Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5)

by C. M. Stunich

  “All I mean to say, Bernadette,” I begin, and I know that if I hesitate too long in here, I won’t be able to control myself. The GMP beat the baby out of my mate. My jaw clenches and my hands curl into fists, nails digging bloody crescents into my palm. “Is that I’m in love with you.” I pause, finding that I’ve abruptly stopped breathing. It takes me a moment to remember how, and I let out a long, deep exhale. “Desperately so.”

  I step into the hallway and slam the bathroom door behind me.

  Bernadette Blackbird

  I end up sitting on the edge of Aaron’s bed, a hot water bottle pressed against my belly, hands trembling as I look through the pictures that the boys saved for me. My eyes are so wet that I could cure drought, chase away the harsh sands and welcome fresh green growth from the earth.

  “Penelope,” I whisper, fingers holding aloft a picture of me, Pen, Pam, and our father. The weirdest part about this picture is that we’re all still smiling in it—even Pam. When did she come to hate us? It doesn’t feel like she did before, but maybe it was the money that made her happy, softened her sharper edges.

  I stand up, clutching my hot water bottle and groaning. I’m wearing my own panties today, my own shirt. I just wanted to wear my own things for a minute. I just wanted to be alone for two. “I’m in love with you. Desperately so.”

  Why did Oscar have to tell me he loves me in a way that sounds so similar to the word goodbye? Because that’s all I heard when he said that to me: I love you so much but goodbye. He’s worried about us and the GMP, the VGTF, the world. He isn’t as sure as he’s always seemed about everything.

  I used to think that Havoc was untouchable, but now that I’m on the inside, I can see it.

  We are all—as Oscar might say—desperately human.

  But it’s the inhuman parts of us, all the ugliest, most hideous, most bloodied parts, that will save us in the end.

  I kneel down beside Penelope’s box and dig furiously through it, pulling out old math assignments, an essay about—of all things—Shakespeare (namely that the fucker was likely a plagiarist of George North), until I find a bunch of pages with thin pink lines printed on the paper. I recognize these pages as coming from her journal.

  And these are ones that’ve been ripped out. Most of them are barely more than fluff. “I saw the cutest shoes today.” My throat closes up. “I saw the prettiest girl today.” My heart starts to race so hard that I feel dizzy, sitting back hard on my ass. My socked feet scrape across the carpet as I lean forward and put the pages between my legs, so I can drop my head between them to help ward off the feeling of vertigo.

  Behind me, on the nightstand, is an empty bowl that was full of beef broth. Aaron brought that to me. I’m being spoiled today. Technically, I’m supposed to be packing for the safe house, but your girl needed a cigarette and a moment.

  One does not take a confession of love from Oscar Montauk lightly.

  “Pen liked girls,” I say, turning the page and finding a rant about Mr. Darkwood that makes me smile. And then frown. I have no idea if he’s still alive. I hope so. In fact, if I were a woman of any sort of faith, I’d probably pray for it. I switch the pages again. This one is a bucket list. I can barely stand to look at it.

  Is there anything more depressing than unfulfilled potential? And this is why I hate rapists. This is why I hate murderers (although, I suppose, I am one myself now). How dare you corrupt beautiful souls and act like there’s any excuse for it.

  The back of the bucket list page is blank, making me wonder if there isn’t another page stuck to it. I doubt anyone would notice it, but Penelope always wrote on both sides of her notebook paper. I’ve rarely seen one without something scrawled on the back of it: be it a list, a note, a drawing of a sun or a heart or a moon with a face.

  I peel the pages apart and find something that I feel like Sara Young may very well want to keep.

  “The worst part is the way she talks to me when nobody else is around. She says that I ruined her life. She says that I stole her youth. She tells me all sorts of things that mothers should never whisper to their daughters in the dark.

  She wants me dead.

  She wants me gone.

  She says I took her man.

  She says she’s going to kill me.”

  I stand up suddenly, snagging a pair of blue jeans and stuffing the hot water bottle in the front. I don’t bother to zip or button them up; they just sort of hang there. But I have better shit to do. I take off, throwing open the bedroom door and heading down the stairs to find Oscar and Vic turning on a pile of new phones.

