Page 9 of Serpentine Valentine
Nails ripped across his cheek, gouging long tracks, flesh lodged under my green-painted talons. He started to fight back, trying to find leverage where he was caught between his desk, my body, and the wall at his back, but nothing at that moment could have stopped me short of death.
The girl screamed and screamed behind me, but not as loudly as I’d screamed last night.
By the time someone dragged me off him, Professor McDreamy’s famous pretty face was streaked with blood and swollen where I’d bruised him. He cursed me with a tongue too thick in his mouth, broken by his teeth and my fists.
I couldn’t hear anything but the roar of blood in my ears urging me to take more. There was something frantically certain in me that if I lost my anger and gave way to sadness, I might very honestly die and never be reborn.
“Alexandra Gorgon.”
The sound of my name spoken by such a familiar voice loosened the teeth of my fury enough that I could turn my head to see the doorway filled with bodies, in the forefront President Mina Pallas.
I almost didn’t recognize her. Not because of the fog of my own colossal ire, but because of her own.
She was livid. Face contorted grotesquely with disgusted rage, her slim body suddenly huge and looming with aggression all aimed at…
At me.
I blinked, disorientated suddenly. Weak and woozy.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” she demanded,storming forward to take me by the chin like a hook through the gullet of a fish. My head was wrenched back and up, pain exploding behind my eyes.
Something like a whimper leaked through my throat.
“Mina,” someone murmured behind me, the person holding my arms behind my back to restrain me. “Wait, a moment. She’s clearly been attacked.”
She didn’t listen.
“What do you think you’re doing attacking a teacher? Attacking ProfessorMorgan?” She said it like I’d committed blasphemy. Like she was seconds away from excommunicating me from the only church I’d ever known.
“H-He attacked me,” I found the strength to cough up the words that sat like rocks in my gut. “Last night, he drugged me a-and he raped me.”
The wordrapeechoed in the silence that followed. I wondered if it would always be stuck in my head, a song on repeat I wanted desperately to ignore.
“I did no such thing,” Morgan snapped, standing and shaking off the tending arm of a woman I recognized as a first-year anatomy professor. “I was with Monique Fournier all night, wasn’t I, darling?”
The anatomy professor blinked behind her cat-eye glasses and then nodded slowly. “Yes, of course.”
“Of course.” The girl seated across from him when I entered broke free of the crowd and sneered at me. “You’re pathetic for accusing him of something so horrible.”
“Now wait,” the woman holding me argued, loosening her hold on me to step to my side. I realized it was the Dean of Law, Professor Diana Strong. “Whether or not it was Morgan, this girl has clearly been assaulted. Someone call the damn campus and local police. Getan ambulance here.”
I swayed on my feet now that she wasn’t holding me up, but she leaned into me, offering the support of her shoulder. She smelled of pine needles. When I turned my head to vomit violently, she held back my hair while ordering someone else to fetch her the garbage can.
“Really, Mina,” Morgan was saying, holding out his hands, palms up as if in surrender. “You’ve known me for twenty years. Would I really do something so awful? Not to be crass, but I hardly need to force myself on some young girl.”
I choked on bile, the only thing left in my stomach as I wretched again into the pail.
Someone at the door was ushering everyone out and closing it in their faces.
Suddenly, the idea of being in a closed room with Morgan was too much.
“I need to get out of here,” I murmured, trying to pull away from Professor Strong.
“Not yet,” she hissed, just for me. “Wait, I’ve got you.”
I trembled so strongly in her hold that she had to hold me aloft, but I stayed still. I didn’t have the autonomy then to disobey the orders of the only person who seemed to believe me.
“We’ll need to take Professor Fournier’s statement for the police, Dylan,” President Pallas said, dragging a hand over her face in exhaustion before turning a glare my way. “Though, of course I believe you. What happened, Lex? Did he decide not to give you the assistantship, and you lashed out?”
