Page 9 of The Vipers and Their Vendetta

His thumbs fly across the screen, his neck bent as he sends a text.

“What happens now?” I ask. “Are you going to stitch my arm?”

The thought makes me woozy all over again. It’s not that I want him to. I’d prefer we go to the hospital and let a professional take a look at it—and at the rest of me while they’re at it. But I want to know what he’s planning.

He doesn’t glance up at me. “Yes, but first, we wait.”

“For what?”

“You’ll see.”

“I thought you said this cut was serious?” I glower at him.

Anger builds within me. It’s slowly replacing the grogginess and the fear.

I’m so sick of the men at this college thinking they can pull this shit with the women all the time.

“This won’t take long,” he says.

Sure enough, only a moment after he speaks, the door to the water tower slams open and a second man enters the room.

The moment I see him, the fear returns tenfold. He’s wearing a long, dark, leather coat and ripped black jeans, with big, heavy boots. His hair shines like ravens’ wings in the low light of the room. It’s his mask that grabs my attention, though. He’s wearing a blank mask with just eyes, and nothing else, except for those dark hollows, and it’s oddly terrifying.

“Did you bring it?” the guy with the long hair asks.

The new arrival rummages in his coat pocket and pulls out a knife. It’s not like a switchblade or a kitchen knife—this thing is ornate and looks extremely old. I gasp and scramble back on the bed, as far away as I can from these complete lunatics. Are they intending to gut me?

Jesus. The thought of being left, dead and destroyed on the wooden floor of this shitty water tower, my innards spilling out like some discarded fish on a dock, makes me sick.

The new arrival slips his coat off and throws it over the back of the chair before stalking across the room toward us. He’s dressed entirely in black—the long-sleeved t-shirt clinging to his muscles.

He stares down at me, and I feel his gaze burning into me through the holes in the mask covering his face.

“She’s a pretty thing,” he says.

His tone has me cowering, curling into myself to try to hide from him.

“That’s not what this is about, Malachi,” the first one snaps.

Malachi. I commit his name to my memory.

“It could be,” Malachi argues.

“No, it can’t. Stop screwing around. We need to do this fast because she’s bleeding. I don’t want her to get an infection.”

“Always with the good heart and the healing,” Malachi says. “It’s a good job you’ve got me and Cain to balance out your soft side.”

The guy who took me sighs, the way a parent would at an errant child. It’s a mix of impatience and fondness, but it shows he’s in charge here.

“Listen, we’ve been wanting to screw with the Vipers forever. This is our chance. We’ve seen them with her, and we’ve heard the rumors, and now, she’s confirmed it to me … this girl means something to them. And now we have her, we can use her to make bad things happen for them.”

So, they aren’t going to rape me, but they might simply kill me. For what? To upset the Vipers? Great, that’s so much better. I regret now telling him I was theirs. I regret ever opening my damn mouth at all, but I go ahead and do it again just because I am so pissed right now.

“If you murder me, Zane will rip your heads clean from your bodies.” I stare at Malachi because although he’s terrifying, he seems slightly less insane than my kidnapper. He certainly seems more of this world than the other guy. He might be a sicko who wants to get sexual with me, but he’s not speaking in riddles and sounding as if he came back in a time capsule.

“Wow, Roman, she thinks we’re going to kill her.” Malachi starts laughing, and he laughs so much he ends up folded over. One arm around his stomach, he finally straightens as he shakes his head at me. “If he was going to kill you, he wouldn’t have brought you all the way through the woods to do it. Why waste the energy? He’d have just gutted you right there and then on the forest floor, like a pig.” He leans in close, and through the mask, voice distorted by it, he says. “Would you have squealed like a pig for him, Ivani?”

His words chill me to the bone, and he knows my name, too. It means these men have the advantage of knowing way more about me than I do them. Have they killed people before? If they won’t make me a sacrifice, what do they intend to do?

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