The Demon They Once Feared. {BOOK 2}

|25|Falling Into Place.

The sound of the slap seemed to echo through the forest, the silence so thick it was suffocating.

"You knew," the Uchiha spoke, his voice void of any emotion. Acting like it didn't hurt, and considering the pain he just went through, it didn't. Though he didn't know why Mina decided to hold back.

And the Uzumaki breathed in, releasing a sigh. She gathered her emotions and shoved them under the rug.

"So what'cha gonna do now?" she beamed the question, taking a couple of steps back, clasping her hands behind her and swaying on her heels.

"What do you mean?" the squeaky voice of the other girl standing there questioned, standing in a defensive position. Face morphed into a mixture of curiosity, anger and no doubt jealousy. "Sasuke's obviously becoming a leader," Mina's eyebrows shot up in surprise.

"Oh Sasuke~" she sang, a grin playing at her lips as she turned back to face the dark-haired teen, ignoring the comments coming from the white-haired boy, "is wittle baby swaske being petty and needy?" she teased doing an almost forgotten baby voice.

Sasuke's eye twitched hearing her tone, thoughts flashing back to a time at the academy. Mina had always been the odd one out, and he expected her to be the same as the other girls, a fangirl, but the moment she started teasing him for everything he did, his tolerance of her was cut very short. He could stand the girls, sometimes going out of his way to impress them (it pleased his ego hearing them praise him) oh boy, did it infuriate him. Knowing that she was the sister of the blond dork, and in good terms with his family, made it even worse. How could his own family take better care of some dead-mans daughter than their own son? How could she get the affection of Itachi better than his own brother? He felt the hole in his heart increase just a little at that thought. But the unreasonable feeling was misinterpreted, she wouldn't understand. No one could. His own brother had massacred his whole family, clan, without batting an eye.

But the glint in her violet eyes said otherwise, and it angered him.
Mina was talking, but her words were nothing. Rambling about nothing, "ya know, you should've looked into it before, ya know, you kill-" and Mina was flying across the pathway in the forest.

The pain erupting in her abdominal, almost didn't hurt, but the choked breath she released said something else, "wha- hey! That hurt, ya know!" she complained, standing up and trying to rub the pain away.

She noticed how everyone was on guard, ready to attack. So sighing and raising her hands in mock surrender, "look," she started, taking a pause to look then all in the eye. The red eyes of the redhead and the large man, purple eyes of the other guy, and the bloody red eyes of Sasuke, the three black dots of his Sharingan staring right back at her. "I don't want to fight," she said gaining a scoff from the girl.

"Yeah, you just want to steal Sasuke from me!" the girl said, voice rising as she spoke. Mina gave her a pointed look, raising both eyebrows in slight surprise. "Not that you could--I mean, look at you!" She gestured to Mina with an exaggerated scan of Mina short height. "How could a rouge-" she pointed at the scratched headband Mina was wearing, "get this amazing man-" she pointed at Sasuke, who was staring at the scene with a blank face, and the others seeming annoyed by her. "Scum like you will never amount to anything. Even your brother-"

The girl choked on her words, suddenly finding it hard to breathe, the pressure of the calloused small hands on the throat increasing by the second.

Mina was fuming, feeling he blood boil, the steam already seeping out of her pores even if the girl was taller, the Uzumaki managed to push her to the tree and increase the hold she had on the redhead's throat.

"Listen here," Mina said in a dangerously low and calm voice, though the air thickened with a deadly and suffocating pressure. Sasuke raised his eyebrows, feeling the pressure but not doing anything about it, after all, Karen had gotten herself in this mess. He crossed his arms, noticing the other two male tense but did nothing about it, he did nothing about the cold sweat that dripped down his forehead or the weaver in his heart. "Say another word about my family and you won't get one with your precious Uchiha," Mina whispered in her ear, though the deadly undertone didn't go unnoticed.