Home > Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5)(2)

Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5)(2)
Author: C.M. Stunich

Ahh. A smile lights up my mouth. Victor. I trust our leader with Bernadette. A strange sort of calm settles over me, soothing some of that exquisite ache in my blood that screams at me to find Bernie, hold her, fuck her. Wetting my lips, I exhale and let those emotions go—for now. There’ll be plenty of time later for finding and holding and fucking, but in this moment, all I need is the violence.

I turn around to look up at Oscar, finding the white parts of his suit speckled with blood. Doesn’t show as much on the black. Isn’t that nice? That there’s a color you can wear that helps hide the bloodstains.

“Roger that, O.”

Oscar pauses and turns his head sharply, gritting his teeth in response to something. And then he’s gone, and the sound of bootsteps behind me is drawing my attention around. Three men come around the corner, pausing when they see me standing there, dressed in a hoodie and shorts and bleeding from the throat.

I can’t beat them all, not like this. My head is whirling and swimming, but I keep my mind focused through sheer force of will. Turning on my heel, I take off after Russ. I’m faster than the men chasing me, and that’s my only advantage right now.

Cupping one hand against my mouth, I let out a howl. A lone wolf in need of a pack.

As I round the corner behind the school, another gunshot drops one of the men pursuing me.

Oscar, again.

I keep after Russ. He’s the type of person that, once he gets your scent, never stops coming. If he’s here now, it’s because the GMP has decided that even a taste of Victor’s inheritance isn’t enough to put up with the risk that is inherently Havoc.

The enforcer pounds the pavement hard, leaving a trail of blood behind him, and then disappears into an abandoned apartment building three blocks down. Not surprising. We are deep in the heart of south Prescott here. I can practically hear its heartbeat, one-part dereliction and one-part unshakeable courage.

I wet my lips and slip around the back of the brick building, weaving my way through a sheet of ivy to climb into a first story window. Two of the men are still behind me, cursing as they struggle with the foliage.

While I wait for them to catch up, I creep through the shadows the way I taught Bernadette. Move with purpose, but don’t rush it. Be unpredictable. Never assume you’re safe, not even buried in the dark.

“Those little punks killed Will,” a voice is saying, the words echoing from upstairs. The speaker pauses briefly and curses. “He’s in the building with us.”

“Is he?” another voice replies, one that makes my jaw clench and my skin prickle. There are different sorts of monsters. I’ve always found the ones who use sexuality as a weapon to be the worst. Perversion is a terrible, terrible sin.

Who could that be, Callum? I wonder, making my body as small as possible so that I can crawl into the open door of an old sideboard. Carefully, I pull the door closed and then aim my weapon through the crack, waiting. I’m good at that, the waiting part.

It’s what makes me so fucking dangerous.

Rabid dogs that bite too quick are put down.

Two men come down the stairs, the weak light from inside the building doing little to illuminate their features. One of them is clearly Russ. I can tell by the metallic stink of him. The other … I’m hoping that the wild guess forming in my mind is wrong.

Maxwell Barrasso wouldn’t send his second-in-command to a high school, right?

I mean, if we weren’t so purely and honestly Havoc, then the forces the GMP marched through the doors of Prescott High would’ve been mad overkill. I wet my lips again, squinting to see if I can’t line up a shot.

“Well, where the fuck is he?” Russ asks when the two men that were chasing me finally make their way into the room.

“He came in through the kitchen window,” one of them says, and I notice Russ’ eyes immediately begin a scan of the room. It’s unlikely a man of my size would choose a place like this to hide, but they’ll check here. Not yet, maybe, but soon. “No fucking clue where he is now, but Kody is dead.”

“This the blond kid we’re talking about?”

That voice … One of our girls said that when she heard Maxwell’s second, Mason Miller, speak for the first time, that she felt like she’d already lost. She said that when she got home, she took a scalding shower and cried as if she’d been assaulted.

And Prescott girls … they don’t say that sort of shit lightly.

This just has to be Mason Miller.

I aim for his head. Even if I were to die here today—I won’t—then killing Mason might just make it all worth it. He’s one of Maxwell’s secret weapons. To remove the threat of the GMP from Springfield, we’ll need both Maxwell and Mason.

Just as my finger tenses on the trigger, Mason’s eyes flick to me. I can’t really see his face. Shit, it’s bathed in shadow and obscured by dust motes that dance through the early morning air the way I used to, effortless, weightless …

He drops down just before I pull the trigger, so I don’t bother taking the shot. I need this bullet. It’s my very last.

