“One day, we’ll either have a baby or we won’t. But I want you to decide when that is. Not Victor. Or me. Most especially not the GMP …” He trails off and then lifts a hand up to cup my face. Sandalwood and roses. That familiar scent makes my nostrils flare, and I close my eyes briefly as the wind picks up, ruffling my hair.
Aaron takes my fingers, twisting our hands together. He winces slightly, but he doesn’t pull away. That broken hand of his probably still hurts like fucking hell. That one time, when I crushed my finger in the garage door, it hurt for months longer than the doctor told me it would. That’s pain for you. Persistent. Relentless. A demon with reaching claws.
I realize then that it isn’t that Aaron Fadler thinks he still shits rainbows and fairy glitter; he just doesn’t relish the fact that he’s gone over to the dark side. He exists here because he has to. And now that he’s wrapped up in Havoc’s shadowed arms, he may as well have been dragged beneath the sea by a kraken.
There is no escape for Aaron.
I push my palms up against his, inked digits tangling together.
“Sometimes, I wonder if it wasn’t you that should’ve gone to Nantucket,” I say, wondering if I could’ve saved Aaron all those years ago. What if I’d marched up to Vic and looked him in the eye, refused to let him look away until he acknowledged that we could never let each other go. What if I’d told him that I belonged to Havoc and Havoc belonged to me? Would Aaron have been able to walk then?
His smile softens, and his eyes blaze with stark intent. It isn’t difficult to guess what he might say.
“Not without you there,” he assures me, giving my hands a squeeze and then releasing them.
Hael is waiting on the other side of the car, shoulder propped up against a telephone pole. It feels safe here somehow, being surrounded by Havoc. In every building, on every floor, there’s at least one member of our crew. And if we do have a rat, well, I guess we’ll deal with that when it comes.
But we’re not running.
Not from the Grand Murder Party or the police, not even the feds.
“You two done getting all Gone with the Wind over there?” Hael asks with a cocky chuckle, turning and heading up a narrow walkway toward a derelict front porch. Victor is already there, unlocking the door with a key and letting it swing inward on rusted hinges.
“Have you ever actually read or seen Gone with the Wind?” I ask, cocking an eyebrow. “It has absolutely nothing to do with our romance.”
“We’re more like …” Aaron begins, lighting up a cigarette as he steps onto the soft, damp wood of the porch. “My Girl or Bridge to Terabithia.” I give him a sharp look, but he just laughs, pushing chestnut curls away from his forehead. “What? That’s how all childhood romances end—in tragedy.”
“Hilarious,” I say with a roll of my eyes, stepping into the front entry of a house that, once upon a time, was probably very nice. As of now, the old Victorian is smashed between two brick apartment buildings built in the early seventies, rotting away and forgotten in the darkest part of the city.
“Looks like shit, don’t it?” Victor quips, moving into the damp, wet mustiness of the house as I wrinkle my nose. Oscar and Callum are at Joseph General together which both worries me and makes me feel better all at the same time. Cal most definitely needed medical treatment, but at the same time, I don’t like the idea of us being separated.
We are strongest together.
“It’s … barely livable,” I admit, and Vic chuckles, shaking his head as he goes for the stairs and Aaron and Hael fan out to secure the house on either side of me. I decide to follow Vic up, past threadbare sofas and peeling wallpaper. There’s a TV at one end of the living room that looks like it was probably purchased in the late eighties.
I slide my hand up the banister, finding myself in a hallway that stretches out on either side. There are half a dozen doors up here, most of them shut tight. Vic is in the doorway to the bathroom, peering at the toilet and the shower with a frown.
“Fuck, this is rough—even for Prescott.” He snorts a laugh and steps into the room, testing the toilet to make sure it flushes. “We won’t stay here for long, don’t worry. Just a week or two.”
“You’re not actually considering sending us all to Oak Valley, are you?” I ask, because I’m having a hard time getting that out of my head. The rich are just as monstrous as the poor, only they have resources to fund their dark ambitions.
