Page 62 of The Vipers and Their Venom

“Leave me alone, Zane,” she whispers. “I mean it. All of you.”

Then she goes back to running her finger down the list of names. What is she looking for? Is this to do with Reagan? Lex and Saint told me about the folder, but we still haven’t had the chance to ask her why she took Reagan’s file. I’m not sure we want to open that can of worms. When our name is associated with Reagan’s, things tend not to look good for us. What happened had almost ended our time here at Verona Falls. I guess we have Nathaniele to thank for smoothing things over with the family, but he only did that to save Verona Falls’ reputation. It wasn’t to help us.

But now Vani is here, clearly poking into things again, and it leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer…Is that what she’s thinking, too? Has she heard something, and that’s why she’s letting us get away with messing with her?

Her dark head is still bent over the list.

Is Vani looking for Reagan’s name? She won’t find it here.

“Hey, venomous one,” Saint says as he approaches us. “Your hair is giving extra Medusa vibes today. Nice outfit, too.”

She ignores him, continuing to read the names and then standing straight. “Huh?” she says, more to herself than us.

“You can see your panties through your shorts,” Saint taunts. “Don’t you own a thong?”

A few of the guys standing around snicker. I smirk, too, but I’m still thinking about how she’s definitely looking into Reagan, and I want to know why.

“I am all out of thongs,” Venom says clearly, looking right at Saint. “Can I borrow one of yours? After all, your clothes have more frills than mine.”

Then she sends him a fake, simpering smile and sashays over to her new friends, an extra sway in her lush hips and ass. Well, damn, Venom has sass. Her ass is spectacular in those shorts, and Saint’s right, you can see her panty outline. I kind of like it.

The race begins, Lex joining us at the last minute. The gun is fired, and off we go.

I can outrun any of these motherfuckers in a sprint. My muscle mass gives me that burst of strength needed for speed. I’m not as good at endurance events, so I pace myself. Anyway, I’m enjoying hanging back and running behind Venom so I can watch her ass jiggle. My mouth is watering at the show she’s giving me.

“Like the view?” Lex chuckles as he pulls up alongside me.

It’s nice,I sign.

“Come on, you pussy-ass motherfuckers. At this rate, the Devils will beat us, and if our time sucks, the Preachers will win overall like last fucking year.” Saint speeds by us, shooting us daggers.

The Preachers aren’t in our house, but they are our rivals, the way the Devils are. They are different from the Devils though inevery way. They don’t go to the bar, and they don’t fuck with the girls. They are weird and quiet and isolated, and yet they often excel at nearly all the competitions. The fights. The races. They even won the aptitude tests at the start of last year. I don’t give a fuck, but it eats Saint up if he isn’t the best at everything.

That guy needs to chill sometimes.

Lex speeds up at his twin’s words, but I hang back and let them run ahead. Screw this. It’s kind of hot for the time of year, and I still haven’t returned to anything like full fitness after my latest surgery.

After about ten minutes, I round a corner and my heart stutters. There are the three bitches, as I think of them. Angelica, Jarena, and Faith, but where is Venom?

Did anyone tell her not to get separated from the girls on this run? She’s new and might not know all the unspoken rules of this place. The faculty might officially be in charge, but they don’t make the rules. It’s as if the building itself does.

I glance back at Verona Falls through the trees, standing guard, as permanent as time itself. This place has a culture all its own, and there are traditions that will never be written down but might as well be carved in stone.

One of them is that girls should never become isolated on the cross-country run.

The tradition is based on a Verona Falls urban legend that I’ve often thought about. I wonder now how true it is.

The legend goes back in the 1920s. At the time, the college accepted men only, but they decided to accept a small group of women. They were from some of the less traditional clans and families, and they came here to get an education but also, so the tale goes, to find husbands.

They were from lesser families, the story says. Not like today, when some of the women, like Camile, come from the most feared families of all. We have screwed with Camile a bit just tofuck with her, but even we wouldn’t do anything more because her father would burn down the college if he heard a whisper of anything inappropriate. He’s a fucking madman.

So, back in the day, six women joined the college, all without the protection that would have been afforded them if they’d been from the families at the top of our world’s hierarchy.

Things went okay, as they were basically kept sheltered, until the cross-country run. The story goes that the day of the run, the women somehow got separated, and a run turned into a very different kind of sporting event.A hunt.

The women were chased down one by one and deflowered, and the college was mired in scandal. The legend we all whisper to one another says that the men who took part were all beaten so badly they couldn’t walk for weeks. Then they each had to marry one of the women. The college was males only again until after the Second World War.

---