Page 75 of Serpentine Valentine
It was the antithesis of how I operated, which maybe explained why I was so enthralled by her.
“Are you wet for me?” I asked, leaving the statue so I could replace its cool feel with Luna’s soft warmth.
Her pupils were blown, so dark in her face like black holes sucking me in. When I carefully wound her long hair around my fist, her lips parted as she started panting.
“Let me check,” I murmured, slipping my hand up the inside of her skirt, playing along the line of her thigh-high stockings, the same ones I rolled up her legs that morning, and then finally cupping her sex. The damp heat was obvious against my palm. “Such a dirty girl for me.”
“Can we leave now?” she asked, already begging, and I barely had my hand on her. “Please.”
“I thought we’d see the Ancient Egyptian exhibition too,” I demurred.
She rocked her hips into my hand right there in the middle of The Metropolitan Art Gallery. “Please, Lex.”
Triumph sluiced through me, washing away the remnants of clinging bitterness our argument about our futures had stirred in me. For a second, I let myself marvel at the magic of Luna Pallas, before I reminded myself what this thing between us had to be.
Revenge plan B.
And Luna Pallas was only a delightful cog in that wheel.
When all was said and done, she’d be lost to me, but somehow that made more sense than her absurdly wonderful idea of spending forever together.
I leftLuna napping in bed after I thoroughly fucked her and forced myself to go about my business instead of indulging in a lazy evening with her.
The moment I descended the stairs, I was glad I’d done so because Rhea and Dahlia were in my front parlor drinking tea with my sisters.
“What’s this?” I asked, immediately moving to Rhea, whom I’d been friends with before we’d been assaulted.
She opened her arm to me, her cheeks damp and lips trembling as she hugged me to her side. “Sorry to bother you, Lex.”
“You’re never a bother,” I promised, dropping into a crouch right in front of her instead of taking a chair at the table. Her hands were cold and too thin in my own. “What’s up?”
Tears swelled and broke in her lower lashes before cascading down her cheeks. “I know I said it would be enough, but it’s not. I thought… I mean it felt good––feelsgood––to know Jerrod was publicly humiliated and exposed as a rapist, even if the school didn’t do anything about it, but I still feel this…” She ripped her hand out of mine to curl it into a fist over her chest, mute with the weight of emotion on the back of her tongue.
“Chasm?” I filled in, feeling a phantom pain in my own brutalized chest.
She nodded, tears flinging off her jaw.
I looked over at Dahlia, one of the girls who had been assaulted and filmed by the Delta Alpha fraternity. “And you?”
“It’s the same,” she whispered brokenly.
Effie offered her hand across the tabletop, and Dahlia took it like a lifeline.
“I’m working on changing things around Acheron, but it takes time,” I admitted bitterly.
My sense of helplessness was kindling for my voracious rage. It ate at the feeling until my skin was ablaze.
“I know. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Rhea protested, taking my hands again, a little too tightly in her earnestness. “You’ve done so much for me. I don’t think I would have had the courage to do anything about Jerrod myself.”
“You focus on your healing, okay? I’ll worry about stopping Jerrod and his ilk.”
“It’s just, sitting on my hands doesn’t feel right either,” Dahlia interjected. “I have all this energy inside me, and without a place to go, it just beats up my insides.”
“We were thinking maybe we could help?” Rhea asked, and she was so pretty, I didn’t doubt she usually got her way.
Happily, I was so enchanted by Luna, it was easy enough to stick to my guns. “I don’t want you in any more danger, let alone punished for taking action against these guys. My sisters and I know what we’re doing.”
“How?” Dahlia had the balls to ask, looking at my sisters sitting mutely around the table, their bold personalities under wraps to give room for these two healing hearts.
