Page 17 of Shadow (Marinah and the Apocalypse #1)

Marinah

T he walls of my room felt like they were closing in.

I tried every breathing technique I knew, counting by threes, fours, sevens, forwards, backwards, but nothing worked. Five minutes after entering this claustrophobic space and attempting to calm myself, a hysterical burst of laughter escaped my throat.

I literally survived the zombie apocalypse.

The laughter dissolved into tears.

Our government did this.

The scientists told us that GMOs were safe. It was backed by those in power.

The group of protesters I ran with in college went after the manufactures of GMOs. All of them were guilty of using hidden practices to keep the public ignorant.

We wanted transparency. That was it. You’d think we had demanded they shut down entirely. Labeling food was our objective. Let the people decide was our motto.

I thought about the honeybee colony collapse, directly linked to the use of neonicotinoids in different multi-billion-dollar manufacturing companies. It’s why we protested. Those at the top were always about greed, corruption, and power.

And yet, our efforts, our marches, our voices, meant nothing.

Because in the end, it wasn’t about the food. Something else, something entirely unrelated to feeding the population, was genetically engineered. And that something created monsters that nearly wiped out humanity.

I didn’t know which company decided to play God with formaldehyde.

But at this point, did it even matter?

Before the first attack, scientists were already modifying the genetic codes of babies. It was only a matter of time before something went catastrophically wrong. There were too many people to blame, and I no longer had the energy to untangle the mess of it all.

The bottom line was horrifying. We had been fighting our own dead. And in a way, they weren’t even dead, which was somehow worse. They didn’t just attack mindlessly; they fought strategically, working together to destroy us.

I couldn’t shake the image of those eyes. The creature’s gaze wasn’t empty or primal. It held some kind of intelligence.

I rubbed my arms and began pacing, my thoughts spiraling. How could our government have known about this and kept it hidden? If King’s suspicions were right, they had known as far back as the first wave of the invasion.

Nuclear fallout didn’t affect the hellhounds or hellhumans, as I might start calling them, but it killed countless people. And those who survived? They were left to face the monsters.

I needed a drink.

Opening my door, I found both guards standing at attention. One arched a brow as I addressed him directly. “I need a bottle of tequila. Do you know if there’s any available?”

Before he could answer, I rushed to add, “Honestly, I’m not picky. If you have anything; beer, whiskey, whatever, I’ll take it.”

He nodded silently and walked away, leaving me with the second guard. Boot had mentioned there would always be two, so I was never left unprotected if one had to run an errand.

For once, I wasn’t as resentful of my confinement. There were hellhounds in this compound, and I was terrified I would run into one. Since I was stuck here, I might as well use this safety to my advantage and ease the pressure I had been under since I arrived. It sounded like a great idea, even if I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes you had to do what you had to do.

Back inside, I changed into a nightshirt and shorts, pacing the room while my thoughts spiraled. Pacing solved nothing, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

Ten minutes later, a knock on the door interrupted my circling. When I opened it, the guard handed me a bottle of Havana Club rum.

I took it with a grateful smile and closed the door in his face, wasting no time in finding a glass. Dumping the water into the sink, I refilled the glass with the amber liquid.

The first swallow burned all the way down. The second, not so much.

And so it went.

It had been years since I had gotten drunk. Too many years.

I sank onto the bed, my head resting against the pillow, the glass perched on my chest, and the bottle sitting on the nightstand. My thoughts, now easing with alcohol, ascended into the absurd.

King popped into my head.

A fucking gorgeous , asshole King who had threatened to kill me too many times to count. He had me sleeping in a building that held hellhounds several floors below. Creatures capable of ripping everyone to shreds.

I finished the first half of the bottle and cared a little less.

An hour later, the bottle was mostly empty, and I was sipping at what was left in my glass, the alcohol fully in control. The room spun lazily, and I knew tomorrow morning was going to be hell.

A heavy knock at the door jolted me from my morbid thoughts about hellhounds tearing me apart.

“Come in,” I slurred, making no effort to move. I was too drunk to stand anyway.

The man himself entered, or should I say, the King. For a moment, I wondered if he was there to kill me. “Go ahead, do your worst,” I slurred with exaggerated bravado.

I wasn’t prepared for his smile. That damn, soft, inviting smile that transformed his harsh features into the surprisingly human side of him even if it was an illusion.

“If that almost-empty bottle is your doing,” he said. “I don’t need to kill you. I just need to wait you out. Ever hear of alcohol poisoning?” he asked with humor.