Mason rises to his feet in a movement so fluid that I wonder if he, too, was ever a dancer. He moves across the dirty ground, littered with used condoms and needles, and kicks the door in. Bits of wood splinter and dig into my skin, but I barely notice the pain, blue-painted fingers curling around the edges of the opening as I drag myself out and throw my body into Mason.

Maintaining close contact with any one of the men will help reduce my chances of being shot. But grappling with Mason is not the same as grappling with Russ. He manages to get a hand free, hitting up against the bottom of my chin and causing me to bite my tongue. Fresh, hot blood fills my mouth as he throws a punch that likely would’ve burst my eyeball if it’d made contact. Instead, I manage to avoid it and his fist flies into the wall.

Four against one. Odds that normally wouldn’t scare me. But Mason is different. Russ is dangerous. The other two men are just add-ons at this point, but even they’re a step-up from the Charter Crew’s best and brightest.

An elbow hits me in the chest before I register that Mason’s changed his tactics. He’s trying to drive me toward a broken window this time, likely in the direction of additional GMP members. I turn and grapple the edge of the staircase, hauling my body up through a break in the spindles and finding my feet even as Russ fires several times in my direction.

Drywall dust fills the air, clouding the few lit spots in the unending darkness of the building. There are so many like this in Prescott. Havoc knows them all. Even before I trip over the first body, I know we lost a few members of our crew in here today.

There’s nothing I can do to help the dead, so I don’t stop. Instead I continue up the stairs until I hit the metal door that leads to the roof, shoving through it with both palms and surveying the space around me.

About ten years ago, the city started changing its zoning laws to allow buildings to be built closer and closer together. The apartment next door is practically within touching distance. Neither of them is particularly tall—about five stories—but a fall from here would kill me.

I tilt my head to one side, trying to calculate the odds.

The sound of pursuit behind me makes the decision relatively easy. I’d rather risk falling to my death than end up in Mason’s grasp. I’d be lucky to simply die at his hands. Chances are, if he can, he’ll take me alive and try to torture Havoc’s secrets out of me.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I pull in a deep breath, remembering that day in the studio when I danced for Bernadette like a beast performing some sort of primal mating ritual. I open my eyes again, lips twisting up in a smile. That’s what I did, didn’t I? Danced. Begged. Pleaded for her to let me touch her the way I’ve always dreamed of.

That’s what drives me when I take a few steps back, brace myself for the jump, and take off for the edge of the roof. Even though it kills my knees and makes me wish I were hopped up on painkillers, I flex my muscles and leap, landing on the gravel surface of the neighboring roof.

Agony screams through me, rippling from the carefully rebuilt knobs of my knees, but I ignore it. I’m used to pain. So used to it, in fact, that when I see it in others—Bernadette’s face, for example—I find it beautiful.

Breathtaking, really.

I don’t bother rising to my feet, crawling over to a nearby hole and lowering myself into the ruined space until I’m standing on a nest of pine needles and wet drywall. It smells like must and piss in here—typical Prescott—but there’s something else, a strange clove and smoke smell that gives me just enough warning to avoid getting my head blown off.

Ducking into an open door, I put myself behind a brick wall, my mind assessing what I just saw.

Mason was there in the dark, in the opposite building. There’s a broken window on both my side and his. Likely, right now, he’s climbing between the two spaces. That’s what I’d be doing, after all. If he’s anticipated my movements to a T, then we clearly calculate our next moves in a similar matter.

I heft the handgun from my hoodie pocket, eyes traveling the length of the room, sweeping across the ceiling. I won’t be caught unawares from above, not the way I surprised those men in the hallway. I reach up and adjust the skeleton mask on my face. Like everything else with Havoc, we create our own traditions. Skeleton faces and wolf howls and a girl that’s too wild for one boy to possess on his own.

Crawling across the floor, I allow myself to peek around the corner.

I don’t see Mason anywhere.

Taking my phone from my pocket, I try to send a text but pause when I hear movement from the next room. Russ appears on the staircase and, from somewhere deeper in the building, I hear the movements of several people. Maybe even a dozen.

I grind my teeth and decide to finish my text.

Mare’s nest.

A perfect complement to Bernie’s text from earlier. The rest of our group chat is filled with things like where are you? and two men in the gym, stay safe. I manage to send that off, but that’s it. Mason comes up out of a trapdoor about two feet from me. That’s when I realize that we’re in what amounts to an attic; he’s used the access point to surprise me.

   
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