He almost didn’t have to live this life. He almost got the fuck out of here.
The thing is, you don’t always have to run to make things better. You can fight. You can inflict change on a world that rallies against it as if it’s the fucking plague. That’s what we’re going to do here, take this city under our dark wings and give it the underground it deserves, one that allows the normal people who dwell in the sun and live on the surface a chance to live a normal life.
People like Heather, like Kara, like Ashley. People like that girl, Alyssa, that we rescued from the beach house. People like Ms. Keating. Even people like Sara Young.
Because no matter what, the world will have an underground, an unsavory fragment of darkness that casts shadows across anything that dares to play in the sun. If we can control it, if we can redirect that darkness, funnel it, punish it, leash it, then we can change things for Prescott. For the city. Maybe even more than that.
I have a feeling that if we can do this, if we can drive the GMP out of our borders, if we can subvert Ophelia’s plans and collect Victor’s inheritance, that we’ll be able to do all that and more.
Like I said, I still want to believe.
Believe the world is good.
Believe that love prevails.
Believe that there is justice.
Callum drops his hand, shuddering as my fingers probe his neck. The cut is gnarly, but obviously not deep enough to have severed any major arteries. Thank fucking god. We all remember Danny and how quickly a neck wound can result in an earthy bed six feet under.
I relent and go back to the wound on his shoulder instead. He’s right: the one on his neck is fairly shallow. We’ll wrap it with gauze. I wouldn’t attempt to stick a fucking needle in my lover’s throat anyway.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t protect you better,” Cal tells me, but I don’t look at him. I’m too busy working on the wound at his shoulder, the one that scares me even more than the gunshot.
“You saved my life,” I tell him, thinking of his masked face appearing from the vent in the ceiling. “And that’s not the first time either. Don’t apologize to me for anything.” I continue my work in silence, glancing over to find him with his eyes closed, racked with pain.
Once I finish with his shoulder, I put the kit away and try to climb off the bed.
Cal snatches my wrist and yanks me back, so hard and so fast that I end up off-balance, falling into him and landing on his chest as he sinks back into the pillows. He sighs and curls his arms around me, holding me close. My fingers clench against his bloody hoodie of their own accord.
I just can’t resist the rhapsodic poison that is Havoc.
“Let me get you something to smoke or drink,” I murmur, but Cal just tucks my head against the side of his scarred and ruined neck, stroking blue-tipped fingernails down my spine. I can feel the heat of his fingertips, even through the Ruth Bader Ginsburg tank that I’m wearing. RIP to one of the baddest bitches around.
“In a minute,” Cal breathes into my hair, making me shiver. The idea that he’s having this sort of effect on me is just further proof that I’m already intoxicated by his presence. “Let me feel your heartbeat first.”
We lay there together until the sun has fully risen and the night’s ebony fingers have furled from the sky. Then, as Callum sleeps softly beneath me, I get up and go in search of whiskey and a few joints.
“He still alive up there?” Vic asks when I appear at the bottom of the stairs, streaked with Cal’s blood and dizzy enough that I wish I’d had some of that fucking OJ before coming down. I don’t want Vic or Hael or Oscar to sense that someone’s wrong before I get a chance to tell them.
“He seems okay,” I hazard, drumming my chipped nails against the round top of the newel post. This Prescott bitch needs to get her fucking nails done. Like, Jesus, for a Prescott girl to have nails like I do now is considered a cardinal motherfucking sin. If you can’t afford to get your nails done, you ask one of Stacey’s girls and she’ll do them for you provided her crew doesn’t hate you.
Stacey.
I sigh, and the sound is distinctly melancholy. I’m mourning our school’s queen bee for the friend she could’ve been, for the good person that she was.
Aaron is asleep on one sofa, clearly taking a shift while Vic sits with a shotgun and a cigarette at the table. Oscar is on his iPad, glancing briefly my way as I stand there, wrapped in a thick fog of emotion.
I have a lot to process.
We don’t have a lot of time.
Tomorrow, we’ll move to a safe house and I’ll probably spend every second there missing the safe, easy normality of Aaron’s house.
Hael appears from outside, stepping in the sliding glass doors as he taps the cordless receiver against his lips. His brown eyes slide over to mine and he smiles, the expression skin-deep at best. He’s stressed-out. We all are.
“Brittany says she thinks her father is gearing up for a raid. She says it’s habit for him to hide in his shop all night writing letters to the family, just in case. I’m inclined to believe her on this one, especially since I know she’s mentioned this to me sometime in the past.” Hael sets the phone down on the table as my eyes sweep past him to Vic, back to Oscar.
