“Either we run out of ammunition or else the VGTF shows up,” Oscar muses, and I can tell that even if waiting for the feds would be the easiest option for us, it’s not the one he wants. He wants to make someone bleed.
“You mean … either they run out of ammunition,” Cal corrects, and I can taste it in his words, too. He also craves the violence. Not me. I’d so much rather just take the girls home and bundle them in blankets, hold them close, and only kill if needed to keep them safe.
Standing where I’m standing, with Hael and Bernadette all the way on the other side of the Camaro, I feel like killing is exactly what I have to do. When one of Maxwell’s men leans out, aiming in the opposite direction and likely—and falsely—assuming that he’s protected by the second car, I aim for the wide breadth of his back.
Deep breath.
Tense on the trigger.
A shot rips through the man’s body and he slumps forward and then sideways, bleeding out into the grass. This is going to be an interesting scene to explain to the feds, but it is what it is at this point. They gave us no choice; they took our child.
Not just once either.
They stole Heather … they beat the baby out of my Bernadette.
I scoot out from behind the car, even as Oscar makes a sound of protest, and the movement draws another one of Maxwell’s men out to take down what he assumes is an easy target. Oscar is able to shoot him through the forehead before anything happens to me, and I duck back behind the Eldorado’s tire.
“A little warning next time, Fadler,” he murmurs, but there’s a dark smile on his lips that wasn’t there before.
“Watch my back?” Cal asks, and then before either of us can answer, he takes off across the green. Gunshots ring out in his wake, but he’s able to disappear into the woods without being hit. That’s the thing, right? Fighting Havoc means fighting shadows. We’re not usually about big-ass firefights.
“That fucker.” Oscar’s grumbling under his breath, waiting for his next opportunity to take a shot. From the opposite end of the road, Hael and Bernie are doing the same. I both hate and love that, seeing her in the trenches with us. It’s where she was always meant to be, but also … I’d rather she were safe. Nantucket, Nantucket, Nantucket.
What is Nantucket anyway? Some snooty seaside town with good scallops? A bunch of cute buildings and rich assholes and whaling and fishing and lighthouses? That would never have suited Bernadette. This does. I put away my overprotective streak so that I can concentrate.
Callum reemerges from the trees, once again drawing fire from Maxwell’s men, and ending up on Bernie and Hael’s side instead of ours. Smart.
“Go,” Oscar tells me, his silver eyes sliding my way. “Join them.”
I wet my lips briefly, and then I take off in the opposite direction. While the men are more focused on Callum, I clear most of the ground between me and the trees before they start shooting at me.
Panting for breath and carrying my gun in both hands, I move through the woods down the incline, waiting for Oscar to open fire on one of the black sedans. As soon as he does, I run as fast as I can until I’m sliding in the dirt behind the Camaro.
“Oh, a party up in here,” Hael says with a big grin, firing his weapon several times before ducking back down behind his poor motherfucking car. I already wrecked it once which I had to apologize like a thousand times for, but now this? Both the Eldorado and the Camaro are going to need a ton of work. Again. Poor Hael.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Bernie tells me, and I can’t fight the smile that rises unbidden to my lips. Taking my place beside her, I get ready to unload on Maxwell and his men, if only to give Oscar time to join us. It’s better when we’re together. Always better.
Only, it seems that Maxwell has a different idea in mind. He and his men take off, even with the threat of our bullets at their backs, and they charge the Eldorado where Oscar is now stationed by himself.
Cal and I are hopping over the Camaro at the same time, in a move that probably looks choreographed. It’s not that—even as much as Bernie might tease us about it sometimes—it’s just that we’ve known each other for years, grew in pain and poverty together, and now we’re just … this. Dogs of war, crying Havoc, and gnashing teeth.
We move so quickly up the hill that Callum opts to grab onto one of the men rather than shoot him, knocking him down to the ground with Cal on his back. In a ruthless move, Cal whips his pistol out and fires once into the back of the downed man’s head before scrambling up after the others.
There are only three men left now. With Cal and Oscar together, that’s basically nothing. They could take down a dozen men. Two dozen, maybe.
