“Do we have to keep playing these games?” Sara asks me, losing a bit of her practiced patience. “You sent a text with the words mare’s nest just about the time the shooting started. Why? What does it mean? Is it a code word?”
“I have the right to remain silent, don’t I?” I ask, looking back at her. “I mean, I’m not under arrest right now. Really, I didn’t do anything wrong. Every man I killed today had it coming. You don’t come into my school and start guerrilla warfare with my crew.”
Sara says nothing as I open the door and climb out. It occurs to me that if Prescott High—a very public place that was actively being watched by cops—is a target for the GMP then Aaron’s house is no longer safe.
We’re going to have to move.
Shit.
“Would you mind walking me in?” I ask, raising a brow as I lean down and stare at her across the interior of the maroon-colored Subaru she’s driving. No way in hell this is her real car. It’s gotta be a rental. “I’d rather not get ganked by a member of the GMP.”
I shut the door before she can respond, but I’m not surprised when she follows me. As I glance over my shoulder, I see Detective Constantine in a car just down the block. He’s watching us which is unsurprising.
Everything I do from now on is going to be carefully observed and recorded.
I move up the walk and unlock the front door, bringing Sara with me. I’m sure if she doesn’t have a search warrant for this place yet, she’ll get one soon enough. Her eyes are brimming with curiosity as the door swings open, and I turn on the lamp near the sofa.
“Not quite the gangbanging shithole you expected, huh?” I ask, turning around and watching as she takes in the simple living room, the dining table with a spray of fresh flowers in the vase, the Christmas tree in the corner we have yet to take down.
“It’s a nice house,” Sara says, waiting near the front door until Detective Constantine and both uniformed officers join her. They begin a sweep of the house, starting with the downstairs. The weed is in a locked cabinet in the converted garage area, and the whole back corner of the house reeks of it. But it is technically legal in Oregon, even if it’s still illegal federally. What a joke, making a medicinal plant a schedule one narcotic. But I’m too stressed out about my boys to go on one of my usual political rants.
I go for the stairs next, ignoring Sara when she calls out for me to wait.
When I get halfway up, I can hear it: the shower’s running.
I sprint up the last few steps as fast as I can, taking advantage of the broken lock on the door to fling it open. It smashes into the wall and I see Victor Channing under a stream of hot water, one hand on the wall, his eyes closed. He glances up at me, his dark gaze slicing through me like a knife. I want to bleed for him. I want to belong to him. More than anything, I want to be his queen.
“Bernadette,” he breathes, looking past me to where Sara is now standing. I glance back at her and see her face flush as she curses and turns away. Heh. Guess even hardened FBI agents are red-blooded women underneath it all. Vic might be eighteen, but he’s a man in every way that matters.
“Would you mind putting some clothes on?” Sara asks after she turns her back on us. What trust she has, to turn her back on the queen and king of Havoc.
“I’d rather not, thanks,” Vic says, giving me a smirking half-smile. That’s a good sign, right? If he’s smiling like that? The other boys must be okay. They just have to be, right? Because my story is incomplete without them. Then again, I know better than anyone that real life makes zero narrative sense.
Not everything can be tied up in a beautiful bow.
Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes really bad things happen.
“Are you the only one here?” Sara asks as Vic grudgingly pulls the shower curtain closed.
“Just me,” he says which reignites some of that awful sinking feeling inside of me. It’s like … all those butterflies that broke from their cocoons and took off in flight because of the boys, they’re dying. Fragile wings are broken. The beautiful dust of their scales flaking off and stolen away by the wind.
“Do you know the whereabouts of Callum Park?”
Sara’s next question gives me pause.
“What do you mean by that?” I ask, alarm pitching my voice an octave higher than it should be. My dark avenger, my broken fairy-tale prince with a crown made of bones. Why the fuck is she asking about him specifically?
“He was at school today, was he not?” Sara asks, turning back around to look at me. “He’s the only one of your … crew, is it? Anyway, he’s the only one we haven’t been able to locate.”