“Whatever it takes, wife,” Vic tells me, turning the tap in the shower on and standing up with a frown as the water spurts like a freshman during his first time and then craps out completely. The sound of old pipes echoes in the walls and then the shower coughs up some steamy water. Victor turns his head to look back at me, an apology resting somewhere in his face that I don’t quite understand. “You and Aaron will be able to see the girls, we’ll have round the clock security, and there is no way in fuck the GMP will storm Oak Valley. Too many risky politics involved. Half the students’ parents are paying customers with private militia.”
Victor turns back around to look at me, but it’s hard to argue with that logic.
“We broke in pretty goddamn easily,” I repeat, but I’ve already had this discussion with Aaron. I scrub both hands over my face as Vic approaches me, grabbing the water bottle from my pants and sliding it out in a way that’s far more intense and sexually charged than it ought to be.
“Look at me, Bernadette,” he says, putting both of his big hands on my neck, one on either side. His palms are warm, his touch bringing to life all the winter-dead parts of me, a searing summer day that chases away the cold. I keep my focus on his face, reaching up to place my hands over the tops of his. “If you don’t think the Oak Valley idea is a good one: tell me. I trust your judgement.”
“Do you?” I ask, and he smiles, but it’s a tad lopsided.
“On most things. When it comes to putting yourself in danger, nah, I don’t trust that at all. You’re the queen, but I’m still the boss.” He presses a kiss to my mouth that tastes like dangerous promises and violent heat, of all the horrible things he’d like to do to me in the dark of this abandoned house. “So, what do you think we should do, Bernie? What’s your next move?”
“I say we retaliate hard-and-fast—in the way we do best.” I wet my lips, thinking about all the things I suffered at the hands of the ones I loved the most. “Havoc’s specialty is inflicting pain without leaving any marks. When you locked me in that closet”—and here Vic at least has the common decency to cringe—“you tore me apart in ways that hurt to the very core of my soul. And yet, there was no evidence of it. Nobody would ever know by looking at me who put the darkness in my gaze and the vengeance in my smile, right?”
“Little poet princess,” Vic grumbles, giving my neck a slight squeeze before he drops his hands to his sides. “Go on.”
“We do the same here and now. We retaliate but in ways that make it looks like we’re not doing anything at all. Starting with Mason Miller.” I exhale as I lay my palms flat against Vic’s chest, the diamond ring on my finger catching a stray bit of sunlight from the leaky skylight above my head. “Let me talk to Stacey’s girls. They deserve to know they’re under our protection—whether they agree to this plan or not.”
Vic nods, watching as my hands creep up his chest and curl around his shoulders.
“That works for me, provided you meet with them someplace secure.” His jaw works a bit as his dark eyes sweep me. “And for what it’s worth: I’m sorry, Bernadette.”
“Don’t do that to me,” I groan, trying to pull away and finding myself captured in his orbit, like always. He has but to snap his fingers and command my heart; I’m a soldier for him in so many ways. The only thing that makes that fact bearable is that I know the reverse is true: Victor Channing has always been mine.
“Don’t do what?” he asks, sliding an arm around my waist and bringing my body close. “Apologize? Why? Are you allergic to feelings, Mrs. Channing? If I fuck up, I say s
orry. Anybody who lacks the ability to do that should get their head checked. Being wrong isn’t the end of the world; we all make mistakes.”
“And this apology is for what, exactly?” I ask as his eyes soften in just such a way that I feel my heart breaking all over again. He has no right to show me his vulnerable side and make me love him even more. No right.
“For handling the Trinity thing the way I did. In the end, all I did was hurt you and it didn’t matter a goddamn bit. You were right: I should’ve let my obsession for you guide the way. I always have.” He leans down, like he might kiss me, but pauses at the last second and turns his head away. The nearness of his mouth infuriates me, and I dig my nails into the back of his head, probably making his scalp bleed. He doesn’t seem to give two fucks either way. “For once, I thought maybe I could prove my love wasn’t selfish.” Vic glances back at me, and our noses brush. It’s like, he wants to keep talking, but the magnetic pull of his mouth to mine is making it hard to keep any distance. “I’m not too proud to admit my mistakes.”
