“Yep!” Pandora smiles. “He was quivering in his boots. Or not boots, since he was naked.”
River groans. “Pandora…” he begins, only to trail off and shake his head. “Never mind. Turnabout is fair play, right?”
I wonder how far she went with her revenge, if she shoved a bottle up his ass, but I don’t want to remind her of that night.
I haven’t forgotten that the bottle was Keegan’s idea, though.
He snitched on Pandora having started the fire, too.
“They’re going to escalate,” I say, clenching my fists. “Brock and Holden are going to go to Ezio, since they can’t fight their own battles.”
“So let them?” Pandora pulls her phone back. “What’s the big deal? We can handle them. And if Ezio attacks me, then it’s self-defense when I decapitate him.”
Decapitate, like she’d done to Zayden.
“No,” I growl. “No, it doesn’t work like that, Pandora.” I take herhand into mine. “Do you not understand that you aren’t invincible? That maybe, just maybe, we should take our time and focus on the important shit first?”
Pandora’s smile turns brittle, and she pulls her hand away. “This was important shit. They were being dicks to you, and how was I going to stop the drip in my ceiling if I didn’t do anything about it?”
The drip in her ceiling? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? I glance up, but I don’t see any drip anywhere.
“Pandora, if you went after everyone who was a dick to us, there’d be no one left. We’ve had this conversation,” River says. “You know that that ‘an eye for an eye’ thing is only going to fuck you over.”
Or in this case, potentially fuckusover.
“It’s going to fuck someone over, sure.” Pandora yawns loudly. “Okay, nap time now. I don’t think this bed is big enough for all three of us though.”
“You need to stop doing stupid shit!” I growl. “Petty revenge isn’t going to do anything for us.”
Pandora laughs. “That’s rich, coming from the guy who had a teenager beat up because he was being a big ol’ meanie to Asch.”
I flinch at the accusation, even though I don’t regret my actions.
I’m never going to regret standing up for Asch or Pandora.
River glances at me, but there’s no surprise in his expression. “Okay, but that was in the past,” he says. “And we’re not doing anything that stupid now. Pandora, he might go to the dean about this. Are you trying to get kicked out before we figure all of this out?”
“I mean, if I fail my pre-med classes, I’ll just have to learn biology the old fashioned way: with a lot of dissections."
My eyes widen and my jaw drops open.
Pandora laughs again. “Oh my god, Blaze. I’m joking.” She lifts her leg and drapes it over my thigh. “Clean me up too, would you?”
I sigh and reach for the tissues. “None of this is funny,” I say as I wipe her down.
“It isn’t,” Pandora agrees. She presses a kiss to River’s leg. “ButKeegan’s expression when I released the rats on him was pretty hilarious.”
“Onhim?” River repeats. He sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Fuck, Pandora. Are you trying to start a war with them now, too?”
“Keegan is nothing,” Pandora says.
“Heisnothing,” I agree. “Which is why you shouldn’t have done that. You don’t always need to get the last word.”
“Okay, fuck you. You’d have done it too if you were half as creative as I am,” Pandora counters.
The dumb thing is, she isn’t wrong.
I reach for her phone and click through the photos. There are pictures of Keegan crying, one where a rat is sniffing at his balls, another of a bloody nipple where a rat must have bitten him.