  “Look what we got you, wife,” Vic starts, his cigarette hanging from his lips. He pauses when he sees me and then frowns hard as I snatch Aaron’s cordless receiver. Without skipping a beat, I grab a card from beside the phone, one that has Sara’s number on it.

  With the page clutched in my shaking hand, I call Police Girl up.

  “Hello, Bernadette?” she says, almost like it’s a question. I assume she’s programmed this number into her own phone.

  “Why did you arrest my mother?” I whisper, holding that damned page and shaking so hard that I wonder if my skin isn’t going to split in half. “It wasn’t for assaulting me, was it? And it wasn’t for Neil’s murder either.”

  There’s a long pause before Sara sighs, like she’s had a long debate with herself on what she might tell me if I should ask. But she still thinks she can build trust with me, that she can get me to confide in her.

  “Bernadette … I had your mother arrested on multiple counts. Namely, I’m focused on her connection to Neil and the GMP.” There’s a long, dangerous pause here. I barely recognize the sound of my own breathing. “But I think what you’re asking is, was she arrested on suspicion of murdering your sister?”

  Frankly, I’m not sure how to respond to that.

  “I left you one page in the box,” Sara tells me, and I feel that strange twisting inside my chest. Like with Ms. Keating. The part of me that still wants to believe is intrigued. The rest of me thinks we should bury Police Girl six feet deep. “You come to your own conclusions, but you’ll hear more once the case progresses. For now, unless she posts bail, your mother is in the jail at the county courthouse.”

  I hang up before Sara can say anything else.

  Glancing down at the page in my hand, I wonder why I didn’t just tell the Havoc Boys to put Pam into the coffin with Neil.

  “You alright, Mrs. Channing?” Vic asks, coming up behind me and putting his hot hands on my upper arms. As soon as he touches me, my numbness shatters to glass. It hits the floor with a sound like bells as I turn my head back to look at him.

  “Sara Young offered me a plea deal,” I say, and Vic’s hands tighten almost imperceptibly.

  “Yeah? What were the terms?”

  I turn back around toward him.

  “I don’t give a fuck what the terms were. I don’t work for the cops. I only work for Havoc.” I stare back at my husband, the head of heads when it comes to this five-headed hydra beast that is Havoc. He stares right back at me, and that magnetic pull that both pushes us together and launches us leagues apart, I can feel it and it almost hurts. “Pretty sure she wants me to testify against my mother.”

  “For?” Vic asks, glancing over at Oscar. He’s wearing one of his suits again, as polished and perfect as always. He gave me everything and then he panicked. But I was there, and I felt his heart beating against my back. He most certainly has a strong one. I’ll let him act the lead part in his personal plays all he wants when we’re around other people. But alone, I want to see that skeleton masked ripped clean off.

  “Murdering my sister for one,” I say, and then I lift up the page from Penelope’s notebook. I release it into Victor’s hand. Our fingers, when they brush, create sparks. He stares at the page for a minute and then looks up at me. I’m so fucking numb without you, Vic. “She … how …” I pause, and my mind strays back to that night where Penelope stared Pam straight in the e
ye and told her about the dress. “I took it, and I sold it.”

  And then the image of her, lying on her bed, wrapped up in blankets … Pamela’s pills on her nightstand.

  Pamela’s pills …

  Pamela’s …

  Victor reaches out and uses two fingers to lift the chain from inside of my shirt, the one with his grandmother’s ring hanging from it. I don’t move; I don’t speak. I just stare into his ebon eyes and let myself fall. He’ll catch me. That much, I know for sure.

  He spins the chain around so that he can access the clasp, unhooking it and then taking the ring off. Victor slides it back down my ring finger.

  “Pamela and not Neil,” he says, like even he’s surprised by this one. He looks down at the water bottle sticking out of my pants. It’s just an old glass bottle with the label removed, something one of the boys probably dug out of the recycling. But, heat it up under the tap to make sure the glass doesn’t break when you pour in the boiling water, and you’re golden. His eyes lift up to my face. “What do you want us to do?”

