Beautiful Venom: A Dark Hockey Romance (Vipers Book 1)

After what I went through, I should’ve buried my face under the covers and hid there the rest of the night.

And I tried that.

Thankfully, when I got back at one in the morning, Megan wasn’t home yet. It’s not unusual for her to spend the night with her friends or just stay out partying.

I had a shower in which I scrubbed my skin until it turned red, then slipped under the duvet on my stomach because my ass burns with every move. Whenever I close my eyes, images of my parents’ accident and the rough, merciless sex invade my head.

Shame and disgust prickle my skin with renewed intensity, so I jump back into the shower. Under the scalding hot water, I rub my skin with enough force that new bruises join the existing sex bruises.

How the hell did I come by being used like that? By that demon?

Am I sick?

Part of me wants to hate it to its core, consider it assault even if I agreed to it. That part, probably some form of defense mechanism, whispers that I wasn’t given a choice. That I only did it because I couldn’t say no.

But I could have.

Kane gave me every chance to say that godforsaken ‘red,’ but I refused.

My head hurts long after I leave the shower wrapped in a towel.

I lie on my stomach on the bed and grab my phone that was returned to me on my way out of that damned building.

Instagram is open. Specifically, my last DM exchange with Kane, when I expected him to meet me by the entrance. And even though I didn’t think he’d help me, I also didn’t think he’d use me in that sense.

Though it’s useless to feel wronged or attempt to feel victimized. Not when I was offered a way out countless times but still went with it anyway.

I click on his profile and narrow my eyes at the caption.

Vipers’ Center & Captain.

More like a two-faced devil.

I studied Kane’s Instagram page like an essay during my stalking stage, but now, I look at it through a different lens. It’s hockey-themed and full of shots from games and practice as well as pictures with teammates, the coach, some professors, and fans.

There are others at fundraising events with the university’s top brass and the Vipers’ donors. The big names in town. His family, the Callahans, the Armstrongs, and the Osborns.

But those are few and far between, as if he doesn’t want his background to be the main focus.

He looks perfectly cordial in all of them. No signs that suggest he’s faking it or building an image.

His smiles give off a genuine, charming vibe, like he’d be great fun to talk to.

It isn’t until now that I realize those smiles never reach his icy eyes. Not really.

They look beautiful because of the color, but that doesn’t mean they smile with the rest of his face.

Maybe it’s because I already met the other side of him, but the veil has been lifted and I realize that the random, sometimes uncoordinated pictures are just a game he plays so well.

Like the perfect disguise he hides behind.

And now that my fate is tied to his in Vencor, I need to figure him out. Somehow.

I need to get closer.

Any way possible.

I go back to our conversations.

Me

Better test for that STD I gave you tonight

What? That should get his attention.noveldrama

I guess my only consolation about the whole fucking raw part is that Kane and his teammates tested negative on their latest medical tests. I know because I accessed their reports behind my professor’s back.

My heart jumps when his reply comes immediately.

Kane

Very funny.

I wasn’t joking.

You must be, because your cunt felt like it hadn’t swallowed a dick in a long time. Almost like a virgin.

My cheeks heat, but I double down.

And you fuck a lot of virgins?

No. Not a fan.

Thank God. No virgin should suffer your vicious way of having sex.

Was it also suffering when you squirted all over my dick?

I rub my thighs together but type the entire opposite.

Uh-huh. Worst sex of my life.

Doubt it. You were swallowing my cock so deep. Almost as if you couldn’t get enough.

No, I wasn’t. Anyway, I’m just telling you. Chlamydia is nasty.

I’ll take your word for it.

You’ll suffer like a motherfucker.

Go to sleep, Dahlia.

I try to think of other insults, but I’m too agitated, so I throw the phone on the bed.

The necklace shines under the light and I grab the silver talon between my fingers, staring at the hideous serpentine chain.

Doesn’t matter. The discomfort and shame will fade away. The most important thing is that I’m in.

