Page 80 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

My throat clogged up. He’d brought me a gift on a shining silver platter in the shape of a steel table for finishing my plate of food the night I’d awakened in their compound.

I swallowed past the knot tying my vocal cords. “But he’s already dead. There’s no point in doing anything to him.”

“Give him a minute and he will come to. We did not want his screams to be what greets you,” Gedeon said.

“What did you do to him?” With the amount of dried-up blood, I wondered how he was still alive. Cauterized flesh marked the guard’s crotch, and I wrinkled my nose in disgust. His dick and balls were gone.

“It was Eislyn’s idea.” Zion grinned in wicked delight. “Meds that paralyze his muscles, but don’t kill him.”

On the beat, the man’s eyes peeled open, and he fell into a coughing fit, the metal encircling his ankles and wrists loudly banging against the silver table. The rattle reverberated in the vast expanse.

His heaving chest stretched out the cuts in his milky skin, and I cocked my head aside to decode the incisions. “You carved out your name?”

“Gedeon likes marking them.” Using his knife, Zion re-opened the first inch of the first letter, and the guard choked on a cry.

“I enjoy seeing my possessions branded,” Gedeon explained, indifferent to the guard’s croaked voice pleading with Zion to cease deepening the lacerations.

“I don’t want to hear him.” Staggering back, I hit Gedeon’s chest, and he caught me.

Gedeon threw the thin gray scarf to Zion, and he stuffed it into the guard’s mouth, securing the ends around his head.

“Thank you.” I willed the rising bile to simmer down. The man’s voice had swirled in my ears like poison. “Do whatever you want to him. As long as it hurts, I’ll be happy.” The wrist and ankle cuffs restraining him purred to me that he wasn’t going to exit the basement in one piece. The belief enveloped me in wings of corrupt contentedness, and I leaned into Gedeon.

“As you wish.” His fingers dipped under my t-shirt and began tracing idle circles around my navel. My stomach grew light and fluttery.

Examining the chained man, Zion bit his fist, and I asked Gedeon, “Is this...a thing for him?”

“You mean why he enjoys dissecting people while they are still alive?" Gedeon drew a line up to my sternum. “Why he likes to drain them of their blood, nice and slow? Why he’s fascinated by the crimson liquid?”

“If we can call it that."

His fingers slid down to the hemline of my shorts and back up again. "Our past was not exactly easy. We grew up learning how to kill and defend, and when Ilasall attacked us years ago, certain things...changed. We changed." My pelvis contracted, and Gedeon repeated his caress anew. "This—let’s call it the study of human pain points—is his outlet when life becomes too much. A way to take the edge off when memories threaten to overcome you." I shuffled on my feet, and he gripped my hip, his tone lowering. "Call it a game of vengeance. Only his opponents never cross the board to reach the winning side."

My ass pressing into his not-so-soft groin challenged my focus as I pushed, “What’s yours?”

“Outlet?” He tapped a rhythm on my belly, eliciting a twitch out of my muscles. “The training rings. I particularly enjoy the resistance of my opponents, but anything that inflicts some sort of damage does it for me.”

The experience I had been deprived of. Giving had been what I was coerced into providing to survive and go after what I wanted behind the city’s wall, but here, in their compound…

Taking seemed to be an option you could choose.

Zion sauntered around the guard in search of his next target. The gag in his mouth couldn’t muffle his screams as Zion flayed strips of his skin from his abdomen and they landed with a wet plop on the cement floor, as he meticulously sawed the man’s ears into thin ribbons like that leather whip from Vice and they hung limply down the sides of the guard’s head, as he madeprecise crisscrossing cuts in the soles of the abomination’s feet, all the way from the heel to the toes, as he drew parallel lines on his plaything’s inner thighs and scarlet coated his pale flesh.

Each drop of crimson, each cry, each convulsion, only pushed Zion further. Scrutinizing his work, he angled his head to the side and shifted his weight, drawing my attention to the stretched material of his jeans across his hips.

He was into this.

“Would you like to take care of it?” Gedeon teased the underside of my breasts, so close and yet so far from my hardened nipples aching to be pinched, because the way his callouses had scraped at them before?—

I cleared my throat. It dissolved the lump turning my voice hoarse, but not the wetness soaking my panties. “I’d like to watchyoutake care of it.”

“He knows I wouldn’t mind.” Disturbing mirth sparkled on Zion’s wide smile, and my core tightened at the image his words had conjured.

Gedeon grunted—like it was a proper response—and asked, “Do you know how I brought you out of the city?”

“You mean how you drugged me? Water, Gedeon. It wasn’t that hard to figure it out,” I said, tracking how Zion slowly, so damn languidly, left long slashes in the guard’s armpits and inner biceps. “And I said before, if you do it again, I swear to the gods, I won’t rest until I have you chained on that table instead ofhim.”

“Such a fighter.” His low laugh rumbled in my ear. “But I meant after you passed out.”