Page 3 of Pretty Pink Poison
Help wasnevercalled when there was blood on the floor unless it was our own.
“Jesus. This is the problem with a syndicate and Black allegiance. You’ll kill us all without ever blinking an eye.”
I winced at her accurate observation, stepped over Vincent, and quickly made my way toward the headmaster’s office. “I’ll get help right away.”
As I turned the corner, I heard his steps approaching me quickly and just as I was about to call for faculty to get a nurse or, well, maybe we actually did need an ambulance, Bane’s hand wrapped around my neck, crushing my windpipe as he slammed me into the wall so he could stare me down. “You think I’m going to let you save your boyfriend?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. He was cutting off my voice but also the oxygen I could breathe in. My eyes bulged at his forceful hand holding me there, controlling whether I lived or died, controlling my breath.
Something had changed in his eyes today. They were a wild, dangerous blue now. Full of chaos that wasn’t tethered anymore.
He growled in my ear before his other hand whipped out to open the locker room door beside us, and then he dragged me in.
No one saw or followed.
I’d known Bane all my life, and he’d never put his hands on me like this. He’d lurked behind his brothers most times we were all together and let everyone else take center stage.
Yet, I knew something was different the second I saw him walking up to me today. He’d been absent for months now after everyone claimed that he’d finally lost it. I’d seen him on campus all the time before but when he wasn’t with his brothers months ago, I finally asked Rafe what had happened. “His tendencies got the best of him. He snapped and mother and father had him sent off.”
Snappingmeant he’d waited until one of the older students who’d rearranged his dorm was alone in the practice gym. He didn’t just confront him. He cornered Barry, moved the weights around in an almost ritualistic way, forcing him to be trapped in. Then, with surgical precision, he slammed a dumbbell across his knee, shattering it, and followed that up with striking his other one, leaving him incapacitated.
It wasn’t really snapping. That would have been a disorganized mess of torture. That wouldn’t have been Bane. Bane was perfectly measured, calculated, and in control. His “tics” were still there, almost beautifully so. This didn’t actually seem like too much of a breakdown to me. Instead, he’d just used what people thought was a weakness as a strength and a weapon.
I knew how particular he was, and quite frankly, it’d been their own faults for preying on what they thought was someone’s instability. In my mind, Barry had paid the price.
Nothing else.
After Rafe told me that, I asked Angela if she’d heard any more about it, and she’d quietly handed me whatever video she’d been able to smuggle onto her phone. I saw a grainy Bane standing over Barry for a moment, breathing controlled, eyes scanning the room to make sure nothing was out of place, nowitnesses. Then he turned and walked away as if nothing had happened. No apology, no hesitation.
The idea of remorse didn’t exist in his vocabulary.
So I didn’t expect him to feel bad about Vinny now either.
Ihad to though. I shoved at him in the locker room, but he didn’t budge as he slammed me into the towering set of double stacked lockers. “What are you doing?”
He lifted a brow. “I told you. I’m not letting you save him, Bianca. He isn’t worth saving anyway.”
“You’ve been gone for weeks and now you want to hold me hostage right when you get back?” I glared at him.
He hummed and the vibration rattled through my bones before he asked, “You miss me then?”
“No,” I spit out too quickly. The truth was that I had, too much. Ezra, Bane, and Rafe were friends even if Bane kept to himself most of the time. “You didn’t call or text or answer when I reached out. So, maybe I forgot you existed.”
“Right… you forgot and yet you can barely catch your breath when I touch you.” And then he leaned in. He got close to me in a way he never ever did. He let me feel his heat and his breath and the brush of his lips on my ear as he said, “Just how wet are you?”
“What?” I gasped. Bane and I didn’t discuss our attraction toward one another. It’d been going on for years, but it wasn’t something we ever talked about. “You… you can’t ask me that.”
“I just did.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I wondered where he’d been this past month. What had changed? How had he changed so much?
“I’m promised to your brother, Bane.” I looked away from him now, ashamed that I had to say it.
“Exactly. Maybe I need to protect him from you.” He and I both knew that wasn’t what he was doing. “Maybe I want toknow if you’re being faithful, or are you getting soaked for little Vinny out there?”
I lifted my chin, a defiance suddenly building within me. If he was going to goad me, I was going to goad him back. “Or maybe you know it’s not him that I get wet for, Bane.”
His piercing blue eyes darkened, his grip tightened. It was like he needed me to tell him otherwise when we both knew the truth. I’d longed for him for years. I didn’t care if this was how I was going to admit it. “Don’t say things you’ll regret by tempting a guy you can’t control, Bianca.”
“You think I control everyone else?”
