a white plastic box at his feet. Brown locks curling around his shoulders obscured his face, but not his intentions. He wasn’t going to help me.

Suddenly, my wrist was squashed so brutally that a string of arrows of pain shot up my arm, destroying my nerves along the way as I screamed. My fingers relaxed against my will, allowing my captor to prise them apart. The shard clattered to the floor, opaque from my blood, and the puddle of water turned red where it’d splashed.

But the fury for ridding me of my weapon summoned an idea. I leaned backward into Zion and, using his body as leverage, kicked at my abductor’s chest with my heel. Pain shot up my ankle from the improper strike, and I blinked rapidly to will the tears away.

He stumbled back, his thick lips parted in shock. Yet his smirk floated back up as he cracked his neck. “Such a fighter.”

“If you don’t stop moving, this is going to hurt.” The third man popped up at my right, tapping the half-full syringe to check for air bubbles. “And I’d rather not injure you any more.”His caring words shouted innocence, compelling me to let him wipe a spot on my upper arm with an antiseptic-soaked cotton pad in a practiced motion. Alcohol permeated my next inhale.

“What are you doing?” I asked, my hand quivering from the deep cut the crystal shard had left across my palm.

“Something so you don’t get an infection.” Quieting right at the end, he jabbed the needle into me, and his lie flowed from the thin steel tube into my muscle. I strained to get away, cursing him out, but to no avail.

The man—a doctor?—released me, and I spun, driving my elbow into Zion’s stomach. He crouched, and both surprise and hunger lit up his eyes.