I just stare back at her.
“Meaning you have the rest of my family in custody?” Vic asks, pushing the curtain back and grabbing the towel off the rack. He throws it around his hips and then pauses behind me, resting his forearm on the doorjamb above my head. I can feel him in the same way one might feel an inferno. There’s scalding heat at my back, threatening to burn but oh so pleasant on a cold winter night. My throat gets tight, my mouth goes dry, and I can’t stop the flood of desperate longing that takes over my core.
“Meaning we have the rest of your boys accounted for,” Sara says carefully, and my heart sinks. Her words are no reassurance at all. Accounted for could easily mean dead. I choke a little on the idea. “I’m guessing you don’t know where Callum is either?” I will never forget the expression on that woman’s face. She looks … sad. Not in the same way that I’d be if Callum were gone—that, that would be like a black hole opening up inside of me, a tear so dramatic and violent that entire galaxies could be spirited away. She looks like someone who hates to deliver bad news but is exceedingly good at it.
The FBI doesn’t know where Cal is.
“Can you please leave?” I ask. “I’d like to be alone with my husband.”
“Husband …” Sara begins, exhaling sharply. There’s something in the way she’s looking at me that tells me she knows about the annulment. I don’t care. It’s not official by any means. We’ve only filled out the paperwork to start the process; there’s still a decree of annulment. There’s still a court date.
I’m not going through with any of it.
Victor wanted to keep me safe. I understand that. Shit, I’d have done the same thing for him.
Circumstances have changed.
That, and I feel like I’ve finally grown a pair of ovaries.
“I’ll be in touch,” Sara says finally, heading down the stairs as I turn away. Victor and I ignore her, too intent on one another to pay much attention. My heart thunders in my chest and my nostrils flare with Vic’s scent. His breath hitches, as if he can sense that I’m scenting him. Preparing myself. He shifts that big body of his, steam rising from his inked flesh.
I glance briefly toward the stairs as Sara pauses in the living room to speak with Constantine. Then, finally, they both leave. The sound of the front door closing is as ominous as the careful, shuttered clasp of a casket lid ending the legacy of a life.
I turn back to Vic.
Our eyes meet.
My hands find his towel.
The fabric falls to the floor as he lifts me up and parks me on the bathroom counter. His lips are a hot slash of menace, as they always are, but there’s something softer underneath, something that speaks to me as both a primal, sexual being and a spiritual entity. I feel him on every level. He’s a beautiful masculine specimen, the perfect complement to my femininity. He’s also my soul mate in every way that matters.
Victor growls as he claws at my borrowed sweatpants, wrenching the seam down the center of the crotch, like he can’t even be bothered to take them off. I’m not wearing panties—mine were covered in blood and thanks but no thanks on wearing borrowed underwear from police girl.
“Fuck, you taste like blood,” Vic says, but not like it’s a bad thing. His mouth moves from my lips to my neck, so he can bite down at the same time that he thrusts, owning me, claiming me, just the way
I need in this moment. We need to reconnect, readjust, reevaluate. Connecting our bodies this way brings up a firestorm that burns away the confusion and the fear, the frustration and the worry.
We will find Callum.
We will win this city.
We will not let them win.
My arms twine around Victor’s neck as he drives into me, hands cupping my ass, hips driving forward until he hits the end of me, and I cry out. He smells like that fancy peach soap from France that I jacked out of the glitzy Oak Park boutique, and his skin is vibrant and hot from the spray of the shower. I dig my nails into his muscles, absorbing his strength through my fingertips, stealing his essence like a dark witch with a pointed hat, a cottage in the woods, and nails tipped with poison.
Vic comes when I tell him to, whispering horrible things in his ear that cause him to shudder and grip me like he’s falling. This time, it’s my turn to catch him. And I do. And I’m okay with that.
I do not see Kali’s ghost.
I don’t think I ever will again.
No, I know that I won’t.
