“Tastes like shit, huh?” he asks, sighing as he flicks the stack of black pancakes with an inked finger. Clearly, he’s avoiding answering my question. Vic grabs the pack of cigarettes from the counter and lights one up, holding it between his lips as he watches me with a guarded look in his dark eyes. It’s like, as open as we were with each other upstairs, we’ve both buttoned-down and closed ourselves off.
This, this is a waiting game.
We need to see if the other boys come back from the station, and then we need to find Callum—before the feds do. Or the GMP. That is, if they don’t have him already.
“If the GMP took Callum,” I begin, watching as Vic pulls his borrowed phone close (this one’s from a member of our crew) and taps an app for a food delivery service. It reminds me of the night we spent together after he gave me a much-needed pep talk in that infamous closet of his. We’re so similar, me and Vic. I kept pretending like I don’t understand him and his motivations, but in reality, it’s just because I was too stubborn—or too afraid—to understand myself. “Then we’d know, right? I mean, they’d try to contact us somehow to hold that over our heads?”
Vic gives me a long, steady look that scares the shit out of me. And the reason it does that is because if I were to give somebody else that look, I’d be saying one thing and one thing only: I’m sorry.
I grit my teeth.
“It’s what you suggested before, when Aaron—”
“It’s what I thought happened to Aaron when Ophelia was just a conniving bitch with the Charter Crew as her pets. But the GMP …” Victor trails off and closes his eyes for a moment, swiping his hand over his face.
I just sit there and stare at him, and then I grab a cigarette from the same pack and gesture at him for a light. He flicks the flame on the lighter as he stares back at me, the orange glow highlighting the masculine lines of his face. Everything about Victor Channing screams primal, male, terrifying.
I keep my eyes on his until the cherry of my cigarette crackles with heat.
“I ordered pizza,” Vic tells me, and I can feel his eyes on me even when I look away.
We both pause at the sound of a key in a lock and exchange looks. If someone is here, and none of our crew bothered to inform us that someone was on the way …
That can mean only one thing: Havoc.
But which letter? Which motherfucking letter?
I stand up from the stool, heart pumping so furiously that if I were to nick my carotid the way we did Danny’s … this entire room would be bathed in blood.
The front door opens, and Oscar slips in, letting it swing shut behind him. It takes me a second to recognize that it’s him since he’s no longer wearing his suit. I imagine that, like with me and Vic, the cops took his clothes.
He reaches back and flicks the deadbolt. And then, when he turns his gray eyes over to me, I swear that his attention cuts through the shadows like a ghost on a haunt. Delving into me. Owning me. Possessing me.
My breath catches, and I have to lean back and curl my fingers around the edge of the countertop, just to stay standing upright.
“Shit, they give you the nth degree, too?” Vic asks, and Oscar turns his head very slowly to look at our boss. My husband. His longtime friend. So many fucking things. My eyes rake over Oscar’s body, taking in the long, lean lines of him, the myriad tattoos showing on his exposed arms, above the scooped neck of the white wifebeater he’s wearing. The sweats he’s got on—they look like they might be part of a Prescott gym uniform—sagging so low that I can see a band of ink between his lower belly and his waistband.
“They know a lot of things,” Oscar says, turning back to me and moving very, very slowly down the length of the living room toward the kitchen. As he goes, he grabs a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a light from the top of a shelf, flicking the wheel and firing up the end of one. By the time he gets to me, he’s pulling in a long drag and then exhaling pretty white smoke into the darkness surrounding me.
He taints it, too, Oscar does. He taints it fuckin’ filthy, and I love everything about that, about the way he poisons the air, the way his stare is venom and his heart ice, his trauma so deep it could make canyons in his soul. That’s what I like, all of it.
“But not enough to keep me,” Oscar finishes finally, tossing the pack of smokes onto the counter and then removing the cigarette from his sharp and dangerous mouth with two fingers. He stares down at me, and I feel like I can hear it, the pounding of his heart. His signature cinnamon smell grabs me by the throat, pun intended. “We have to make some moves—and quick.”
“Do you know where Callum is?” I ask, and Oscar goes very still, like a vampire who’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. That’s a scary thing to witness, watching someone turn into a statue of ink and blood and bullshit.
“No,” Oscar breathes darkly, and Vic sighs, reaching out to take the smoke from Oscar’s fingers. As if this is one of Callum’s choreographed dances, Oscar’s hands find their way to my hips. In an instant, his breath is stirring my hair and my eyes are closing of their own accord. “The last I saw of him, he was outside the school, chasing someone.”
