Page 24 of Savage Hate
I swallow at the feeling, and he turns his tattoo gun on. The buzzing sound has quickly become a comfortable second nature to me.
“I should pierce his mouth shut,” Jude remarks, arms crossed as he leans against his chair and watches Silas. My blood chills at his words.
Silas begins to ink Noah, and the flutters in my stomach grow stronger. My eyes glide over Silas’s bare arm, the muscles contracting with every stroke of the tattoo gun, the veins cording his golden skin, running down to his large hand. Swallowing, I clench my thighs together as my heart races in my chest.
I feel someone behind me, but I don’t turn around. “What are you thinking, princess?” Jude asks, his breath on my neck. He reaches around and moves my hair over one shoulder. I ignore the way my body trembles ever so slightly in his presence.
“About what you all think of me… how you’ve treated me until tonight,” I murmur, my eyes not leaving Silas and Noah. “What changed?”
“Seeing him,” Damon growls, baring his teeth in the direction of Noah’s unconscious body. “Remembering that night.”
That night.
I suppose I need to get a tattoo one day, too. What would mine say?
Bully.
The word flares through me and nearly knocks me over.
I was a bully. To them, to all three of them, and to some of the other students. I shake my head.
“Will he remember that he came in here tomorrow? How will you cover your tracks?”
Silas chuckles, a deep, low sound as the tattoo gun forms the ‘P’ on Noah’s forehead. He wipes the extra ink away and continues.
“When he wakes up, his forehead will be sore, but he won’t remember tonight at all. He was already drunk when he came in, and then we gave him the sedative… he’ll be lucky if he remembers his own name.”
“It’ll be an epic hangover,” Damon adds gruffly.
“Don’t you have cameras?” I ask, looking around.
Silas shakes his head. “Not tonight, we don’t.” He swipes the tissue across Noah’s forehead again and looks up at me. “There won’t be any evidence this ever happened. Aside from his new tattoo.”
I wrap my arms around myself, nauseous with the thought of tattooing one word on myself—one fatal flaw. Would they make me do it, eventually? Would they kidnap me and ink me against my will for what I did to them all those years ago? In a way, they were already getting revenge by having me do so many of the tedious chores. Was there more to come–something worse–in my future?
I rub my sweaty palms on my pants, and then I grab my purse from where it lays on the floor.
“I should go,” I say quickly, twisting around.
“Lennon,” Silas barks, and I still.
“Yeah?” I ask, not daring to turn around, not daring to confirm the pitying expressions on their faces. The anger, the thirst for revenge.
“See you tomorrow,” he says after a few seconds.
I wonder what he was about to say. If we were perhaps thinking the same thing.
I walk out the door and turn right, each step up to my apartment slow and heavy because of the alcohol, and the adrenaline that has now given way to utter exhaustion.
I barely make it to my bed before I collapse onto it and fall asleep instantly.
fifteen
Lennon
I wake up thirty minutes before I’m supposed to meet my mom at Café du Pont for lunch. It’s a new place, inspired by Parisienne brasseries, and it looks pretty fancy. It wouldn’t be Genevieve Rose without a fancy lunch, though, so I’m not surprised. I make a quick cup of coffee and take a few ibuprofens to numb the pounding headache behind my eyes. I shoot a response to Mindy, who had texted me that she’d gotten home in one piece, and then I throw on my most sophisticated dress—which just so happens to be the dress I wore to my engagement party.
Smoothing it down, I look at my reflection.