Sooner or later, I’ll be able to identify Vi’s attacker.

Violet.

The urge to see her beats beneath my skin like a ticking time bomb.

I change into jeans and a T-shirt, then throw on a sweater before I head out of the dorm. I ride my bike to town.

Graystone General Hospital is huge and renowned for having large departments that benefit from the founding families’ extensive funding.

It’s also the prime beneficiary of Graystone Hope Foundation, which finances countless expensive surgeries throughout the year. It’s the foundation that offered me the scholarship at GU and is paying for Violet’s medical expenses and her stay in the hospital.

Forty-five days ago, my sister was driven by a black van with a fake plate to the hospital in Stantonville, where we used to live. A man whose face was entirely hidden dropped her on a gurney and sped away in the van before he could be identified. My sister was unconscious and had a wound at the back of her head and multiple less serious injuries all over her body. They transferred her to Graystone General Hospital because it’s bigger and has a trauma center.

Since then, she’s been in a coma for a month and a half. I’ve seen the bills she’s incurred during her stay. Bills I wouldn’t be able to afford even if I sold myself for parts on the black market.

So I’m thankful beyond words to the foundation. I don’t even mind taking pictures with them and accepting charity money. I don’t care if it’s the rich people’s way to avoid taxes. At least they’re paying for the tube that’s literally keeping my only lifeline breathing.

I lost my parents, but I’ll never lose Vi. Not even if I have to offer my soul to the Devil.

I take the elevator to the fifth floor, where they keep comatose patients.

I greet the night shift nurses. They’ve seen me practically daily since Vi was admitted. The head nurse, Mrs. Hales, a plump blond with rosy cheeks, smiles at me and then frowns.

“Dahlia, honey. You look pale. Have you forgotten to eat again?”

“I’m fine. How’s Violet?”

“Worry about yourself first.” She rummages through the desk and then produces a protein bar. “Eat this before you faint.”

“Thanks.” I accept the bar sheepishly because she’s right. I’ve been surviving on the tuna sandwich I had for lunch yesterday.

Violet shares a room with a young man who has dark olive skin and thick eyebrows. His name is Mario, and he had an accident shortly after Violet was attacked. They were both in the ICU for a bit, and now, they still share a space because the hospital couldn’t move either of them to single rooms due to a lack of capacity.

I don’t mind since they have a curtain separating them, so their privacy is respected when the nurses tend to them.

Mario, however, doesn’t get any visitors. At least, I haven’t seen anyone come to visit him for the duration of the time I’ve been here. Though I do find baskets of fruit on the table beside his bed sometimes, and Mrs. Hales often tells me to eat them since they’ll rot and be thrown out.

Since Mario must feel lonely, I talk to him sometimes as well, mostly about the day’s news or random anecdotes. I don’t want to imagine what Vi would feel like if I stopped visiting her.

Putting on my most cheerful smile, I push the door open. “Vi! I’m so excited to have full-range access to the lab as an upperclassman⁠—”

My words halt at the view of a tall shadow standing by Violet’s bed. He’s smothered by the dark, and a hoodie covers his head and face.

I barely get a glimpse of him and scream.

He sprints to the window, forces it open, and jumps out.

I dash toward Violet as footsteps rush in from the hallway.

Thankfully, she’s still sleeping peacefully, and the machine by the side of her bed beeps in a slightly high but mostly regular rhythm. I still grab her pale hand and check her pulse just in case.

“What’s going on?” A nurse peeks in, her cheeks red.

“Someone…was in this room.” I motion at the window. “They jumped out the window.”

“Impossible. They’d die from this height.”

“It’s true.”

The nurse looks at me as if I’m out of my mind, then goes over and looks outside. “There’s nothing.”

“I know what I saw. Please check the security footage.”

Her frown deepens as she slams the window shut and walks out.

My heart thumps loudly even as I feel my sister’s steady beat beneath my fingers.

I throw a glance at Mario and release a breath when I find he’s also peacefully sleeping.