Maxwell veers off from the group, and I take off after him, chasing him into the trees in the same direction as Ophelia and Heather. I don’t see them—Vic either—but I’m focused on one thing and one only: Maxwell Barrasso.
This is our chance.
If Vic can take Ophelia down—he will—and I can deal with Maxwell, then that’s it. Game over. Obviously, explaining what happened to the VGTF will be interesting but really, how can we be charged for any of this? Attacked on schoolgrounds by a notorious gang yet again and all with the plausible idea that it’s only about Victor’s inheritance and nothing else.
Adrenaline surges through me as I catch up with Maxwell and grab onto the back of his jacket, knocking him to his knees in the leaves. He’s good though, much better than that man I killed on the hill after I escaped the cabin. A man that, I know now, was probably a member of the GMP.
Maxwell spins so quickly that he’s able to kick the gun from my hand before I can stop him. His own weapon is long gone, and I wonder if he wasn’t running out of ammo back there in the first place.
Without a gun, this is going to be more difficult, but not impossible.
I throw my body onto Maxwell’s, utilizing both gravity and weight as I wrestle him into the leaves. He throws a punch that manages to connect with my face, and stars flicker in my vision. Doesn’t matter though. The well-dressed asshole beneath me hasn’t been in the trenches recently. I’m not afraid of him.
Only, Maxwell is good.
Much better than I expected.
Like, he’s Mason Miller good.
Fuck.
I know as soon as he manages to roll us over, somehow taking the advantage of gravity away from me. My fist manages to break between his arms as he struggles to hold me down, and my knuckles connect with his face. In retaliation, Maxwell backhands me so hard that blood fills my mouth.
“You took my son from me,” he says, in such a smooth and even tone that I really start to worry here. “Do you really think I’m going to let a high school student wrestle me in the woods?”
His hands grip my wrists and shove them into the ground as he uses his knee to hit me in the groin so hard that the breath is knocked out of me. Blackness sweeps at the edges of my vision, but I take advantage of that single second when he’s balancing on one knee atop me, and I roll.
Maxwell is knocked off as I scrabble for the gun. My fingers wrap around the grip, but my opponent is right there, putting a knee on my back and hitting my wrist so hard that the weapon drops back to the ground. He reaches for it, and that simple movement puts him off-balance yet again.
I shove up to my feet, throwing Maxwell aside. It doesn’t last; he’s up on his own feet and lunging for the gun in less time than it takes me to steady myself.
We’re standing on the edge of a sharp incline, where the woods sweep down toward the perimeter wall that surrounds the grounds of Oak Valley Prep. I just let myself fall backwards, even though it’s a risky move.
With a grunt, I hit the ground and then I just start rolling. But my movements are quick enough and erratic enough that even when Maxwell takes a few shots at me, he doesn’t find his target. Once I stop rolling, I’m so dizzy and breathless that I lose several precious seconds trying to suck in air. My entire body hurts now, throbbing and screaming as I shove
back up to a standing position.
Maxwell is already sliding down the incline toward me, the gun still in his hands. He aims for me and pulls the trigger; if the gun were still loaded, he might’ve actually hit me. Unfortunately for him, he’s run out of ammo, so he simply chucks the weapon aside and comes at me anyway.
This time, as he’s moving through the trees and I’m stumbling back looking for a branch or rock or anything that I can use as a weapon, Maxwell pulls a knife from an ankle sheath hidden beneath the finely pressed lines of his slacks.
Licking my lips, I think about Bernadette, about how beautiful her mouth is when she smiles at me, how kind her eyes are even when she tries to be a hard-ass. I think about how good it felt to take her at the same time as Victor, how tight and warm and perfect everything was. And I imagine living in that house with her, with them, with the girls. We could have it all. If only one of us doesn’t die here today.
Because if somebody does, Bernadette will never be the same again. She will never recover. I know that because I lost her once, and even though it was a temporary state, something that could be rectified later on, I was devastated, broken, bitter. No, if one of us dies we might as well take her with us.