Because I’m done letting other people get in my head. I’m done consenting to the act of feeling inferior.
Fuck all of that.
I am queen of Havoc, and we are just getting started.
“Do you think the GMP took Cal with them when they left?” I ask Victor, sitting at a stool in the kitchen in the dark and waiting for the other boys to come back. It’s just after six in the evening, and they’re still not here.
Our crew—what’s left of it anyway—is crawling the city, sticking to shadows but keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the cops and the GMP.
Vic puts his palms on the counter and looks at me across the surface of it. Every once in a while, there’s a knock at one of the doors and a crew member waiting. Victor speaks to them in low, hushed tones, and then returns back to the counter.
So far, no further activity from the GMP.
They’d have to be stupid to come here right now, with all of those fucking cops outside. Not that a gang like the GMP cares about the police, but with the VGTF involved, that means FBI. That means media coverage.
In a day and age where corruption runs so rampant that it taints every aspect of daily life, attention is the true nightmare of the underground. Shine a light on something and see the people rise.
I take a bite of a burnt pancake, frowning at the taste of ash on my tongue. Victor is not nearly as good in the kitchen as Hael or Aaron. Shit, he’s almost as bad as I am.
“Tastes like shit, huh?” he asks, sighing as he flicks the stack of black pancakes with an inked finger. Clearly, he’s avoiding answering my question. Vic grabs the pack of cigarettes from the counter and lights one up, holding it between his lips as he watches me with a guarded look in his dark eyes. It’s like, as open as we were with each other upstairs, we’ve both buttoned-down and closed ourselves off.
This, this is a waiting game.
We need to see if the other boys come back from the station, and then we need to find Callum—before the feds do. Or the GMP. That is, if they don’t have him already.
“If the GMP took Callum,” I begin, watching as Vic pulls his borrowed phone close (this one’s from a member of our crew) and taps an app for a food delivery service. It reminds me of the night we spent together after he gave me a much-needed pep talk in that infamous closet of his. We’re so similar, me and Vic. I kept pretending like I don’t understand him and his motivations, but in reality, it’s just because I was too stubborn—or too afraid—to understand myself. “Then we’d know, right? I mean, they’d try to contact us somehow to hold that over our heads?”
Vic gives me a long, steady look that scares the shit out of me. And the reason it does that is because if I were to give somebody else that look, I’d be saying one thing and one thing only: I’m sorry.
I grit my teeth.
“It’s what you suggested before, when Aaron—”
“It’s what I thought happened to Aaron when Ophelia was just a conniving bitch with the Charter Crew as her pets. But the GMP …” Victor trails off and closes his eyes for a moment, swiping his hand over his face.
I just sit there and stare at him, and then I grab a cigarette from the same pack and gesture at him for a light. He flicks the flame on the lighter as he stares back at me, the orange glow highlighting the masculine lines of his face. Everything about Victor Channing screams primal, male, terrifying.
I keep my eyes on his until the cherry of my cigarette crackles with heat.
“I ordered pizza,” Vic tells me, and I can feel his eyes on me even when I look away.
We both pause at the sound of a key in a lock and exchange looks. If someone is here, and none of our crew bothered to inform us that someone was on the way …
That can mean only one thing: Havoc.
But which letter? Which motherfucking letter?
I stand up from the stool, heart pumping so furiously that if I were to nick my carotid the way we did Danny’s … this entire room would be bathed in blood.
The front door opens, and Oscar slips in, letting it swing shut behind him. It takes me a second to recognize that it’s him since he’s no longer wearing his suit. I imagine that, like with me and Vic, the cops took his clothes.
He reaches back and flicks the deadbolt. And then, when he turns his gray eyes over to me, I swear that his attention cuts through the shadows like a ghost on a haunt. Delving into me. Owning me. Possessing me.
My breath catches, and I have to lean back and curl my fingers around the edge of the countertop, just to stay standing upright.
