Page 16 of Serpentine Valentine
She sobbed, big rolling cries that wracked her whole body. When she lifted her head to drag the overlong sleeve of her sweater over one flushed cheek, I was struck by how pretty she was with tears on her face and sorrow crumpling her brow.
Suddenly, she was human. Fallible. Not quite so untouchable as her popularity and status as President Pallas’s daughter made her seem.
And that was when I knew.
Men had been attracted to me since I’d grown breasts at eleven years old, but I’d never cared. Instead, I’d buried my head in the sand like an infant, content to believe that because I felt no attraction to them, the sentiment was returned.
I’d been born to love women, and they were all that intrigued me.
Yet I’d never tried to turn that charm that seemed to ensnare men in their direction. Before everything, I’d been too young, too blindly focused on my studies like any true academic. Now, now the idea had merit.
Not only because it might help the disgust I felt with my own body for unintentionally making itself an object of desire to men. But because I refused to allow what happened to rob me of the experiences I deserved. The smile of a future lover across the room filled with promise. The touch of a feminine hand cradling my breast, soft and coaxing. The taste of a woman’s lips, how silken they might feel, how sweet the taste.
I would not live the rest of my life confined in the cage Morgan’s actions had forced me into, bars between myself and freedom of sexuality, freedom of choice.
I’d take it back just as I’d take everything away from him and from Mina Pallas for disbelieving me and stripping away everything I loved.
And therein lay the true reason for my flash of brilliance watching a girl spin and sob in an empty midnight library.
Luna Pallas was the perfect tool to humiliate her mother.
All I had to do was seduce, corrupt, and destroy.
It was almost too easy.
The moment her startled green eyes locked on mine, I could sense it. Her interest. It burst like static electricity between us. When I moved my hand through the air, bringing my pen to my mouth, the currents tickled my skin and gave me goose bumps.
She couldn’t stop watching me through class.
I wasn’t even nice to her, but then, I understood women. We were disgusted by blatant cruelty, maybe, but gentle derision and a special kind of conceited pride intrigued us.
In five minutes of sitting in History of the Tragedies, I’d hooked Luna Pallas through the mouth like a fish. All I needed was to reel her in.
“She’s pretty,” Grace noted as she bent to polish her toenails black.
I leaned over to tug my copy of Edith Hamilton’sMythologyout from under her foot before returning to my essay notes.
“Who?”
“Revenge plan B.”
I rolled my eyes, but Juno was the one to say, “The whole point of code names is to be discreet, Gracie.”
Grace looked around my large attic bedroom and scoffed. “It’s just the four of us. I don’t think anyone is listening through the walls.”
“I don’t know,” Juno muttered, side-eyeing the portrait of Virginia Woolf I had hung up on the wall by the door. “She always looks like she’s watching me.”
“This is a revenge story, not a ghost story,” Gracie said, tossing a box of tea at her sister. “You’re so easily spooked.”
Juno raised her brows as she paused in her task. She was wrapping barbed wire with gloved hands around the barrel of a wooden baseball bat.
“By ghosts,” Grace corrected. “Not men.”
“Damn straight.”
“I’m terrified of men,” Effie announced, even though we all knew this. She was the first of us to feel terror under the male gaze. She’d been abducted by her biological father when she was just a kid, before I even came into the picture. She didn’t talk about the incident much, but there were scars on her thighs all of us pretended not to notice. “That’s why it feels so good to hurt them.”
A cruel smile bit into my cheeks. “I find anger and all its accompanying sins are the best kind of medicine.”
