Page 89 of Serpentine Valentine

“She fucking deserves it! She’s a goddamnbitch.”

“Yeah,” Pierce agreed. “But so are you and you don’t see me beating you up, do you?”

“Fuck you,” he spat, and through my watery, unfocused gaze, I saw another figure moving toward me. “I’ll do it myself, you pussy.”

Pussy.

Like having one was weak.

When pussies delivered babies. When women dealt with pain every single month that wracked their wombs and their minds with dark, sharp hurts. When the clitoris had four times the nerve endings than the head of a cock.

Pussy, I thought, and that old anger, subdued by the shame of what I’d done to Luna, flexed and uncoiled, hissing in my belly. I imagined the snakes tattooed on my skin writhing into wakefulness, ready to spring.

I cupped my hands over my face as if couldn’t get up, as if I was as weak as this fucking asshole thought all women were.

When he got close enough, steps heavy and fast with momentum, I reared up like the strike of a cobra, darting inside his reach, using the entire weight of my body springing up from the ground to land an uppercut to the underside of his square chin.

Pain burst through my knuckles at the massive impact of the hit, but it transmuted to fierce, vibrating triumph a moment later as I watched the big bully sway on his feet. His eyes were unfocused, mouth slack and dumb. I pushed into his chest with a single finger and grinned when he fell straight back, landing on the grass beside the path with a heavy thud.

Pierce and his two other buddies stared at me with slack-jawed shock.

One instinctively moved forward, probably to defend his now-out-cold buddy.

But before he could, there was a loudwhoopof noise.

And then another.

And another.

Coming from the shadows between buildings, from behind trees.

A moment later, dark shapes appeared, running down the path toward us on either side.

I rocked to my toes, hands loose fists at my sides, prepared foranything.

What a shock it was to realizeIwasn’t the one under attack.

Black-clad bodies of women materialized in the low light as they surged around the men. A flash of fishnet-covered thigh. A swish of a leather skirt. The gleam of a metal baseball bat as it descended and hovered threateningly by the head of Pierce Argent.

They were dressed like the Man Eaters, but I would have recognized my sisters anywhere, even in black ski masks and war paint.

These weren’t them.

“Are you okay?” one of them asked me, staring at me through uneven holes cut in the fabric of a balaclava.

The others waited, in position to attack, but restrained like attack dogs at the end of their chained leashes.

I nodded, a little dumbstruck. “I’m fine.”

My voice was threadbare from the strangling, but it seemed to be enough to pacify their leader. She stalked up to Pierce, clearly reading that he was in charge, and got in his face, made tall enough to do so by the heeled shit kickers on her feet.

“I expected more of Pierce Argent,” she hissed. “Keep your dogs on a leash and let the rest of your buddies know we’re patrolling campus now. It won’t be so easy to catch someone unaware and vulnerable anymore.”

Pierce swallowed thickly and dragged a hand through his hair so it stuck up like a little boy’s. He looked young and weary, a kid past his bedtime.

“I’m sorry,” he said to me reluctantly, eyes flashing to me and then to the ground. “The guys riled me up, and I was already pissed off with you, but that’s no excuse. I shouldn’t have put a hand on you.”

I lifted my chin in the air and stared at him for a moment before I conceded, “I understand your anger. What I did to Luna wasn’t right, and neither was what you did to me. I think we can call it even.”