Yes, fucking humor. I lifted my glass in a mock toast and took another sip. It was good, too good. “You have no…” I hiccupped loudly, “idea how much liquor I drank in college. If that didn’t kill me, this bottle won’t either.” I gestured toward him with the glass, sloshing its contents slightly. “If you drink, join me.”

Instead of responding, he moved toward the bed and sat near my knees, swinging his full gaze to mine.

I studied his face, and for the first time, maybe, I found his eyes sexy. The damned eyes I wasn’t supposed to look into. Not the rest of him, though. He was just too big to be sexy.

A giggle escaped me. Back in the day, all I wanted was a man taller than me. Now I had one sitting on my big, lonely bed, and I was judging his height as a flaw. It was. And those muscles? A total turn-off. They were. Really. He was just too much.

“Why can you look into my eyes, but I can’t look into yours?” I asked, marveling at how the entire sentence actually came out the way I meant it to. Or at least I thought it did.

“Your eyes are bouncing from the alcohol, and it isn’t giving Beast trouble.” He lifted the mostly empty bottle, and for a second, I thought he was going to take a drink. Instead, he poured the remaining liquid into my glass, filling it to the brim. “Liquor does nothing for us, so please, enjoy it without me.”

“Ha,” I responded, taking a sip. My other hand slid over the bedspread, enjoying its smooth texture. “My eyes aren’t bouncing.”

“It’s called nystagmus,” he explained, watching me closely. “Your law enforcement used it for years to prove impairment.”

“Your law enforcement too,” I countered, though my spinning head was making it hard to focus. For some reason, the dizziness made King somehow prettier.

I giggled, and his brow furrowed slightly. “What do you find so entertaining?” he asked, keeping his slight grin.

“You’re pretty,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. My hand flew to my mouth, covering it in mortification. Did I really just say that?

He laughed, a deep, rich sound. “Pretty has never been a word used to describe this ugly mug.” He scratched his jaw, the rasp of his fingers over his five o’clock shadow filling the silence. The scar on his face caught the light, and I made a mental note to ask him about it someday, when I was sober enough to remember his answer.

“Okay, not pretty,” I conceded. “Just, I don’t know, interesting, maybe?”

“I find you interesting too,” he replied, more on the serious side now.

Oh boy. Were we going to have sex? Did I say that out loud? He didn’t react, so I guessed not.

“You’re good at giving compliments,” I said instead, flashing a wide grin.

His hand moved to my leg, fingers trailing lightly up the side of my calf. His focus sharpened, and he watched the movement as if captivated.

“Soft,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“Do you have a girlfriend or wife?” I asked, my words spilling out before I could think better of it. He had just touched me, and that could lead to other things. Knowing whether he was attached was definitely something I should find out.

His hand moved away, and his expression shifted to the arrogant mask I had become so accustomed to. “I’m King. I don’t have time for women,” he said.

I couldn’t help but laugh at his sheer egotistical grandeur. But as my laughter faded, other thoughts stirred. “Is King your title or your name?” I asked, unable to ignore the strange new awareness humming through me.

His voice was rough. “It’s both.”

“Why aren’t you naked?”

He blinked, clearly caught off guard. “Come again?”

“I was told Shadow Warriors preferred no clothing and ran naked through the night,” I slurred slightly. “Problem was, I haven’t seen a single one of you naked. Is your naked body classified information, something you’re hiding from the Federation?”

Another grin tugged at his lips, and he shook his head. “That’s an old wives’ tale. We were raised as humans, just like you. My mother would’ve whipped my butt if I ran around naked after about four.”

Even through the haze of alcohol, his explanation made sense. But it sparked another thought. Were the rumors about their, uh, size exaggerated too? My fingers tightened around the glass, and I drank the last of the rum, the liquid burned pleasantly as it slid down my throat.

Warmth pooled low in my belly, and my eyelids felt heavier by the second. My body was torn between two priorities: sleep and the heat simmering deep inside. “If you planned on hanky-panky, get started,” I murmured. “I don’t know how long I can stay conscious.”

His hand slid just a fraction higher on my leg, sending a pleasant shiver through me. But then he stopped, his tone amused. “Go to sleep. I don’t have hanky-panky with inebriated women.”

I cracked one eye open and caught the faintest glint of laughter in his expression, even though he wasn’t making a sound.

“Your loss,” I mumbled, my words trailing off as my eyes closed. Monsters and hellhounds were distant concerns now. Sleep claimed me, pulling me under before I could confirm whether the king of arrogance was still in the room.