Chapter 4 Valentina #3
My vision edges white for a second, but the pain sharpens everything. I smile, slow and sharp, the expression stretching the cut on my lip. Johnson sees it through his watery, blood-blurred eyes and hesitates. That’s all I need.
I slam my palm into his chest, driving him back until his spine hits the table.
Plates rattle. Coffee sloshes. I grab the front of his cut with one hand, his wrist with the other, and use my leverage and his bulk against him, twisting and pulling.
He topples sideways, crashing onto his back on the floor, air whooshing out of his lungs.
I drop with him, a knee landing hard across his bicep to pin his arm.
The other hand wrenches his captured wrist up and back.
His howl this time is high and choked.
“Stop!” someone barks from down the table, but nobody moves. They’re too enthralled. Or too afraid of getting between a councilman and the girl he just tried to humiliate.
“You really thought,” I murmur, pitching my voice low enough that the whole room has to lean in mentally to catch it, “that you could throw eggs at me and keep talking?”
He bucks under me, trying to dislodge my knee from his arm.
I push my weight down harder until I feel the strain in his shoulder, the tremor where tendon protests.
My free hand slams into his already-broken nose again, driving the bone back and sideways.
Blood spurts, hot and slick, across my knuckles.
He screams, chest arching, eyes rolling.
“Asher,” Cassandra whispers somewhere behind me. There’s a note of panic in her voice. “She broke his nose. She’s going to break his arm.”
“She warned him,” Asher replies, tone perfectly calm.
Johnson claws weakly at my thigh with his free hand. I catch that wrist too, grip like iron, and slam it down by his head. He’s not small, but pain levels the field. His breath wheezes in and out, wet and ragged.
“You want my seat?” I ask him, tone almost conversational
He tries to spit at me. It comes out as a spray of red that misses my face and hits my collarbone. My smile dies.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I say.
Then I shift my weight and jerk his arm just enough. Ligaments scream. A pop cracks loud enough to make a few onlookers flinch back. Johnson’s scream tears through the room, higher than any sound a man his size should make. His arm goes limp in my grip.
“Valentina,” Asher says again, this time with a thread of warning.
I look up at him without letting go. “Relax. If I wanted him dead, I would have snapped his neck two minutes ago.”
We hold eye contact for a moment. There’s a sliver of… not approval, exactly, but recognition in his gaze. He nods once.
I release Johnson’s wrists and stand. Blood streaks my hands, my shirt, the side of my neck. Egg and yolk and red mingle in tacky swirls. The councilman cradles his ruined arm against his chest, sobbing silent curses through his broken nose. Two men rush forward to drag him away from my boots.
I step back into the center of the space, breathing steady, and turn in a slow circle to address the room.
“Let’s clear the air right now,” I say, voice carrying easily now. “ If anyone else thinks they can do better as president of this club, now’s your moment. Challenge me. Right here. Right now. Or forever shut the fuck up. ”
The room holds still.
No one moves. Not the prospects. Not the full-patch members. Not the council. Not even the ones who hate me enough that their hands curl around their forks like they wish they were knives.
The only sound is the faint hiss of eggs on the warmer and the drip of Johnson’s blood on the floor.
“Thought so,” I say softly.
When I turn back toward the head of the table, I catch Asher watching me.
His expression has barely shifted, but there’s a subtle change at the corner of his mouth—a tiny, reluctant curve that almost, almost qualifies as a smile.
It’s gone the second I notice it, but the fact that it was there at all does something strange to my chest.
“Are we done with the theatrics?” I ask him.
“For now,” he answers.
I walk back to the chair and sit. This time, no one says a word.
A plate appears in front of me that I didn’t ask for—scrambled eggs, bacon, toast. Isaiah slinks closer and drops into the chair at my right, eyes bright with manic pride, dried ink smudged on his knuckles.
He looks like he wants to climb onto the table and declare me queen of hell.
“Marry me,” he whispers.
“Eat your food,” I mutter back.
Across from me, Asher picks up his fork with all the calm of a man who didn’t just watch me rearrange council hierarchy with my bare hands.
For a while, the only sounds in the room are cutlery scraping plates, low conversation starting to trickle back in, the quiet, grudging acknowledgement that—for today at least—the girl in Xavier’s chair has earned the right to sit there.
I lift a forkful of eggs to my mouth. They’re lukewarm, a little rubbery from sitting too long on the warmer, and taste like victory and bile all at once.