  Pamela is at the county jail.

  On suspicion of murdering my sister.

  But the VGTF is investigating the Grand Murder Party.

  Neil was involved with the GMP; Pamela likely was, too. She has all those rich friends, doesn’t she? I start to shake. What if she sold us to the Kushners? I wonder. What if, all along, she’s been a part of this? Woven into the very fabric of my demise.

  My throat gets so dry that I can hardly imagine speaking another word.

  I let Vic band an arm around me and pull me close, putting his lips against the top of my head.

  “What do you need, wife?” he asks, and I can tell his heart is broken. For me, I’ll bet. Because I always hurt for him, too. I have since we were kids and I saw his mom stop by the school once—just once in all our years of elementary, junior, and high school combined—and dig her nails into his skin so hard that he bled.

  I recognized that pain in him, when he was eight, and I was eight, and our eyes met across the dusty surface of a playground that’s already been forgotten in time.

  “Do we have any girls in the county jail right now?” I ask absently.

  “No,” Vic begins cautiously, his thumb brushing across my knuckles and making me shiver. “But we could find one. I bet one of Stacey’s girls would know who to contact. What do you want to do?”

  I stay where I am for a moment.

  I haven’t fully processed it yet.

  I’m not sure that I can, not right now. Not after yesterday.

  “Find out for me. And then I’ll give Pam a choice. Admit to what she did or …” I pause, working my jaw in anger for a moment. My fingers curl around Victor’s. “I guess she might find herself hanging from her sheets one morning.”

  I try to pull away, but Vic tightens his hand on mine. I see Oscar stiffen at the table, like this is a dance we just danced, as if he recognizes all the moves.

  “Ophelia called while you were upstairs,” Vic tells me, his mouth turning down into a frown. He wants to pursue, nail down my emotions, probably nail me … But he can’t do any of those things, so he settles for letting that feeling travel down his fingers and into my arm. “Sara Young wasn’t wrong: the GMP is coming for us.”

  I stare back at him, and then shake my head.

  “But. There’s a but in there somewhere.” I see Oscar watching us, but I’m having trouble meeting his eyes, so I keep my attention on Vic. Another cramp hits me like a punch to the gut, and I grimace. Victor pulls me close and parks his hands on my hips. I know what he’s thinking, a bunch of bullshit like they killed my baby or whatever alpha-hole crap goes through that thick skull of his. He keeps it carefully tucked away, but it won’t last, that feigned indifference. Eventually, we’ll be stripped down and trembling in front of one another, souls bared, hearts naked.

  “She wants us to renegotiate with Trinity. If we speed up that process, and guarantee Maxwell a cut of the money, he’ll keep his men back for the time being.” Vic leans down to put his mouth near my ear. “But guess what? I saved you the trouble of deciding what to do.”

  “Yeah?” I ask, rubbing my thumb across my wedding ring. I can’t look at him right now, reeking of sin and sex, looking like a goddamn demon made of carnal torture and ink. My body hurts too much to feel like this; it isn’t fair.

  “Well, they already tried to have us executed, didn’t they?” Vic smiles at me, all white teeth and bullshit, just the way I like him. His purple-dark hair is smoothed back, his eyes the color of an empty grave, freshly dug and awaiting a body to fall into its shadowy hands. “And it didn’t work out so well for them. I told Ophelia to fuck off.”

  I let out a sharp exhale when something catches my eye.

  It’s the pamphlet for Oak River Elementary.

  It’s almost time for my phone call with Heather.

  “What’s going to happen to Prescott High?” I ask, looking back at Vic. I wonder where Aaron, Hael, and Cal are? After nearly losing Aaron, and coming close to the same with Cal, I’m not letting any of them get more than a hundred feet from me at any given time.

  “Indefinitely closed,” Oscar says, his voice just this side of genteel. You’d almost think he was having feelings in that crazy head of his.

  “What’s the district’s plan?” I ask, glancing back at Vic. “For you to get your inheritance, you need to graduate. So, what’s the deal?”