“Shit, they give you the nth degree, too?” Vic asks, and Oscar turns his head very slowly to look at our boss. My husband. His longtime friend. So many fucking things. My eyes rake over Oscar’s body, taking in the long, lean lines of him, the myriad tattoos showing on his exposed arms, above the scooped neck of the white wifebeater he’s wearing. The sweats he’s got on—they look like they might be part of a Prescott gym uniform—sagging so low that I can see a band of ink between his lower belly and his waistband.
“They know a lot of things,” Oscar says, turning back to me and moving very, very slowly down the length of the living room toward the kitchen. As he goes, he grabs a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a light from the top of a shelf, flicking the wheel and firing up the end of one. By the time he gets to me, he’s pulling in a long drag and then exhaling pretty white smoke into the darkness surrounding me.
He taints it, too, Oscar does. He taints it fuckin’ filthy, and I love everything about that, about the way he poisons the air, the way his stare is venom and his heart ice, his trauma so deep it could make canyons in his soul. That’s what I like, all of it.
“But not enough to keep me,” Oscar finishes finally, tossing the pack of smokes onto the counter and then removing the cigarette from his sharp and dangerous mouth with two fingers. He stares down at me, and I feel like I can hear it, the pounding of his heart. His signature cinnamon smell grabs me by the throat, pun intended. “We have to make some moves—and quick.”
“Do you know where Callum is?” I ask, and Oscar goes very still, like a vampire who’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. That’s a scary thing to witness, watching someone turn into a statue of ink and blood and bullshit.
“No,” Oscar breathes darkly, and Vic sighs, reaching out to take the smoke from Oscar’s fingers. As if this is one of Callum’s choreographed dances, Oscar’s hands find their way to my hips. In an instant, his breath is stirring my hair and my eyes are closing of their own accord. “The last I saw of him, he was outside the school, chasing someone.”
“Shit,” I grind out, because I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like it at fucking all. “Chasing who?”
Oscar gives a slow, simple shake of his head, and I grit my teeth in anger. Not at him. At myself. At Prescott. At the world in general. Callum Park should be at, like, fucking Juilliard or something, no
t chasing down Nazis during a school shooting.
See if the other boys come home, Bernie. Then call Ophelia. Make her put you in touch with Maxwell. If he has Callum, or he knows what happened to him, he’ll tell you. He’ll do that because he’s a monster, and monsters always recognize other monsters.
And their weaknesses.
The Havoc Boys are my strength, but they’re also my weakness. My life force and my demise. My rise and fall. Fuck.
“I was worried about you,” Oscar says, and a quip hops right to my naked lips, the ones that feel foreign because they’re not covered in brightly tinted wax, brilliant jewel tones of stolen color that represent so many different things. It’s part of my armor, that lipstick, that color, those opinions. Because if I can tell you what lipstick I’m wearing and why, then I don’t have to answer all those other pesky questions that a person can pose: who are you? what do you do? where are you going in life and why?
“I was worried about you, too,” I say, my eyelashes fluttering as Oscar takes my face in inked fingers and then swiftly drops his mouth to my lips, tasting like mint and cucumber water. I bet they gave him that to loosen him up, to make him feel less like a prisoner and more like a friend. But people like us are not their friends. And they’d best remember that.
Oscar draws back from me slightly, looking me right in the face from a distance that’s both physically and emotionally close. Right now, in this moment, I know he can see every single part of me—bad stuff as well as good.
“We need to call Ophelia,” Oscar says, turning his head away sharply, like the level of intimacy between us in that kitchen is too much for him. He keeps touching me, and I remember my question from the ski lodge: do you want me to keep touching you?
He confirmed it.
Look, I’ll give credit where credit is due: he was marginally better after that night. Of course, that was only two nights ago. Trauma does, of course, accelerate things. Emotion. Trust. Those tight bonds that hold you together when the whole world is trying so desperately to tear you apart.
His hold on me is endless and eternal; it isn’t unbreakable because the possibility of being broken was never even an option. It just is. A fact. As sure as the moon rises.
Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Page 4