Page 96 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

Bending to my left, I peeked around them. A young and hollow-cheeked girl stood frozen in time, her mouth agape and a bag of shining red apples pressed to her stomach, the fruit curvier than her belly, partially camouflaged by the flowing light pink dress I’d seen before.

She was that scrawny girl I’d met in the bakery on my way home from work the day I’d been snatched from the city.

Her gaze bounced from me to Gedeon, Ava, Zion, the woman behind the counter, and settled back on me. “You,” she squeaked.

“I remember you. We met in the line at the bakery.” I squirmed out of Zion’s iron grip on my waist and walked around them, swatting away Gedeon’s outstretched arm for disobeying his crystal-clear instruction to stay behind them. “What do think she’ll do? She’s pregnant, for gods’ sake.”

Rooted in place between two shelves, she tracked my approach. “You escaped,” she said shyly.

“How do you know?” Gedeon’s harshness knocked her a step back.

“My,” she gulped, “friend had once mentioned a man with a forest tattoo on his arm could help you get away.” She pointed to Zion’s exposed and inked right forearm.

“Stop scaring her,” I scolded Gedeon. “And I didn’t escape. He kidnapped me and the other one helped.”

She staggered back, the bag of apples swaying in her grasp.

So that hadn’t sounded the way it was supposed to. I added, “But it’s all good now.”Kind of.

Zion and Ava snickered while Gedeon glowered at me.

“What? It’s true.” I shrugged. “Yes, their tactics are a bit…questionable, but they take care of their people.” The green band on her skinny wrist shimmered under the fluorescent lights, and I knew what I had to do. The words tumbled out of me. “Do you want to get out of here? The city, I mean. You could live in our compound or with the others. Outside the wall. Wherever you want. But you have to decide right now; we don’t have much time.”

“I—” She chewed on her bottom lip. Her gray eyes, matching the concrete residential buildings, a symbol of Ilasall, bore into the elderly woman behind the counter.

“Go,” she encouraged her. “Don’t overthink it. Trust me.”

“Ahm, o-kay.” She fiddled with the knot on her bag of apples. “Uh, my name is Malaya.”

“Kali.” I tapped my chest and indicated the rest of us. “She’s Ava, the brooding one is Gedeon, and the one your friend talked about is Zion.”

I plucked the poor bag Malaya was destroying with her nails and poured the apples out into the basket on the shelf, the faint thuds from fruit hitting fruit the only sounds disturbing the silence enshrouding our group. Maybe I hadn’t been clear enough.

“Malaya’s coming with us,” I announced.

“She is not.” Displeasure deepened each arch and dip of Gedeon’s face for acting the opposite of his orders—quick and quiet. “We cannot risk bringing someone unplanned and unscreened home.”

I strolled to him hovering in front of Zion, while Ava exchanged glances with the nameless older woman, like a silentthis again?

“Please,” I pleaded, my lips an inch away from his. His thick and impossibly lickable lips. A pair of which had stolen the world from underneath my feet and rendered me a ball of contrasting feelings, each a different shade of yarn. A pair of which harbored his tongue, quick to anger and spit controlling words, yet caring and ready to give me answers to the questions I sought.

He sighed through his nose. “For you.”

Victory.

Or, in other words, the result of the lesson I’d learned years ago: using your body to your advantage. He had a thing for touching me, and if I could use it to get what I wanted, why not? Nothing came for free in this world.

“You do things to me, little death,” he murmured. The strain abandoned his shoulders and the austere lines of his jaw I was stroking, his faint stubble scratching my fingertips. He hadn’t shaved in the last three days. The roughness of it roused thoughts about how it would scrape against my inner thighs and?—

Nope.

“Thank you.” Pure will to not give in to temptation so recklessly peeled me off him. Usually, I didn’t ask for support. I simply sold and bought. Made deals.

I didn’t need his approval. Malaya was coming with us. Yet for some reason, it felt nice to have it.

I couldn’t pull Alora out of Ilasall today, but at least the city would have one person less in their clutches. Zion had said theyrequired more information about her besides her name to bring her out, and that, I didn’t have. When you were a child confined in Ilasall’s schools, you had no use for a person’s identification code. Their name was your universe, and all it entailed.

“Let’s go.” Ava made a circular motion with her forefinger and strode between the shelves toward the exit. “The curfew begins in ten minutes. We’re going to be too late to go out the way we came in, so the northern gates it is. Hopefully, we won’t die today.”