Just to be sure, I leave Vi’s side and peer out the window. All I see are cars speeding down the road below.

But I couldn’t have been mistaken.

Someone was here and if I hadn’t come in time, who knows what they would’ve done to Vi.

My blood turns cold.

Wait.

It couldn’t have been whoever hurt her coming to finish what he started, right?

I rush back to my sister’s side.

She’d look like an angel while sleeping if it weren’t for her sickly white skin that’s paler than the sheets. Her hair, which used to be a shiny strawberry blond, is now dull and lifeless as it frames her petite face.

Violet has always been a beauty whom everyone stopped and stared at. Flirted with. Tried to take advantage of.

Her now closed eyes are actually a deep denim blue, her facial features are petite and perfectly harmonized. She even has a dusting of freckles on her nose.

She often dressed like a hobo, never putting on makeup and even wearing thick-framed nonprescription glasses so as not to be noticed. I can’t say that helped, because she often suffered malicious male gazes.

The thought that one of them could’ve done something to her just now forms a knot in my heart.

Ever since I became an adult, I’ve made it my mission to protect her just like she protected me when we were young. For some reason, men are not as attracted to me as they are to her. I mean, I get looks, but they’re not like the ones she gets. As if she’s blood and they’re vampires who want to suck her dry. As soon as they see me, and usually, some of my pepper spray, Tasers, or the landlord’s guns that I clean as a side gig, they fuck off.

But I couldn’t protect her this time.

This time, one of them got to her first.

I hug her, my head pressing against her chest as tears blur my eyes. “You said you’d never leave me alone, Vi. You…promised.”

The words constrict my throat and I tremble all over. Like the day she ushered me out of bed and helped me put my shoes on. She was also shaking as we hid by the corner. She was thirteen. I was twelve.

“Do you trust me?” Violet once asked me in the darkness of the room where we shared a bunk bed.

I nodded.

Living in the system since I was six, I learned not to trust anyone, but Violet is different. Some kids hate it when they have a foster sibling. They despise having less food to go around and sleeping in bunk beds.

They can get malicious and even violent.

Not Violet.

Ever since I arrived at this house in the New Jersey suburbs a year ago, she’s shared her food and her hiding nook in the closet.

When I got here, Violet had been with Martha and Gerald, our foster parents, who only use the system for extra income, for six months.

Violet has often said we need to get out of here.

One night, Martha called her a whore who was trying to seduce her husband. I called Martha a bitch and her husband a creep because he was the one looking at Violet while licking his lips when she was wearing plain cotton pajamas. Vi never dresses in a revealing way. Like never.

She’s been growing breasts and hips and getting curvier over the past year, and that creep Gerald can’t take his sleazy eyes off of her.

Another day, Martha beat me up for talking back until she busted my lip open. Violet apologized on my behalf, promising I wouldn’t do it again.

Vi apologizes a lot. She also stands with her head bowed, listening to Martha calling her an ugly whore just like her slut of a mother and telling her she should be thankful that they took her in or she would’ve died on the side of the road like her drug addict mama.

Violet always swallows the knife with its blood and buries her wounds deep. She never complains or causes trouble and prefers to suffer in silence. It wasn’t until recently that I found out Gerald touches her inappropriately, letting his hands wander and linger where they shouldn’t.

To avoid conflict, she chooses to remain silent instead of speaking up, but she always speaks up when it comes to me. She always tries to rectify the situation and shield me under her wings.

She always says I need to be careful with my spicy mouth, but I’m nowhere near as patient as she is and get easily wound up. I’d rather be beaten up and spend nights without any food and thrown in the attic than let Martha and Gerald get away with their shit.

Which is why Martha beat me the hell up earlier tonight. I clawed at her face, and when Gerald pretended to break up the fight, I kicked him in the nuts.

He punched me so hard, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I found myself locked in the attic.