Now would be a good time to mention the miscarriage …
“Don’t leave me, prima ballerina,” Cal whispers huskily from behind me. I jump, spinning around to his dark chuckle and finding him leaning his elbows on the railing at the top of the stairs. “You really think I’d let you slip away?”
“I’m getting you something to smoke, at the very least,” I grumble, going for what I know is one of the boys’ recreational weed stashes on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. I’m too short to reach it, even at five-ten, so Hael reaches over me and snatches a plastic bag full of joints instead, dropping them into my hand.
“Fucking hell,” Vic murmurs as he and Oscar look up at Cal, waiting at the top of the stairs for me. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”
“Piano wire,” Cal explains, his voice even darker and huskier than usual. He closes his eyes as I come back around the peninsula, snatching Vic’s bottle of whiskey off the surface of the table. Callum doesn’t need to be sober right now; the rest of us can hold down the fort just fine.
Besides, it’s unlikely the GMP would attack with the house surrounded by feds—ones that I’m quite sure are not in Maxwell Barrasso’s pocket. Sara Young … she’s the type of person that cannot be bought. And if Brittany is telling Hael about a raid by the VGTF … well, it isn’t for us, now is it? Not after yesterday, not with the plea deal on the table, not after all that questioning.
Sara was surprised that Havoc was able to defend Prescott High. She most definitely wasn’t prepping a search warrant and organizing a formal raid.
“A garrote?” Oscar clarifies and Cal gives a brisk nod, rising to his feet and looming over the railing in a way that makes me nervous. He’s shaking slightly, and I’m terrified he’s going to pass out and tumble over the side to the hallway below. Behind me, I hear the couch springs squeak as Aaron sits up, swiping both hands over his bleary face.
“A garrote,” Callum confirms as I glance back at him, his blue eyes staring down and into mine. He sees right through me, to all the tender, delicate parts underneath. On the outside, I know my shit. I’m a Prescott bitch through and through, but on the in … there’s something about my own innocence that refuses to die. Cal recognizes that. He recognizes it because he’s a monster, but he’s my monster. That’s all that matters. “One of Maxwell’s enforcers was at the school—Russ Bauer, I believe it was.” He coughs, closing his eyes against the pain as he rests his hands against the railing again. Callum Park is no stranger to pain, physical or otherwise. “Sometimes pain is pretty, to the people who have too much of it,” he told me once. If that’s true—and I’m starting to think it is—then I guess that’s why he’s so fucking beautiful to me.
“Figures,” Victor growls, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up at the sound. I would not want to be on the receiving end of that anger. He cocks the shotgun for emphasis. Or maybe just because he’s pissed off with nobody to take that meticulously controlled temper out on. “You get him?”
Cal chuckles softly, as if anything about this situation could be construed as funny. That’s just one of the things I like about him though, how he can find humor in the macabre.
“Let me take a shower, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
He waits for me to come up the stairs, accepting the joint and the lighter I pass over to him and lighting up with a raised brow in Aaron’s general direction.
“Don’t be a smartass. The girls are at Oak River, and school shootings most definitely break my no-smoking inside rule.”
Callum pulls away and turns toward the door to the bathroom as I follow after him. He strips his hoodie off and then lets it fall to the floor with a wet slap. That’s how soaked in blood it is. Red spatters the walls in tiny droplets.
My skin prickles with recognition as the other boys come up the stairs behind me. A lesser woman would run. Me, I accept the joint when Cal hands it back to me, ashing it in the sink, and then taking a long drag.
“Give us the abbreviated version for now,” Vic says, leaning against the doorjamb as I move into the bathroom behind Cal. He sits on the toilet, hands shaking as he goes to remove his shoes. When I step forward and offer to help, he doesn’t refuse. Instead, his blue eyes lift to mine in quiet strength.
I feel him so fucking hard in that moment; it’s inexplicable. This kind of connection, it only comes along a few times in infinity.
“Thank you,” Cal whispers, reaching his hand up to rub at the gash in the front of his throat. “I have to say, that man was worth his weight in gold.” Cal pauses, his lips twitching as the other boys crowd close to the door to listen in. “The enforcer, I mean. Just … not quite as much gold as me.” He chuckles again and then stands up after I’ve removed both boots, letting his pants fall to the floor. He doesn’t seem to give a fuck that we’re all standing right there. I mean, they all fucked me in front of one another, so maybe it doesn’t bother them at all? Bet they’ve had dick measuring contests, too, like with literal rulers and shit. If I were a dude, I’d probably do, that. While I was at it, I’d grab the circumference, too—just for fun.