Page 4 of Feral
“You don’t have to do anything to get on the bad side of someone who doesn’t have a good one,” he scoffed.
“So you know her,” Ella teased.
“Oh, yeah. She and Axel were a match made in heaven,” he snorted. “Or hell.”
Ella pursed her lips, trying not to laugh before she realized there was no point in holding back. Bishop was the only person she’d ever felt safe to be herself around, even if it hardly made any sense. He was even more out of her league than Axel.
After the conversation between Natalia and Emily the night before, there was one unsettling possibility that had occurred to her. What if Emily was right and the only reason he had any interest in her at all was because he wanted to maintain his close connection to power?
She shook the thought off immediately, feeling guilty for entertaining it at all. Bishop wasn’t that kind of person, and neither was his mother.
“Are you sure you still want to go out with me?” she asked, deciding to shift the subject away from Axel and Marissa, since they both had a way of bringing out the worst feelings in her--and she didn’t want to waste a second in Bishop’s company on either of them.
“Absolutely,” he answered without hesitation. “Why not?”
“Well, the whole ring thing…”
He gave her a lopsided grin that stopped her heart dead in its tracks. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping we could talk about that.”
Her eyes widened in disbelief as he stepped closer. The bleeding had finally stopped, and Ella had almost forgotten about her injury when Bishop licked his finger and wiped the remaining blood off her face. For a second, she’d thought he was going to kiss her again, but now she was even more embarrassed.
“Not here, though,” he added pointedly. “Meet me outside the dorms tonight at eight?”
“A-alright. Yeah,” she stammered in disbelief. No matter how enticing his words were, she knew she was doomed to spend the rest of the day agonizing over all the ways she could have misinterpreted them. She might have gained a spine where Axel and Marissa were concerned, but it seemed like her weakness for Bishop was destined to linger.
Chapter 3
Ella
After a long day of class, Ella finally returned to her room to get ready for her date with Bishop. It didn’t take long before she realized figuring out what to wear was the least of her worries.
Every single item of clothing she possessed was strewn across the bedroom floor, or at least whatever scraps they’d been torn into. She could hardly recognize anything as a full piece of clothing. It looked like a giant cat had shredded everything in a fit of rage.
Considering just how many giant cats she had made enemies of, she wouldn’t have been remotely surprised if that was the case.
As she stood in the middle of the destruction, she realized the tears she usually would have spilled by now weren’t coming. In their place was a fire rising up higher and hotter than her rage ever had.
Before she fully knew what she was doing, she turned and stalked out of the room, letting the door bounce off the stop on the wall. She felt like someone else was piloting her body as she made her way toward Marissa’s room, but she could no more stop it than she could stop a roaring tornado.
Without even bothering to knock, she flung the door open and found Marissa at her bathroom vanity, talking to her roommate. The other woman shot up from her seat on the edge of her bed and cried, “Hey! What the fuck is she doing in here?”
Marissa turned, her eyes narrowing venomously as she looked Ella’s way. “Did you not learn your lesson already?”
Ella stood with her fists clenched, trying to remind herself that decking the most popular girl in school was not the way to ingratiate herself to the colony. If it hadn’t been for what Natalia and Sterling would think, she wouldn’t have cared.
“You were in my room,” she accused, her voice much steadier than she’d expected, given the fact that she was still trembling in anger.
The twisted smirk on Marissa’s face made it obvious she wasn’t even going to bother to deny it. “Oh, that,” she said, planting a hand on her hip. “You should thank me. I’d say it’s a vast improvement on your wardrobe.”
“You’re going to pay for it,” Ella said, taking a step closer until she had Marissa blocked in the doorway. Or maybe she was the one who was trapped. Time would tell. “All of it.”
“Is that so?” Marissa sneered, shoving hard against Ella’s chest. “And what makes you think anyone has to do a single damn thing you say?”
The flame in Ella’s gut exploded into an inferno and she saw the other queen’s eyes widen in shock the second before she lunged.
“You crazy bitch!” Marissa shrieked as Ella pushed her back against the bathroom sink. She wasted no time retaliating, shifting enough to let her nails lengthen into claws as she slashed Ella across the face.
The three stripes across Ella’s left cheek weren’t deep enough to scar, but the pain fueled the feral rage growing inside her. It was the same thing that had happened with Axel, and she almost felt like something else entirely had possessed her. She just couldn’t bring herself to care.