  “I had an idea,” Vic says, reaching out and taking the Oak River Elementary pamphlet. He flips it over to the ad for Oak Valley Prep on the opposite side. I lift my gaze up to meet his. “We need a school; I’m allowed to withdraw money from my trust for education.”

  I just stare back at him like he’s a crazy person.

  “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I say as he chuckles and pulls away, still shaking his head. “You’re not saying what I think you’re saying, are you? Our rachet asses at Oak Valley Prep? I’d probably spontaneously combust if I tried to step onto that campus as a student.”

  “Desperate times call for desperate motherfucking measures,” Vic says, opening a wooden box on the peninsula and pulling out a cigar. He offers it up to me and I take it in two fingers, staring at it before looking up at him. “You know how men back in the fifties would smoke a cigar when their baby was born?” Vic asks, and I just stare back him. He frowns, and I can tell he’s upset, probably more so than I am. “Just humor me and have a smoke.”

  “And Oak Valley Prep?” I reiterate, because the very idea of attending that school skeeves me out on so many levels.

  “Hey, think about it,” Vic says, clenching the cigar between his teeth and grinning at me. “If we enroll, it’ll be that much easier to kill Trinity Jade.” He lights up, taking a few puffs on his cigar before handing me the lighter.

  I stare down at it in my hand for a minute, but I can’t deny him that logic.

  He has a point.

  The safe house is right in the dirtiest, ugliest part of South Prescott. This block is, like, the southside of the southside. The air tastes like desperation and despair, and the wind brings with it the acrid scent of piss and unwashed bodies. Junkies line the stoops, slumped over and broken. The cops don’t ever come here. Or, if they do, it’s not to help anyone.

  I grind my teeth slightly, my arm banded across my middle, holding a fresh hot water bottle in place. Having a miscarriage in the middle of the gang war is … impossible. Nantucket, Bernadette. You could’ve had Nantucket. Hah. But really, you can take the girl out of Prescott, but you can’t take the thirsty ho out of the girl.

  I never would’ve survived there.

  All of this shit, this adrenaline, these dangerous boys that smell like spice and passion, how was I supposed to walk away from this? It’s quite literally in my blood. Violence is in my blood. The need to win against an enemy that I can see, smell, and touch. More often than not, our worst enemies are intangible.

  Self-doubt. Fear. Ignorance.

&
nbsp; Aaron opens the passenger side door, holding out his recently broken hand. It’s a little early for his cast to be off, but I can understand why he took it off. Vulnerability hurts, especially if it means you might not be able to help the ones you love the most.

  I take his outstretched fingers and let him help me down from the Bronco. Our bodies fall together, and I look up into his green-gold eyes, flecks of color swirling like dancers as cold winter sunshine falls across his face. The air is so crisp that even though I just got out of the warm car, my lips feel frozen and dry as they part in wonder.

  How it’s possible for Aaron to look like an angel when he wears the ink of the devil, I will never be able to understand.

  “One day,” he says, wetting his lips and looking up and over my head. I imagine that he’s staring into the open door of the Bronco and over to Hael on the driver’s side. Aaron tilts his head back to look at me. We don’t have to hurry or hide the fact that we’re here. The reason that we’re here is that this is heavy Havoc territory. There are crew members in every building.

  This is where we hunker down, deep in the darkness and the filth of our own nest.

  Six blocks down, Prescott High sits, surrounded by reporters and filled with cops. Who knows if, after the investigation winds down, if there will even be a Prescott High anymore.

  “One day?” I query, squeezing my fingers around his. He drops his lips to mine, tasting our shared memories on my mouth. He never wanted anyone but me, and in that desperation, he forgot that he should let himself relax every now and again, let his guard down. He doesn’t know how to do that anymore, paint my face with frosting while we laugh until we cry like we did on a Christmas Eve three years ago.

  But, as soon as those words leave my lips, I see something shift in his face. His worst fears are coming true, and he has no choice but to face them. In doing that, some of his careful shell cracks around the edges, and he’s a seventeen-year-old boy with too many responsibilities all over again.