The branch groans, and the rope creaks, but all I can hear is the thumping of my heart as I clamp my hands over my ears.
“Bernadette,” Vic says, putting his hands on my wrists and pulling them away from my ears. “Pay attention.”
With a sick, lurching sensation in my stomach, I move toward the edge of the roof, guided by his hand, and find that the silk purple rope tying Don's throat has come undone.
He's lying on the ground groaning, unable to get up but most certainly not dead.
My eyes flick up to Oscar's gray ones, so devoid of emotion, so goddamn scary.
“I'm a master of knots,” is all he says in that Lucullan smooth voice of his.
I'm at a loss for words, something that doesn't happen to me often anymore. The Havoc Boys have just given Donald Asher the sensation of dying without actually having done anything at all.
The way they locked me in that closet or chased me in the woods.
That's a special sort of cruelty, isn't it?
One that leaves no trace.
“Let's get down there before the little creep wakes up,” Hael says with a smirk, not at all disturbed by what he's just done. Is it fucked-up that I'm not either? That I feel like Donald got less than he deserved?
We head inside and down the stairs to find Don struggling to get up, choking and shaking, his pants stained with urine.
“Darling,” Vic says to me as he puts his boot on the back of Don's neck and pushes him to the ground. “I want you to go back out the gate and wait for us in the trees. Callum'll go with you.”
“Wait, what?” I ask, snapping my face up from Don's sweaty one. “This is my request; I get to watch.”
“Not if I say you don't.” Vic's face is hard when he lifts his attention up to me, and I feel myself bristling. He's testing me again, giving me another chance to prove myself.
What choice do I have?
So with one, final look at Don, I head back toward the front gates, and the slumped security officer, the mysterious Callum Park on my heels.
“What are they going to do to him?” I ask, feeling my heartrate pick up, my palms sweat. I'm ready for this. Vic knows it. He sent me away on purpose, a punishment for last week.
Callum shrugs, dressed in his sleeveless hoodie and shorts, a pair of boots on his feet. He leans back against the brick half-wall, and the black iron posts that adorn it, curling his fingers around the bars. His blues eyes are bright inside the holes of the ski mask.
“They probably won't kill him,” he says, and my brows go up. Probably. Do I want Don dead? What was it that Oscar had said, “How far, exactly, you want this to go: that's up to you.”
How far do I want this to go?
Don is a privileged, spoiled monster. I doubt I’m the only girl he's tried to hurt, and I won’t be the last.
I bite my lower lip, shred it with my teeth, but I don’t move from that spot. I don’t know how to.
After about twenty minutes, the boys come back through the gate, and all of them … are speckled with red droplets of blood.
“Let's go,” Vic says, and as he passes me, he pauses and waits until I meet his eyes. “You can cross that name off your list.”
Even though I know I shouldn't, I creep back toward the gate anyway and glance toward the tree where Don was hung.
There’s no sign of him, of anything at all amiss.
“Come on,” Aaron says, grabbing my arm from behind and tugging me toward him. “Vic wants me to take you home.”
“Hael, pinch Don’s car; we’ll strip it for parts. Cal, crack the safe in his room. Oscar, you deal with the security cameras.” Vic barks orders like he was born to it, tearing off his ski mask as Aaron leads me away into the darkness, his fingers smearing blood across the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
Monday morning gives me a welcome reprieve from the hellhole I call my house. As I take my little sister Heather outside to meet the bus, I can hear my mother and stepfather having one of their infamous screaming matches in the basement.
Eventually, it'll devolve into something worse. They'll start hitting each other and, tit for tat, they'll leave bruises and welts and scratch marks. The atmosphere at home is so toxic that I feel nauseous as I kiss Heather on the forehead and smooth her light brown hair back with my hand.
“Have fun at school, okay, kiddo?” I ask, the only light in my day coming from that little girl's face. There's nothing else for me, no other star to punctuate the velvety blackness of night. When I look at her, I see Pen’s face, and my heart breaks and shatters into a million jagged fragments.
“I always have fun at school,” she says, wrinkling her nose at me, and then waving as she turns and takes off for the bus, ponytail bobbing, the pink charms on her backpack tinkling merrily.
“Forgot how cute she was,” a voice says from my right, and I jump, turning to find Aaron waiting next to his minivan, smoking a cigarette. The screams from inside the house echo out the still open front door, and I cringe, gritting my teeth.
“Yeah, well,” I say, because all of the mean, horrible things I want to scream at him are stuck inside my throat, choking me to death. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to get them all out. Or any of them, really. “What are you doing here?”