He releases me and then, much to my surprise, gets down on his fucking knees.
I just stare at him, heart thundering in the quiet space of the old house, the smell of must and long-buried memories present in every breath that I take.
“What are you doing?” I ask as Vic looks up at me, a tattooed god prostrating himself for my benefit and mine alone. I’d bet you every dollar of that inheritance that he’s never done this for another woman. Shit, I bet he’s never done this for any of the other boys either.
“I know sometimes it seems like I know exactly what I’m doing at all times, but I don’t. Despite everything, I’m just eighteen years old and I’m figuring it out as I go.” Victor blinks up at me, settling back on his heels. “I’m not too proud to admit that.” He pauses again, like he’s waiting for something from me.
“Then let’s figure it out together,” I tell him, cupping the side of his face and loving the way his eyes close almost involuntarily, like my touch is a drug, one that he’d happily OD on like I’m sure a dozen former Prescott residents have before in this very house. It’s not a pretty metaphor, but there’s not a lot that’s pretty in our world. That is, unless, as Callum suggested, pain becomes pretty to those who have too much of it. “Don’t push me aside because your emotions are too intense, or you don’t know what to do, or you’re scared.”
Vic snorts and lowers his head. When he looks up, I can see it there in his face: that’s the truth of it. I terrify him in a way he’s never feared for anything before. I understand that emotion because I feel it, too, this almost inevitable descent into tragedy. Everything about us feels tragic, really, like one of those old fairy tales with a not so happy ending.
“The last time I was afraid like this, I was five years old. It was the day Ophelia and my father discussed who had to take care of me. The reason I was so fucking scared that day was because I was worried that it would be her, that she would take my hand and drag me away from my abusive, alcoholic father, and the nightmare of south Prescott. Because, despite all of those things, she was the worse of the two.” Victor’s lids drop over his dark eyes, like he’s carried away in thought. “I …” he starts, but then it’s like whatever he wants to say gets caught on his mouth on the way out, an ugly truth that bleeds. “Before that …”
My heart stutters and gets caught in my throat, and then I just know that I can’t stay standing anymore. I kneel down in front of him so that we’re facing each other, just two teenagers with old souls and a mountain of cards stacked against them.
But that’s the fun part, you know. Seeing the underdog pull through. That’s what I want, some proof that justice and vengeance both exist, that bad people can be punished, that good people can win—even if it’s a rare and distant sort of thing. Hope, right. The thing with feathers …
“She touched you, didn’t she?” I ask, because it’s the one thing I never expected from Vic’s past. He’s such a careful man; he hides his pain so well. He disguises it with his dominance. But he’s only just now becoming an adult, and he hasn’t left all of that childhood pain and trauma behind the way he thinks he does.
“Her …” he breathes, looking into my face with an earnest sort of expression that betrays all of that long-suffering fear. “Her friends. At the fancy parties …” He trails off and wets his lips, closing his eyes for a moment and scrubbing both hands down his face. He leaves them there for a long moment before dropping them to his lap and looking at me with an expression made of obsidian eyes and a mouth as sharp and dangerous as a knife. “This thing, this … perversion, it’s been running in Springfield for a long time. This isn’t new. None of it is.”
I sit there for a moment, fingers twitching in my lap. My head is filled with the white noise of rage. It’s something I’ve been dealing with for a long, long time. But, as Victor has warned me on multiple occasions, I need to control it and throw it at the right target at the right time.
“And then they took my baby …” he growls, and I close my eyes, my body breaking out in goose bumps. “They took my fucking baby from me.” A gasp slips from me as he wraps his arms around me and drags me into him. Somehow, I’m already anticipating the move, throwing my own arms around his neck and squeezing him like the fate of the universe depends on it.
Since he just so happens to be the center of mine, I guess it really fucking does.
Stacey’s girls are willing to meet me at the nail art place down the block. And by nail art place, I mean that girl whose aunt will do your nails for like fifteen bucks and make it look like you paid three hundred at the stuffy Oak Park place with the weird French name.
