He smiles at me, but it isn't a nice smile.
It's a smile nightmares are made of, and I hate how much I love that.
At this point, I'm fairly certain we're soul mates. We must be, with how fucked-up we are. Put us together, and the fucked-up factor amplifies by about a hundred times. I put a finger up, pointing directly at Vic. He's the leader: Aaron is his responsibility.
“Fine,” I start, poking him in the chest. “You let him die, and I'll cut your fucking balls off.” Nurse Whitney makes a small squeaking sound behind me, but I ignore her. She reaped the fruits of others’ suffering, of their labor, their sacrifice. She recruited girls for Principal Vaughn’s bullshit and reveled in that glory. I really should've added her to my list; Oscar was right.
Vic snorts and grabs my hand, bringing my finger to his lips and sucking it between them in the lewdest possible way. Hael shakes his head and puts his hands on his hips, clearly annoyed with Vic and me and our weird shit.
“If he dies, I'll sharpen the knife,” Victor says, dropping my hand, but I snatch his wrist before he can turn away, raising his dark brows my direction. “Yes, darling?”
“Don't pull that darling shit on me,” I growl, yanking him close. He comes to me, but not because I actually have the strength to move him, but because we're drawn together. Because we're beautiful poison together. Perfect toxicity. “You and Hael come back to me. If either of you gets arrested …”
“Yes, balls, knife, no Havoc babies.” Vic grabs me by the back of the hair with a punishing grip and crushes his lips to mine, taking down my walls with that lush mouth of his. “Don't worry: I'm not going to the hospital.” He lifts his head up and gestures in Hael's direction. “He is. I'm going to find out why none of our crew told us a goddamn pig was at the house.” Vic scowls as he pulls away, nodding at Callum as he passes.
My eyes meet Cal’s blue ones, and I lick my lower lip.
Aaron's body is broken; I'm worried about Callum's soul.
“This is so crazy,” Whitney murmurs from behind me. I turn my head slowly as Vic and Hael slip out the door, just two shadows in the night. Whatever she sees on my face must scare the shit out of her because she stands up, leaving a pale-faced and groaning Aaron alone on the sofa.
“What can we do to help him while we wait?” I ask, my voice a cold thread of steel. “Because if he dies here tonight, so do you.” Whitney's face pales and she takes another step back, looking at me like she's considering calling the cops and risking sending us all to jail, just to save her own ass. What she doesn't know or maybe just hasn't figured out, is that Callum isn’t going to let her get anywhere near a phone, a door, or a window. She's stuck here, for better or worse.
“We need to elevate his legs and keep him warm,” she says, swallowing hard, stray strands of hair coming loose from her bun and sticking to her sweaty forehead. She's got full-on hooker makeup on her face, probably from some long-ago Halloween party. My throat tightens up as I think about the altercation in the fun house, of Danny aiming the gun at me, of Callum lifting the baseball bat.
Fuck.
“He could go into shock …” Whitney continues, giving Callum a wary look.
But she needn't worry about him.
If something happens to Aaron, I'll become her worst nightmare.
“Fine. Get a warm rag, some blankets, pillows. Get him orange juice or something.” I bark out the orders, even though I have no clue what I'm doing. But somebody has to do something, so it may as well be me. Take him to a hospital, Bernadette. The rational part of my mind is screaming at me, but the other part, the darker part, is fully immersed in the world of Havoc.
No cops, no hospitals.
Aaron could lose his sisters. He could go to jail. We all could.
We deal with this our way.
“Did she stutter?” Callum asks, leaning casually against the wall, hands in the front pocket of his hoodie. His voice is pleasant enough, his expression serene, almost too calm, as he turns blue eyes over to Whitney, spurring her into action.
I give Cal a look of thanks as I sit down on the edge of the sofa, sweeping Aaron's auburn hair back from his forehead. My throat feels tight, like there's a sob stuck in there somewhere that I'm just too stubborn—or perhaps just too broken—to let out.
“He isn’t going to die,” Callum tells me, like he somehow knows this for certain. I look down at Aaron for several quiet moments, trying to commit his face to memory, the smooth line of his jaw, the tiny scar on his right earlobe. But then I realize I’m doing it and why I’m doing it, and I get furious all over again.
“You can’t know that,” I growl, turning back to Callum and finding his eyes not on Aaron, but on me. We stare at each other for a long time before he finally speaks in that beautifully dark voice of his, like his vocal cords are shaped from the shadows of Halloween night.
