It’s so quiet in there, so peaceful and warm, that you wouldn’t know five masked boys had just run a train on yours truly.
“You can all stay where you are tonight,” Vic says finally, his eyes meeting mine as I crack them open. I think I was in the process of falling asleep just now. “I’ll figure out some sort of sleeping schedule when I have a moment to catch my fucking breath.”
“You mean, I’ll figure out a sleeping schedule,” I tell him, and he throws a warning look my way.
“Don’t test me, princess,” he says, his voice darkening in admonishment. I’m too lazy and sated and high to move or argue, so I don’t bother. “Get some rest, my friends. You have no fucking clue what Ophelia Mars is really like.”
Victor takes his usual pillow, folds it in half, and then lays down next to me. He does not take off his mask. Aaron stays right where he is, curled around me, his arm carefully draped to avoid the knife wound in my side. I stare at his cast as the leather chair where Oscar is sitting squeaks in protest.
I catch my breath, expecting him to leave the room now that it’s over … but he doesn’t. The TV shuts off, plunging us all into darkness, and I hear some more rustling before he finally settles down.
I expect at least a few of the boys to leave at some point, seeing as the bed isn’t exactly meant for five people, but when I wake up to a pounding fist on our front door the next morning, they’re all still in the room with me.
I could get used to that.
Seems appropriate that I’d drag the white trash of my upbringing into the ‘burbs to poison Aaron’s lawn.
“You little bitch!” Pamela screams as I stand on the porch in a pair of black silk panties and a long, white tee that just barely covers them. When I put my cigarette to my purple-painted lips, the shirt lifts up just enough to flash pale, creamy thigh at Mr. Peters (no relation to Oscar’s foster family), the nosy neighbor across the street.
As soon as Callum sees him looking at me, he fixes a blue stare on the man that should, by all rights, have him shitting his pants.
“For years, I’ve considered killing every man that looks at you wrong,” he says mildly, which is a super creepy fucking thing to say. I smile anyway. Seeing Pamela rage at the edge of the lawn because Cal won’t let her get any closer … that’s gold. I wish I could have this with my coffee and morning cigarette every day.
“Where is he?!” Pam screeches, clearly drunk off her ass and nursing a grudge that burns so bright it could probably be seen from space. She thinks I’ve stolen her man. Because I’m her daughter and that makes total sense for her to think that way. “You’ve been fucking him,” she slurs, pointing at me, so assured of her own convictions that she’s already decided that the first chance she gets, she’s going to slap me. I can just feel it. “You have been. And now he’s gone. What did you say to him?”
“Who are you talking about?” I ask mildly, as if her rant could be about anyone other than my illustrious stepdad, the man who raped her daughter into an early grave. A shiver passes over my skin, like Penelope’s hand from beyond the grave. Was her death truly suicide? Because it might not have been. It might not … but will I ever really know?
“You whore!” Pam screams again, breaking down into sobs and falling to her knees in the grass. As I look at her, dressed in an outfit worth several thousand dollars, I hate her all over again. Like, if she’d looked me in the face today and apologized, I might have been able to forgive her somehow. Not after this. “Where is Neil? What have you done with him?”
“Go home, Pamela,” I tell her, feeling superior, even though I’ve got no fucking right to. I couldn’t kill Kali. I couldn’t fucking do it. Even with Aaron and Callum telling me I should be proud of that, that it takes more courage to be kind than wield a knife … it doesn’t matter. We all know that in the last possible second, the culmination of all my revenge, I couldn’t do it.
So is it Pamela then? Is she the final roadblock on my journey to something new? Is she that strange feeling perched in my chest like a wayward gravestone?
I smoke my cigarette with one hand and sip my coffee with the other.
Fucking all my boys last night was this perfect mixture of heaven and hell. The threat of a punishment fulfilled, the promise of a reward. And then to wake up after all that to Pam pounding on the door? Jesus, it’s been a week.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me where he is,” she demands, sniffling and lifting her head up to stare at me. I wonder what demons she’s nursing? How many times has a man hit her? Or raped her? How much has she suffered? I know her own mother was the wife of an alcoholic who beat the fuck out of them both on a near weekly basis. They went to Prescott High, my grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side. Southside trash, just like their daughter. The daughter who married rich and, for a time, escaped this hell.
Now, that woman’s daughter … she’s come back to rule it.
I just … have to prove it. To Havoc. To myself.
“What is there to take from her?” I wonder, staring at the pathetic creature on the grass before me. “She has nothing left. She is nothing.”