Maxwell’s brown eyes are dark with violence as he moves toward me like a man who’s used to wielding knives, used to drawing blood and hurting people.
See, if he’d had his whole army behind him, we would’ve lost.
If it were just me and him in these woods, then I might die. It’s becoming quite clear that as good as I am, Maxwell Barrasso is better. Plus, we killed his son. He has a very personal vendetta against us that demands bloodshed to be satisfied.
But, as we explained to Mason Miller, wolves have packs.
A gunshot goes off and Maxwell lets out a violent shout of pain, collapsing to his knees in the leaves as blood blooms on his thigh, staining his navy slacks an even darker color and turning the faint pinstripes red.
“What do we have here?” Cal muses, coming out of the woods with the pistol held up by his shoulder. He even itches the bright yellow blond of his hair with the grip, as if everything about this moment is calculated and casual and planned. Really, this is just Havoc in a nutshell. This is what we do.
Panting, I use the trunk of a tree to catch my breath while Cal gets close enough to Maxwell that the man actually tries to swing that knife of his. Callum just shoots him in the hand and the man screams. It’s fitting, a mimicry of what we did to his second-in-command. Only, I was the bait this time instead of Bernadette.
“You okay, Aaron?” Cal asks, and I nod, watching as Callum crouches down beside Maxwell. “You could’ve left things well-enough alone. You could’ve left our territory. You could’ve resisted the temptation to rape and pillage our school. And now, today, here, you could’ve resisted the urge to plunder that child. Everything you have done, Maxwell Barrasso, is what led you here today.”
Maxwell spits in Callum’s face, but it doesn’t faze him. Callum just swipes a hand over his cheek to wipe it off.
“Prescott trash,” Maxwell bites out, scowling and panting. He must know he’s going to die, but he doesn’t show fear or pain. Just hate and rage and frustration. Something about his expression, his demeanor, reminds me of Neil Pence. What was it that Cal said then? They always break, eventually. “If you kill me, my people will never stop hunting you. There won’t be a moment of peace in your lives. Not a single second of it.”
“Mm, I find that hard to believe,” Cal retorts, and then he stands up as Oscar steps out of the trees with a bit of rope in hand. He slips it around Maxwell’s neck, puts a foot between his shoulder blades, and then pulls.
The man scrambles to claw the rope from his neck, thrashing and fighting beneath the easy strength of Oscar’s grip.
“Ah, there it is again,” Cal remarks, just like he did when Neil finally began to scream inside the pretty coffin we picked out for him. “He just broke, too.”
I lean my back against the tree, panting and hurting, but relatively unharmed.
Oscar finishes his work and then lets Maxwell go, watching as the man slumps face-first into the leaves.
And that’s when our phones vibrate in unison and Oscar whips his out faster than Cal or I do. He answers the call with a sharp “what?” and then goes completely still.
That’s when we hear the howling, that’s when Callum starts to run and Oscar moves over to help me so that I can run, too.
“What was it?” I ask, glancing down and seeing that the call on his phone is still connected: it’s Hael.
“Mare’s nest,” Oscar breathes as panic surges through me, and I find myself facing the almost unthinkable reality of losing one of my girls for the second time that day.
Bernadette Blackbird
Ten minutes earlier … again.
Callum and Aaron hop over the front of the Camaro and take off, chasing the men that are now racing up the hill toward Oscar and the Eldorado. Likely, they’re going for the road in an attempt to escape. Either they don’t have a lot of ammo left or the distant sound of sirens has sparked their movements.
Regardless, Cal attacks one of the men from behind while Aaron peels off and heads into the woods after Maxwell. I’m about to go after him when Hael’s hand snaps out and grabs me by the wrist.
“No,” he says, giving me a sharp look. “Vic’s orders. You stay here.” He releases me and then takes aim up the hill, firing off several more shots and then cursing when he realizes the remaining GMP members are now out of range. Hael drops his gun to his side and steps back, unwilling to leave me here alone.
But, like, there’s no way I’m just going to sit around when my boys are in trouble. I’m backing up and considering the possibility of escaping Hael to go after Aaron when movement in the trees on the opposite side of the road draws my attention.