“RIP, my love,” one of the girls says, eyeing her coffin-tipped pink nails with a frown and watery eyes. “Shit, I’m sorry.” She dashes her hand across her face and shakes her head. “The nails are fly, girl. I just … it’s been hard without Stacey, you know?”
“It was all my fault,” one of the other girls says, her face swollen and mottled with bruises. Clearly, at some point recently, she got the shit kicked out of her. Worse than me, even. I’m guessing this is the girl that Stacey’s crew got back alive. “I picked the john. I … and I’m the one that told those GMP motherfuckers that I worked for Havoc.” She glances away sharply, braided hair swinging with the motion. “You sure you aren’t here to kill me?”
“I’m here to tell you that we want you in our crew,” I say, and several of the girls exchange glances with one another. They don’t seem nearly as surprised as I might’ve thought. I look up at the woman across from me, some gorgeous thirty-something that shapes my ragged ass nails into a feast for the eyes. Matte black, coffin-tips, each nail hand-painted with a filigreed letter pertaining to HAVOC and blessed with a jewel of some sort. On my right pointer finger, she pierces a hole through the tip of the nail and puts a ring on it that matches the ones I wear in my belly button.
“No surprise,” one of the others says, checking her purple nails over and tossing me a look that’s split between animosity and curiosity. As if she can’t help herself, her gaze strays over to Hael Harbin, sitting in a chair behind me and watching the proceedings with curiosity, like he’s never been around a bunch of Prescott bitches getting their nails did before. It’s sort of a thing in this neighborhood. “What else would you do? Considering you failed to keep Stacey safe. I thought Havoc was supposed to be our avenging angel, huh? Well, prove it.”
“Don’t talk to them like that, Tiff,” the first girl says, the one who was crying over Stacey. “They saved our asses. You think we all wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for Havoc? Besides, we’re the ones who robbed the GMP.” This girl turns to me, nodding her head, like she’s already made a decision. I vaguely recognize her as the chick that was grinding on that boy in the cafeteria that day, the day that Stacey officially dropped her Havoc request. “You got a plan, don’t you, Havoc Girl?”
“Maybe you need help working all that yummy Havoc dick?” another one of
them asks. In total, there are almost a dozen girls crammed into this little apartment, watching me. And this is just the upper echelon of Stacey’s organization. Like I said, queen bee of Prescott High. With that title open and available, I know I have to step up and seize the crown. “How do you do it anyway, keep all five of those boys satisfied?”
I glance back to find Hael grinning at me. He folds his hands together behind his head and cocks an eyebrow. We’re only about three houses down from the place we’re staying, but I’ve got an entourage anyway. Victor is downstairs, a bit too … primal and male to fit into this crowd. It might be mixed race up in here—we have girls in every color of the human rainbow—but it is a distinctly feminine atmosphere. They might like to fuck Prescott boys, but they sure as shit won’t take any orders from them.
“With a wet pussy and a smile?” I suggest, and the girls howl with laughter.
“Bitch, you’re legendary,” Crying Girl says, nodding her head again. Her red hair has been shaved close to her head in mourning, but her nails are fucking fabulous. “I’m Vera, by the way. I’ll speak to the other girls, but I can’t see any of them turning down your offer. We have to have each other’s backs here in Prescott; you know that Stacey always had yours.”
A shiver takes over me, and I nod. Stacey really did always have our backs. Shit, shit, shit. I feel my face get tight and suck in a sharp breath.
“I do know that. Which is why we’re taking this seriously.” I withdraw my hands as Vera’s aunt sits back in her seat and leaves me to examine my nails. This is legitimately the best nail art I’ve ever had in my life. The matte black color matches the lipstick I’m wearing today, a shade known simply by the silhouetted bat swarm that covers the lid. It doesn’t even have a name, just a symbol.
Now, my nails as well as my knuckles say Havoc. I reach up and push a bit of red-tipped hair back from my forehead, turning around on the swivel stool so I can see Hael while I talk. He watches me do my thing, even as the girls take turns scoping him out. I wonder if any of them ever fucked him? I’m afraid to ask because, even though I’m a feminist in my very blood and bones, I’m also just a little bit animal. I get jealous much easier than I should.
Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Page 13