“Shit,” I grind out, because I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like it at fucking all. “Chasing who?”
Oscar gives a slow, simple shake of his head, and I grit my teeth in anger. Not at him. At myself. At Prescott. At the world in general. Callum Park should be at, like, fucking Juilliard or something, not chasing down Nazis during a school shooting.
See if the other boys come home, Bernie. Then call Ophelia. Make her put you in touch with Maxwell. If he has Callum, or he knows what happened to him, he’ll tell you. He’ll do that because he’s a monster, and monsters always recognize other monsters.
And their weaknesses.
The Havoc Boys are my strength, but they’re also my weakness. My life force and my demise. My rise and fall. Fuck.
“I was worried about you,” Oscar says, and a quip hops right to my naked lips, the ones that feel foreign because they’re not covered in brightly tinted wax, brilliant jewel tones of stolen color that represent so many different things. It’s part of my armor, that lipstick, that color, those opinions. Because if I can tell you what lipstick I’m wearing and why, then I don’t have to answer all those other pesky questions that a person can pose: who are you? what do you do? where are you going in life and why?
“I was worried about you, too,” I say, my eyelashes fluttering as Oscar takes my face in inked fingers and then swiftly drops his mouth to my lips, tasting like mint and cucumber water. I bet they gave him that to loosen him up, to make him feel less like a prisoner and more like a friend. But people like us are not their friends. And they’d best remember that.
Oscar draws back from me slightly, looking me right in the face from a distance that’s both physically and emotionally close. Right now, in this moment, I know he can see every single part of me—bad stuff as well as good.
“We need to call Ophelia,” Oscar says, turning his head away sharply, like the level of intimacy between us in that kitchen is too much for him. He keeps touching me, and I remember my question from the ski lodge: do you want me to keep touching you?
He confirmed it.
Look, I’ll give credit where credit is due: he was marginally better after that night. Of course, that was only two nights ago. Trauma does, of course, accelerate things. Emotion. Trust. Those tight bonds that hold you together when the whole world is trying so desperately to tear you apart.
His hold on me is endless and eternal; it isn’t unbreakable because the possibility of being broken was never even an option. It just is. A fact. As sure as the moon rises.
I swipe a hand over my face to clear the poetry. Jesus, give me a traumatic moment, my fingers buried in some sister-fucker’s eye sockets, and endless amounts of blood, and I start thinking my everyday thoughts in purple prose. What I was trying to say is: I’m glad that Oscar’s back. Because I love him. And I know that, in his own special secret way, he loves me, too.
“I visited Ophelia,” Vic says, surprising me. He hadn’t mentioned that until now. To be fair, we haven’t been here for all that long. Two or three hours, tops. Most of it spent speaking with our crew via text or phone—oh, and that quickie fuck in the bathroom. “She was with Trinity, at a restaurant in one of those fucking tree neighborhoods.”
I smile at that, but it’s a sad smile. It’ll remain that way until I see the other boys. Callum, in particular. How is it that we just got Aaron back and now Callum is missing? That doesn’t seem fair, does it? In books and movies and shit, isn’t it always the girl who gets kidnapped and spirited away? Patriarchal bullshit, to be sure, but I’d trade my life for any one of these boys in an instant.
Bet they’d be pissed if they knew that. Probably spank me some more, too.
I better tell them, just as soon as we’re all together again.
“Well?” Oscar asks, an edge of annoyance making the single word feel sharp, like broken glass. “What did they have to say about the … incident?”
Prescott High Massacre.
That was the title of the article I read, written by a reporter by the name of Emma Jean. Fakest fucking name I’ve ever heard in my life, but shit, maybe she’s on the run from someone or something? Who the fuck knows? The reason that I recognize her name is that she was infamous for being able to get Scarlett Force, the locally famous female racer with the three boyfriends, to give exclusive interviews.
I shake my head, reaching up to rub at my temple with two fingers. I got the ever-living shit kicked out of me today and the bruises to prove it. My body is mottled and purple, like a corpse, just after the blood settles and discolors the skin. Shiver. Shit, I’m even creeping myself out now. Cal would be proud.
My throat tightens as I cock a brow at Vic.
He stares back at me, eyes like crows, a mouth of lush heat, muscles that get every feminine part of me to purr and rub like a cat in heat. I blink a few times and he sighs.