Page 163 of Cold-Blooded Creatures
“My muscles are cramping,” Eislyn complained. She put down the saw she had been using for the past twenty minutes and wiped the sweat beads glistening on her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of red behind.
“You’ve got blood on your face.” Eli indicated his own forehead as he took the saw. Grimacing at the uniform-cladlower part of the soldier, he began dividing the two legs into pieces.
Eislyn faked a gag and rubbed roughly at her skin with the hem of her sweater. “Ew.”
We both chuckled. She was dismembering a body with no aversion to the job, but a drop of scarlet triggered her.
“I know, I know. Tendons and organs are not exactly something that freaks me out, but he assaulted Kali, and I don’t want him on me.” She shuddered and put her chocolate hair in a high ponytail, blowing upward to get the bangs out of her eyes.
Chopping the legs into smaller parts at the joints, Eli asked, “How is Kali, by the way?”
I glowered at him. How did he think she was? Good?
“Why do you think I don’t even question this?” He followed Eislyn’s example and tied up his blond strands stained in crimson, similar to the gray t-shirt he wore, into a bun. “Eislyn caught me up with everything.”
“She’s sleeping,” I gritted out as I carved out the last letter of my message.
“That’s good,” Eislyn softly said. “She needs to rest. It’ll take time for her to process things.”
Fucking time. Like it had not already messed with everyone enough. The longer it ticked by, the more people succumbed to its grasp on their necks.
I placed the skull on the stool I had been sitting on and strode to the mortuary table. “I need one femur bone.”
Confusion laced Eislyn’s delicate features. “A femur?”
“I ran out of space.” I selected a bone extractor from my laid-out tools on the small steel table and made quick of my work. Taking a small brush, I dipped it in the blood trickling from the mortuary table and carefully painted the grooves in the skull and the thigh bone, so the letters stood out.
Scrubbing her hands raw with the dirty towel, Eislyn scrutinized my work. “You signed your name?”
“I want them to know who is sending the message.” I inserted the skull with the etched text, the femur with my name, and the soldier’s identification chip in a plastic bag and tied it up, so the message would remain intact after placing it into the cardboard box filled with the porridge of the dissected body. “Give this box to Ezra. He will deliver it to the Head of Ilasall.”
I had made a deal with Kali that the head of the Head of Ilasall would be hers, that she could take the final blow. I always held my end of an agreement, but the city’s leader did not know that. He had dared to send a messenger with Kali as a message, so I was sending his puppet back with a message of my own engraved into his bones.
Your skull is next
Gedeon
Late morning lightframed Zion’s toned back as he hovered in front of the window, shirtless, the curve of his ass accentuated by a pair of tight black underwear.
My core contracted. He was poisonous. Like that yellow oleander Kali had planned to use. Give in to the allure and it would devour you from the inside out, consuming you until your pulse surpassed dangerous levels and you lost your mind.
I craved it.
Him.
“Is she still asleep?” I murmured to not disturb Kali as I lowered onto the edge of the mattress. Her eyelashes fluttered from a restless dream, the fluffy duvet hiding half of her face as she slept curled up in a ball. Exhaustion had lured her away from us.
Zion surveyed her tucked tightly between the sheets. “She keeps repeating that she’s not a message and wakes up mumbling about Alora every hour or so.”
I swallowed the bubbling pool of emotions, the trickle burning the back of my throat, and breathed out the rage threatening to shatter my teeth. Snapping and lashing out were not what she needed. She had been deprived of safety, of trust, of affection, and I would give anything to have the ability to offer her at least one of those things.
Any tenderness residing in me had been uprooted twelve years ago. Since then, my skills consisted of sentencing sinners, executing opposition, and ruling over my subjects.
And scarring those close to me.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Zion crawled onto the bed and leaned against the headboard. “I can’t wait any longer. Ilasall had it coming for years. Enough is enough.”
A heavy sigh slipped out of me. “We can’t do anything right now. Those months of their security updates disrupted our supply chains. You know that. Winter is starting and we barely have enough in storage to feed everyone as it is. We do not have enough. Of anything. We are godsdamnbehind. I will not put everyone’s lives in danger for a slim chance that we might win. It’s not worth it. We have to survive first.”