It’s a dark, airless box, and the only light is the white streetlamp’s shadow slipping through a narrow, dust-coated window high on the wall. The wooden beams above are splintered and warped, cobwebs clinging to them like silent witnesses to the hours I’ve spent here.

The stale smell of mildew and trapped heat sticks to my skin as I pull my knees to my chest and rest my head on them. I stare at the light dusting of snow falling and landing on the windowsill.

Right. It’s going to be Christmas soon. I hate the holiday season.

Ever since my parents died and I became an orphan, it feels like a needle stabbing an old wound, undoing the stitches and making me remember what I lost.

The floorboards creak under a hesitant step. I perk up as a key jiggles in the lock and then the door opens.

Violet.

She always steals the keys when they’re asleep and brings me a sandwich. Usually, she’ll hug me and tell me to stop rebelling so I won’t get hurt again.

This time is different.

She’s dressed in leggings and a coat, with a duffle bag slung over her shoulder. But that’s not what makes me jump up and run to her.

It’s the black bruise around her left eye. Big, ugly, and so swollen, she can barely open it.

“Vi, what happened? That looks bad.”

She strokes my face. “You have a blue bruise, too.”

“I’m gonna kill them.”

She smiles and it’s the widest, most genuine smile I’ve ever seen on her face. “Want to get out of here, Dahl? Just you and me?”

It’s been some time since we both wanted to get the hell out. Tonight is as good as any.

I nod, inspecting her face.

The bruise looks worse up close, and there’s a small cut on her lower lip. “Who did this? It was that asshole Gerald, wasn’t it?”

“Forget it. I’m fine.” She caresses my cheek, and I wince at the sting of pain. “Your face looks worse, by the way.”

We both burst out laughing and we have to cover each other’s mouths so as not to be discovered.

As we sneak out of that horrible place where yet another couple is using the foster care system to act like God to helpless children, we’re still laughing.

Hysterically.

For both Violet and me, this is the first time in a long time, maybe ever, that we finally feel free.

Alive.

Like we can do whatever we want without creepy foster parents breathing down our necks, using us as a venting outlet for their unremarkable lives.

We stop by a bridge to catch our breaths.

The snow trickles down, covering our shoulders and shoes. But I still spin around under the lamppost and scream into the silent night, “We’re free!”

Violet grabs my shoulders, looking as if she has a halo under the dim light and the falling snow. “Dahlia?”

“Yeah?”

“From now on, we’re each other’s only family.”

“You’ll never leave me alone?”

She hugs me and whispers the word that gives me new hope, “Never.”

Sitting up, I stare at Violet’s face and hold her hand between my trembling ones. “You said we were each other’s only family. How could you leave me? Why didn’t you tell me about the man who was threatening to kill you instead of writing about it in your journal?”

Actually, I might have an idea as to why.

Violet has been soft-spoken and sort of a people pleaser ever since I met her. She never raises her voice and finds it hard to say no to anyone who’s in authority or who yells at her. However, she’s always been a mama bear when it comes to me, quickly transforming into a vicious protective girl if anyone hurts me or says anything negative about me.

I don’t doubt that she wanted to protect me from the man whose identity she probably uncovered. She’d rather die than have me implicated.

The joke’s on her because I’d do the same.

She gave up a lot for me, and it’s my turn to pay her back.

Vi used to say kids like us were always meant to be at the bottom of the food chain, a fringe of the system, a cog in the machine. Our lives, suffering, and trauma don’t matter.

No one cares.

But that’s where she’s wrong.

She matters more to me than the entire world.

I want to tell her that I’m close. That I’ve infiltrated the organization where that scum is. I’ll find him, and, mark my words, I’ll make him pay even if it’s the last thing I do.

But I don’t.

In fact, I’ve never spoken to her about my plans so as not to agitate her. I only share good news and tell her I miss her.

The nurse from earlier pushes the door open, the frown still etched on her face.

“Did you find anything on the footage?” I ask, my blood pumping.

“That’s the thing. The cameras in the hallway and elevator have somehow been disabled.”