Time seems to slow down in such a way that I notice every little detail, like the striations in Hael’s beautiful eyes as he starts to turn toward the rustling sound. I see what’s happening first, as Martin Harbin stumbles out of the woods, his brown eyes bloodshot and his hair mussed. He is a man unhinged and broken in unfixable ways.
His wife, Marie, is clutched against his side, bleeding and bruised, with her husband’s hand clamped prohibitively over her mouth. Her eyes—such a sweet and gentle reminder of Hael’s—are wide with fear and terror.
I see the tattoo on Martin’s right arm, the red one that looks like the silhouetted face of a clown. It occurs to me then, in that split-second of time, that he’s been in prison for years. That, sometimes, when people go to prison, they join gangs.
Martin Harbin is white and awful; the Grand Murder Party is a white supremacist gang made up of awful, awful people.
It’s a match.
And we took his wife from him. We humiliated him. We walked away and left him all alone because it was the safest thing to do, the smartest thing to do.
He’s lifting up a weapon and pointing it at Hael like his son is the only thing left in the known universe, and then his finger is tensing on the trigger, and even though I know Victor would tell me to stand down, I don’t.
I’m already moving before I can even consider the consequences. Because there is no consequence greater than losing one of my boys, of seeing them hurt and bleeding and dying. That’s something that my soul can’t bear. So, regardless of what my actions mean, I take them because there’s no alternative for me.
I’m sprinting forward now, running so fast that the air seems to stream past me like water, flowing across my cheeks and tangling in my hair. If there was more time, I could probably shoot Martin while still being careful not to hit Marie, attached to his side and wrapped in his arm as she is. But that’s not how life works.
You can plan and estimate and figure and calculate all you want, but sometimes random events occur that can change the trajectory of the entire world. This is one of those things.
Martin is Hael’s father, so he was able to get a pass t
o come on campus today. Also, he’s in the GMP, so he knows about Havoc and all the things we do and the vendetta with his boss. He’s angry and he’s desperate and he’s violent, and so when he pulls the trigger to shoot his son, I’m right there in the path of that bullet like I was born to stand in that one place, to fall into line even as Hael lets out a roar of rage, even as he tries with valiant effort to fire his own gun at his father in a preemptive strike.
The thing is, it’s too late.
The sound of Martin’s gun going off is like a car backfiring, but the pain … the pain is indescribable. It’s like being impaled by a hot iron, one that sears and cooks the flesh as it goes in. I’m still standing, adrenaline flooding me and keeping me on my feet for a moment as Hael’s muscled body explodes into violent action.
There’s another gunshot and another and another. It feels like those shots, this pain, are occurring over hours, like time is passing slow and sticky like molasses. In reality, I’m pretty sure Martin’s shots are continuous and near instantaneous, so quick that Hael unloads his own gun into his father before charging the man’s sagging form and managing to tackle him before he even hits the ground.
In a fit of dark rage and tumultuous despair, Hael whips out the hunting knife from his ankle sheath—similar to the one Maxwell Barrasso is wearing, though I don’t know that at the time. All I know is that everything comes full circle, everything recycles, everything repeats and patterns and mimics. And even though I can’t see it, I think of that scar on Hael’s arm, the one that stretches from shoulder to fingertip.
The one that his father gave him.
So it seems appropriate that Hael would take that knife and that he would plunge it straight down into his father’s chest. There’s so much blood; it looks like Hael is being bathed in it. He stabs his dad again. Again. Again. As many times as Martin shot me, that’s how many times Hael stabs him.
Oh, he finally got him, I think, and that’s when I realize that something is really and truly wrong. That’s when I look down and I see all the blood, and I think briefly about that blood running down my thighs. I think of it running when I was on my period and Oscar fucked me. I think about it running when I had the miscarriage and the boys crowded around me in the bathroom. I think about the blood at the high school and the crown on my head and the time when Kali stabbed me. Every significant moment in my life is slathered in blood. Drenched. Soaked. Consumed by it.
Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Page 45