Page 52 of Serpentine Valentine
There was a long enough pause that my stomach started to churn and rumble ominously with more than just sickness. This was the second time I’d put myself out there for Lex, and if she left me hanging again, I didn’t think I could give it a third chance.
“I can call someone else,” I muttered.
“No,” she snapped, and I wondered if she was angry with me. “No one else. Stay there. Get somewhere safe and lock the door. I’m coming.”
I stared at the phone screen after she hung up, but before I could digest what I’d done, bile rose to the back of my tongue.
I lurched up and stumbled over Flora’s purple shag carpet to the en suite bathroom with my hand over my mouth as if that would help. My knees hit the tile with a bang, and the pain ricocheted through my bones all the way up to my teeth. But I was desperate. The toxic combination of bile, booze, and remnants of butter chicken was already clogging my throat.
My sweaty fingers clutched at the toilet seat desperately as my entire body contracted around the mess in my stomach. I moaned between expulsions, too hot and too cold and aching all over as if I’d been steamrolled.
When I was done, I dropped my head right there on the toilet seat and passed out.
At some point, warm hands smoothed over my hair and gently gathered me into strong arms. The chest against my cheek was hard, and for a moment, I nuzzled closer, thinking it was Pierce.
But no, Pierce had left, and the cologne was all wrong, musky when it should have been salt-sweet like ocean brine.
I murmured a protest, but my tongue was thick and dry in my mouth, heavy and ineffectual. When I was placed back on Flo’s bed, I relaxed automatically and black edged in to the sides of my vision. Vaguely, I was aware of the bed compressing on the other side of me, someone rolling snug against my body and smoothing a hand down my stomach.
I was ten leagues under the sea, my own intoxication threatening to drown me in numbness, but beneath it all, there was a kernel of fear struggling to make itself known.
I must have passed out again because I was awakened by an almost feral, growling kind of scream.
When I opened my eyes, it was to see Lex in the doorframe, red lips peeled back over white teeth in a vicious snarl, hands fisted at her sides. There was a girl I didn’t recognize in the doorway behind her, and Haley,holding a glass of water sideways, liquid spilling out unnoticed.
They were all looking at me in horror.
No, not me.
Someone shifted beside me, sending a cool rush of air over my exposed torso. My oversized dress shirt was unbuttoned, the chunky belt undone.
Before I could register what that might mean, Lex was arrowing across the room on another ear-splitting howl. She hauled the person––a man––on the bed beside me off the mattress andthrewhim with more strength than she should have possessed into the wall beside the window. He landed so hard that a painting hanging next to him swung and fell to the floor, glass shattering over the hardwood.
And then, she brutalized him.
The flurry of her fists froze him in place, pinning him to the wall with each blow. Face, torso, knee to the groin so he doubled over, and Lex used that same leg to knee him again in the nose. Blood sprayed over the ground, over the man’s white shirt, and when he reared back against the wall in pain, over Lex’s snarling face.
No one stepped in to stop her.
Maybe they were too afraid, and I didn’t blame them. She looked…monstrous in her rage. Capable of murder or worse, if there was such a thing.
I had no doubt she would have killed him then, but thankfully, I found my voice just as she cocked her arm, elbow bent sharply, and crashed it down over his temple.
He went sliding down the wall to the floor, passed out.
And I said, “Alexandra.”
I’d always believed there was power in a name. Maybe it was fanciful, but in fae mythology, the ancient faeries didn’t give out their true names because they had the power to control them.
It seemed to work on Lex exactly like that. The sound of her name in my mouth lassoed her around the torso and physically jerked her away from the man a moment before she would have landed another punishing blow.
She whirled then, facing me for the first time since she’d started her attack.
It sobered me.
Blood peppered her face, staining her teeth still bared in an animal snarl, a growl working in her throat behind those sharp canines. Her hair was an untamed mass of black curls, the ends tangled over her heaving chest where a few buttons on her cream silk blouse had popped open from the strain of her fight.
She looked dangerous and entirely untameable, a wild thing trapped indoors crazed by claustrophobia.
