I almost gave in and let her come at me, but then I remembered where the fuck I was. They didn’t want me helping Penny. That kind of thing wasn’t encouraged here, and if anything, they’d use Penny against me and make me hurt her some time if I didn’t behave.
I couldn’t risk them seeing my weakness, knowing that I would let myself take their abuse in order to save my friend.
So I said, “Yeah, sure. Come do it, let’s end this.”
And I dropped my hands and my shoulders, giving the impression that I was done. Defeated.
Green eyes smiled, her lips stretching over perfect teeth. But the wider her smiled got, I realized she was missing two of them. One upper on the left side and one lower on the right side. She hadn’t been lying about that, at least. This wasn’t her first fight by a long shot.
She was hesitant as she approached, but grew cockier as she got closer and I forced myself to seem beaten down. Smaller.
Just as she pulled her hand back to cold cock me, I took advantage of her wide open side, and slammed my fist into her ribs, just under her breast. She let out a forced grunt of air and dropped her arm.
I used her own weight against her and tackled her like a football player. I didn’t watch many games because it wasn’t my thing, but I did love watching my Kings practice, so I knew the basics. And I understood the physics of being able to pivot her weight and use my force to knock her backwards to the ground.
Her arms flailed like windmills as she fell and one of her hands reached out to grab a fistful of my hair. She caught a few strands, but I stayed upright as she hit the ground.
She did have a fistful, though, and I felt a burning sensation on my scalp where she’d torn off a chunk of my hair. This enraged me more, more than the all over aches and pains I was dealing with from the other girls. This lit a fire under the tinder pile of my aggression, and I dropped to my knees to destroy her.
I slammed fist after fist into her face as she screamed and tried to defend herself. I straddled her and kept her pinned in place as I released my fury onto her.
At the end, she wasn’t fighting back, and I wasn’t stopping.
A part of me worried that I’d gone too far, but I kept going harder.
Until Penny screamed my name.
I jerked my head around to find out what was happening with her and I saw she needed my help.
I jumped up off the green-eyed girl and ran to my friend’s side. I glanced at Ryker along the way, and he was in the middle of a pile of boys fighting and beating each other, not just him. There were too many to count, and they all seemed frenzied by the violence, as if they forgot who they were supposed to be attacking in the first place.
I reached Penny and pulled the girls off her, throwing them to the ground with force as they kept fighting. They didn’t even realize what was happening at first because they were so caught up in Penny as their target.
I finally drew some of the heat away from my friend and got them all focused on me.
“Come on, you fucking cows!” I screamed and yanked on a girl’s braid hard enough I thought it was going to separate from her skull. “Come at me, you stupid whores!”
They lost interest in Penny when I showed up, and soon enough I was fighting for my life again. It became another blur of rage, pain, hands, fists, feet, and screaming girls as we attacked each other. I didn’t even know who I was hitting at one point. I was just addicted to the sensation of connecting with something solid, another person.
I was losing steam when we got down to the last two girls. Thackeray had approached us and was watching eagerly from a few feet away, his eyes glittering with excitement.
“This is more than I expected of you, Everly Hayes,” he told me, and a slimy grin stretched up the sides of his mouth. He lost years from his face as his glee shone though, the proverbial kid in a candy store. “I knew you had it in you, but nothing like this. Oh god, not like this at all. Kill them, come on, get them.”
Maybe the green-eyed girl was right, maybe he was getting off on this. The thought disgusted me and I shivered with revulsion at the mere thought of him having a dick, let alone getting horny over girls fighting for their lives.
“Fuck you,” I snarled and spat red spittle onto the dirt. “You’re a fucking monster, we don’t owe you shit.”
“I’m not the monster,” he said with a chuckle as he shook his head. “Iworkfor the monsters. Never forget that. And how they treat you depends on how you treat me, so watch yourself.”
“Do you want me to finish this?” one of the girls beside me asked. She stood with a straight back and held her breath expectantly. She was almost quivering in anticipation at his command. She could have been any girl in any one of my high school classes back home. She was a mousy brunette with enormous dark eyes and full, sensual lips on her oval face. She wasn’t tall, but she was muscular, much more so than me. She was gorgeous, of course, like they all are, but she also simmered with a fire that made me uncomfortable.
I wasn’t used to being around people who wanted something so badly.
“No,” Thackeray said and motioned to the remaining two girls to back away. I narrowed my eyes at him and he laughed again, that arrogant, smug, grating laugh that always set my teeth on edge and forced me to suppress a shudder of disgust. “She’s been shown around, and that was the point of today’s endeavor. Tomorrow will bring new opportunities to challenge her and the other new one.”
The mousy brunette exhaled in frustration and turned to her companion, a blonde, and said, “You’re lucky. If it came down to you and me, I would fucking destroy you.”
“Fuck you,” the blonde snapped, but she and I both know it was true. I recognized something in her eyes, a desperate darkness that called to the dark inside of me. A need to fight, to ruin, and to win, no matter how savage the stakes became.