“Might not be safe for you to bike to school today,” Aaron says, waiting at the curb as I head up the walk, grab my backpack, and close the door behind me, silencing the screams.
For a moment, I just stand there with my hand on the knob, breathing in deep.
Then I turn and look at Aaron, really look at him. His chestnut hair is tousled and wavy, his eyes the color of fall, this green-going-gold, just like the leaves on the maple that shadows our ugly street with some much-needed color. He’s wearing a red t-shirt, too tight across his broad chest, and a pair of worn jeans with boots.
His body is made up of long, lean muscles, all of them earned on the streets. None of those contrived steroid-and-gym muscles that make up the football team for Fuller High—the prissy upper-middle class school across town.
“Why? What happened?” I ask. Besides Donald, groaning on the ground, the loose rope still clinging to his thin neck. The blood speckling the boys’ clothes. The way Vic looked at me as he swept past.
Vic.
Fucking Vic.
I feel like he’s gotten into my head, like he’s invading every pore, climbing down my throat, suffocating me.
“The Ensbrook brothers stopped by the game at Fuller last night and started some shit. Broke the JV quarterback’s arm, roughed up some cheerleaders. They did it wearing masks, and everyone’s on our asses about it. Like they think we’d waste our time on something as stupid as that.” Aaron scoffs and turns away, like he can barely stand to hold my gaze for long. “You should’ve gone with your grandmother,” he says again which just infuriates me.
You don’t know the whole story! I want to scream.
Grandma isn’t related to Heather. Even if she wanted to take her in—I don’t think she does—she couldn’t. Heather shares DNA with the Thing. If I left, if I went to Nantucket and lounged on the beach in a bikini, dated the cute son of a fisherman, let myself have a normal life … then Pen wouldn’t be avenged, and Kali wouldn’t pay, and Heather would be alone.
For some reason though, when Aaron looks at me with that stupid handsome face of his, all I feel is anger.
“Let’s go,” I snap, moving past him, and feeling his fingers grab the edge of my backpack. I glance back at him. He has the letters H.A.V.O.C. tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand, just like all the other boys.
Their own not-so-very-subtle gang symbol.
“Eventually, we’re going to have to learn to talk to each other,” he says, his voice hard, so different from the boy I used to know. There’s a fragment of that old Aaron in there somewhere, but that one bright ray of sunshine is swallowed by dark clouds. One day, probably someday soon, it’ll cease to exist.
“You think so?” I ask, and he sighs, raking his fingers through his hair. The muscles in his right arm bunch and swell with the movement, causing the sleeve of his shirt to ride up. I can see the names of his sister and cousin tattooed there, right over the generous swell of his bicep.
“You’re a part of Havoc now,” Aaron says, and I scoff, yanking out of his grip and reaching for the car door. He stops me, pushing in front of me and forcing me back a few steps. Our eyes meet, and I don’t care that he smells like bacon and maple syrup, that I know he cooked for the girls this morning, or that everything he does is for them.
Just like how everything I do is for Heather.
“I’m a plaything for Havoc now,” I say, and Aaron growls at me, grabbing me by the upper arms and staring into my face, almost pleadingly.
“Were you listening when Vic told you the price? Or are you so intent on your own destruction that you can’t see beyond the confines of your hate for yourself?”
Anger and pain flare through me, and I tear myself from Aaron’s gaze, leaving scratches on my upper arms.
“You weren’t even there,” I challenge, meeting his eyes, wishing he’d shove me or slap me, so I had an excuse to lunge at him, take out all the frustrations I’ve ever felt toward him and his gang on his hard body.
“I was behind the curtain,” he spits back, narrowing his eyes dangerously. “Because I couldn’t stand to sit there and watch you make the biggest mistake of your life. You would’ve been lucky if Vic had asked you to be our whore, and nothing else. You’re not getting it, Bernadette: you are a part of Havoc now. Forever.”
Forever … Such a foreign concept. Something that exists and can never be broken, something that won’t shatter, no matter how many times it’s tossed or torn or trampled on.
My mind can’t even comprehend it.
“You’re a member of the group,” Aaron repeats on the end of a long, tired sigh. “Nobody else wanted this but Vic. Nobody. It’s too much, too personal, it brings you too close. But he wouldn’t let it go.” He turns away from me for a moment, eyes burning, mouth pursed. “He wouldn’t let you go,” he adds, but the words are so light, I can almost convince myself I didn’t hear them.