Page 22 of Snake

It’s a notification for a video that came through on the polo message group.

The file name is MULE_FUCKER_MILLER

It’s grainy because of the bad lighting, but from the angle it’s easy to see that it’s Silas leaning against one of the library stacks. He has a book in one hand, his dick in the other. There’s a glossy photo of a racehorse visible on the page.

“She was there,” Silas whispers urgently, his head still in his hands. “It wasn’t just me. She told me to read that—” He cuts off with a frustrated growl. “I’m going to kill her.”

My skin goes cold. “Silas, relax. It’s just a prank.” I reach for him, but he’s up on his feet so fast I hear his knees knock the rim of the table. He flinches, moving too fast, his long legs tangling under him as he tries to climb out of the bench.

“Fuck!” His yell sounds like it echoes.

“Stop giving them what they want.”

The mindless horde wants to feast on his humiliation. His shame. They want to see him embarrassed and angry. They’ve been waiting for this for years. It’s the price you pay when you become an untouchable. When someone finally lands a strike past your defenses, it shakes your whole fucking world.

A guy at the table right next to ours whinnies like a horse, throwing Silas a shit-eating grin.

Silas lunges at the senior, grabbing him around the throat with one hand, yanking his phone free with the other. He dashes it to the floor, the sound of its screen smashing loud in the sudden hush filling the cafeteria.

Mason grabs Silas’s wrist, tearing him off the senior, Silas’s fingernails leaving angry red trenches in the senior’s neck.If Mason hadn’t moved so fast, we’d be cleaning brains up off the floor.

“Enough,” Mason puffs out urgently, pushing Silas away from the senior, away from the other students. That whole table is on their feet, the guys squaring off, ready for a fight.

We don’t need this.

I slide out from behind the bench, grabbing Silas behind the neck. “Let’s go.”

He resists us for all of a second, then lets us push him down the aisle toward the exit. We’d have made it too, the only damage those marks on the senior’s neck and some emotional scarring.

But then Eliza motherfucking Jackson pops up from her seat like a demon-possessed prairie dog. “Did your daddy like horse dicks too, Miner? Is that where you learned all about the studs and the mares?”

Mason and I are trying to force Silas out of the cafeteria, but he digs in his heels, his nostrils flaring as he glares at Eliza. “The fuck did you just say to me, cunt?”

“Dude, let it go,” Mason says. Everyone ignores him, their attention on Eliza as she casually steps out from behind her bench. Five seniors and her two girlfriends come up behind her. Her own little army. The only reason why she has enough fucking backbone to try to target us.That and her name. If word gets out about this, the Jacksons could take down any family except the Harts and the Wrens.

Eliza blinks innocently at Silas. “You know, my uncle owns a stud farm. If you want one of his studs to cover you, I could get you a fantastic rate.”

Despite what I said before, I’d have been happier if Silas had called her a cunt again or tried to punch her. I can feel how he’s trembling, how rigid his entire body has become.But Silas doesn’t do any of those things. He does something I’ve never witnessed before, and it chills me deep into my fucking marrow.

Without a word, still locking eyes with Eliza, Silas turns his head and spits.

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