Cal watches Pam for a moment before turning back to me, his blue eyes the same color as the clear winter sky above us. It might snow, and it doesn’t snow often in Oregon. Fucking Christ. Wildfires and snow. Goddamn motherfucking climate change.
I smoke my cigarette harder and hope it kills me just a little bit faster than the poison in my blood that says that fucking all five Havoc boys last night was a good idea. My pussy is so sore that I winced when I sat down on the toilet. I also found myself wet and desperate for another round.
Shit, what was I thinking, deciding that I wanted five red-blooded men all to myself?
My mouth twitches in bemusement.
“We have some ideas,” Cal tells me, all cryptic and shit. If I ask though, he’ll tell me. I know he will. The boys will never make the mistake of lying to me ever again. “What do you want me to do with her?”
I hand Cal the rest of my cigarette and my half-drunk cup of black coffee.
Without slippers, it’s cold as fuck out here, but I step off the porch and move halfway across the grass. We’re going to be the scandal of the neighborhood come the next neighborhood watch meeting. Aaron worked for years to keep this place classy, and the boys and I have dragged the southside over here to ruin it all.
“Why are you here? Why on earth would you ever think a pig-ass cop would come crawling at the feet of these boys?” I cock my head to one side as I study Pam’s blond hair. It used to be the same shade as my own, but she dyes it now. It’s a strange brassy-yellow color, overprocessed and dry. Maybe she couldn’t wiggle her way into one of her fancy friend’s hairstylists this month? Sometimes, when that happens, she remembers that she was the whore of Prescott High, heads over to the Winco on Olympic and buys a package of bleach for five bucks. “Go home. Get your shit together. Don’t wait around for Neil. Move somewhere tropical. You’re only thirty-four years old. Act like it.”
My mother stares back at me like I’ve stabbed her in the heart, scowling as fiercely as I’ve ever seen. That’s when I recognize it. She hates me. Really and truly and utterly hates me. Maybe she hated Penelope, too, blamed her for taking away her youth? Sure, she snagged the rich, older, married guy that would later become my dad, but was getting pregnant at sixteen really something she wanted?
Pretty sure all Pam ever wanted was to be free.
“Where is Neil?” she whispers one last time. Her 1994 Oldsmobile sits behind her, rusted out and looking like shit. It suits her, that car. Her clothes look ridiculous, like a doll dressed in the wrong outfit. I wonder if that’s how I’ll look next weekend, when I wear a designer dress to a fucking art gallery filled with millionaire and billionaire pedophiles.
“If I knew that, I certainly wouldn’t be telling you,” I inform her, thankful that Hael and Aaron are distracting the girls. If Heather saw our mom here, things would get a lot harder. I’m certain that if Pam sees the way I look at my little sister, she’ll know how important she is to me and try to take her.
I can’t let that happen.
“You know what,” Pam says, getting in my face in just such a way that Callum appears beside her, almost by magic. He stops just shy of touching her, but she can sense what almost just happened and moves back. “You brought this on yourself,” she hisses, backing up. “Remember that.”
Pamela climbs into her car and drives away in a cloud of exhaust.
I watch her go as Cal passes the coffee back to me; he’s already finished the cigarette.
“Do you think Ophelia would contact her?” I ask, because I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this. Havoc has a lot of balls up in the air. I remember once reading a quote from Nora Roberts, some reply to a reader who asked how she keeps it all together, her writing and her family. She said that some balls are made of glass and some of plastic; you have to decide which ones to drop and when.
I need to make sure I remember that.
“Maybe,” Cal agrees, looking from the street to my face. His blond hair, the bit that shows from beneath his hood, is gold in the morning sunlight. “But that’s okay. It won’t change anything.”
He steps toward me, pulling me into his arms. I love the way his smell—like talc and aftershave—sweeps over me and makes me dizzy. I’m drowning in his hoodie. When I nuzzle into it and accidentally spill coffee all down the front of him, he doesn’t seem to mind.
We’re twisted fate, me and Cal.
He recognizes that long before I ever do.
“Shall we?” he asks, holding out his hand. There’s a scar between his thumb and forefinger that reminds me of a heart. And I like that. I like that his ruined flesh can show me something pretty. I smile and offer my hand out, letting him lead me back inside.
“Oh, we’re holding hands now?” Victor asks, cigarette dangling out of his mouth as he sits at the dining room table and polishes a pair of men’s shoes. Barker Blacks, the same ones he wore to the wedding; they have metal skulls on top that suit Havoc’s aesthetic. Also, they’re expensive as fuck. They should go over well at the shitty gala. “How very sweet.”