“He won’t go, not when there’s so much uncertainty between the two of you. He’s never stopped loving you, and he’s never had the chance to truly prove how sorry he is for the things that happened.” Cal pauses as Whitney comes back into the room, carrying a glass pitcher of orange juice and several glasses. He takes one from her and then looks her dead in the face. “Sit down at the kitchen table, and don’t try anything I might not like.” He taps the end of the bloodied baseball bat with the toe of his boot and her face pales even further, a feat I hadn’t considered possible.
Callum brings me some juice, letting his fingers linger against mine for longer than is really necessary. Neither of us misses how much they shake, but we both know that emotional wounds can be dealt with later. Physical ones have an expiration date.
I try my best to get Aaron to sip some juice, but he isn’t moving. Fuck, he’s barely breathing. After a while, I give up and drink it myself. The sugar rush goes straight to my head, giving my adrenaline-addled body the boost it needs. I set the glass down on the pristine surface of the coffee table, hoping it leaves a ring and ruins the furniture.
“Happy Halloween,” I whisper to Aaron, leaning down to press my lips to the clammy skin of his forehead.
I'm going to give Vic and Hael two hours, no more.
And then, even if it costs me everything, I'm taking Aaron to a fucking hospital.
If he dies, something inside of me will die with him, and there isn't that much left of me to give. I'm a tree with barren branches, one lone blossom clinging to a wooden wasteland. I will not let this part of my childhood go, no matter what the cost.
Pretty sure the Havoc boys like to torture me. Must help them get off or something. It's quite literally two hours and three minutes into this nightmare before we hear back from Hael and Vic. There's a loud knock at the front door of Nurse Yes-Scott's house, a sound like a cop’s knock, the pounding of a frantic fist.
Callum checks the peephole, and then wrenches it open, revealing a blood-spattered Hael Harbin.
“What in the actual fuck?!” I shout, standing up as Hael steps inside, clutching a plastic grocery bag by his side. His face and chest are drenched in crimson, and he scowls as he swipes a hand over his full lips, smearing blood across his too-handsome features. His honey-brown eyes look wicked, surrounded by all of that crimson. I’m surprised by how scared I am for him. Little bit more than just a sidepiece, eh, Bernie? That’s when I know for certain that I’m well and truly screwed. Havoc has its claws in me, and it’s never letting go. I force my next words out through clenched teeth. “Are you okay?”
I pray to every dark god I don’t believe in that it’s not his blood. How messed up is that? I want to hear that he slit some asshole’s throat, that Hael isn’t hurt in any way, shape, or form.
“I broke one of these fucking things,” he says, handing me the bag. When I glance down to see what's inside, I find several sealed bags of blood and some clear bags of saline, among other things. My stomach turns as I lift my head to look at him. “Ran into trouble on my way back. Mitch is on the warpath tonight; our boys are even starting to refer to his goons as the Charter Crew.” He shakes his head and drags his arm over his mouth again, flicking the blood onto Whitney’s perfect white walls as I pass the bag to her.
She looks into it, face paling, before lifting her brown eyes up to Hael's bloodied face.
“How did you get this?” she whispers, but Hael just laughs. He's not going to answer her. She should know better than to speak to us like we're anything but her captors.
“Never you mind that, sugar tits,” he says, lighting up a cigarette with shaking hands. Hael might look like a cocky asshole right now, but he's as afraid for Aaron as I am. I flick my attention back to him as Nurse Yes-Scott starts to set up a blood transfusion, right there in her Pottery Barn-inspired living room. Fitting, I think, since everything in here was paid for with blood money. “Use some of your wasted medical knowledge on fixing up our friend.”
“I'm not a surgeon,” Whitney begins, but the look she gets from Hael clearly relays the fact that we give zero fucks. “But I'll … I'll try.”
“Try really fucking hard,” Hael warns as Callum closes the door behind him, and Hael strips off his shirt, using it to scrub the blood from his skin. If this were any other moment, I’d most definitely appreciate his crimson-covered chest. “Vic'll be back soon. Doubtful you want to hear what he'll say if you screw this up.”
Whitney purses her fuchsia-painted lips, giving Hael a side-eye as he smokes a cigarette in her living room, but she gets to work, inserting an IV into Aaron's arm. The bullet is still inside of him; what if it’s lodged next to an artery or something? What if Whitney’s right, and we really do need a surgeon to get it out?
Minute by minute, Bernadette. Take it minute by minute.
Hael takes a seat on the coffee table while I stand near the foot of the couch, watching as Whitney does her thing, removing Victor’s careful stitches and digging into the wound with what I can only hope are a clean pair of household tweezers. This is so wrong, so wrong on so many levels. I turn away, but only for a minute. I can’t let that bitch work on my ex without at least keeping an eye on him.