He stares at me and then turns away, glancing toward the door where the funeral director left from. If the guy is smart, he’ll leave us alone in here for as long as we need.
“My mother used to dye it,” Oscar explains, sounding reasonably tired. A gang war, a school shooting, a new relationship … that’s all hard enough. But admitting your trauma, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, that takes energy that comes from the very depths of a person’s soul. “She didn’t want my father to find out that I wasn’t his.”
I just stare at him, blinking through the surprise.
“You weren’t his?” I query back, and he shrugs one, perfect, genteel shoulder. A model or … something. He could’ve been a social media sensation. Shit, he still could be. He could open up an OnlyFans page, flash that pretty inked and pierced dick of his, and rake in a goddamn fortune.
“Apparently not,” he replies as the cool, green snake of jealousy twists and writhes inside my chest. I would never let him have an OnlyFans page. His cock is mine. The idea that no other woman has felt the glory of having it inside of her makes me almost giddy with feminine possession. My property, my male, mine and mine alone. “And no, I have no idea who my biological father is, and I don’t care to know.”
Oscar moves to stand up, but I grab his hand, keeping him there beside me. He looks down at our joined fingers and then back up at my face.
“You can talk to me,” I tell him, wondering if he can hear the thin crack in my voice that says I need him to open up to me. Pamela killed Penelope. That’s something I’m having a fuck of a lot of trouble digesting. Oscar isn’t the only one who needs to talk: I do, too. We all do, I think. As a group, we need more time to just … exist with one another. Everyday can’t be about violence and survival; we have to find space to live. “Is that why your dad snapped? Because he found out?”
“Maybe. Among other things. He’d squandered his family fortune, too. That was a big part of it, I think.” Oscar glances away for a brief moment before turning back to me. This time—for the first time ever, actually—I can see the faintest hint of blue in his eyes. “He murdered his financial advisor just a few months prior. Before that, my grandmother, his own mother. I didn’t find out about all of that until later. He was unhinged and I’ve manifested his trauma. I dye my hair; I get off on choking people. What can I say, other than that I’m a monster?”
We just keep staring at each other, until I get it in my head to grab him by his hair and kiss him.
He doesn’t seem surprised, but his mouth is firmly closed against the invasion of my tongue, almost like he’s afraid to let himself go. It takes a bit of prying, but I finally manage to get him to open up to me, my nails digging into the back of his scalp as his inked fingers clutch the side of the casket so tightly that his skin pales with the strain.
“Not here,” he finally growls out, pulling away from me with a monumental amount of effort.
“Here.” That one word from me is a fucking order. “As your queen, I’m telling you to get your ass the fuck over here.” I sit up on my knees and throw my arms around his neck, pulling him close even as he shudders from the overwhelming experience of a Bernadette Blackbird hug. See, I’m really, really fucking good at hugs now because I keep recalling all the ones that Penelope gave me that I shirked off like they were nothing.
Because you never know how important a hug is until you realize you can never have another from the person you miss the most.
“Bernadette,” Oscar says, a warning clearly evident in his voice. He won’t hurt me though. Shit, he said it himself, that the only reason he gave into sex with me is because he knew that, out of all the people in the world, that I was the one person he would be able to keep safe, even in the aura of his own violent monstrosity.
“What?” I whisper, the word a challenge against his tempestuous mouth. “Too afraid to fuck me in a casket, Montauk?”
“Afraid?” he asks, a mocking laugh in his tone. But then his face darkens, and he shakes his head sharply. “Never.”
I let out a small gasp as Oscar takes me by the hair and punishes my mouth with the force of his, shoving his tongue between my lips and bringing these soft little sounds to my lips that I wasn’t even sure I was capable of. He kneads the back of my head with his fingers, tasting me, diving deeper. His body lords over the casket, trapping me inside of it as he kisses me in a way I imagine he’s been waiting to do for a long time.
Completely unfettered.
He might be a master of knots, but thus far, the only person he’s truly managed to truss up is himself, trapped in a web of emotional rope. It sloughs off as he kisses me, urging me back until he’s fully crouched over the casket, a uniquely beautiful monster.
“Fuck,” he growls, pulling back slightly and looking up at the ceiling, like he’s checking for security cameras. There’s a chance that some are hidden in the room, but unlikely. That sort of tech costs money and, like I said, Prescott. We use paper and pencils and textbooks from 1999. “Get on your hands and knees.”
“Hands and knees?” I query with a quirked brow, but Oscar ignores me, reaching out and grabbing me by the hips. He flips me over as I let out a small sound of surprise. Holy fuck. One of those deft, inked hands of his sneaks around and unbuttons my jeans before he yanks them over my hips and ass, leaving them to bunch around my thighs.
There isn’t a ton of room inside the casket, but there doesn’t have to be. Just enough for him to kneel behind me, flicking the button on his slacks open as he grabs me by the hair and pulls my head back.
There’s no lead-up to the violent thrusting of his hips, just a brief pressure as my body stretches to accommodate his. Oscar’s pelvis slams into my ass, his cock hitting the end of me as I curl my hand over the edge of the casket, digging my pretty new nails into the side of it.
Like I told Stacey’s second, that girl Vera, I handle all this dick with a wet pussy and a smile.
A wicked curve takes over my lips, and I let out a deep, throaty chuckle that has Oscar digging his fingers into my hips. He slams into me hard, the sound of flesh on flesh echoing in the quiet room. It isn’t difficult to tell by the sound of it that I’m fucking soaked between the thighs. Thankfully, the bleeding has stopped. It’s all desire keeping my monster’s cock slick as he thrusts into me.
“Something funny?” he purrs as he leans over me, bracing one hand over the top of mine. With his other, he keeps hold of my hip.
“Nothing at all,” I promise as he works his hips against me. For somebody who’s still relatively inexperienced in the world of sex, he seems to know what he’s doing. Maybe he’s just a master of all the cardinal sins, working darkness into me with the sharp friction of his body inside of mine. “Keep going.”
“Yes, your majesty,” he growls out, grabbing a handful of my hair again and powering into me over and over and over. Pleasure courses through me in unstoppable waves, my thighs trapped together by my jeans, making him feel even bigger, making me seem even tighter.
Using my left hand for leverage, I start to push back against him, meeting each one of his thrusts with a movement of my own. Shit, I don’t even try to hide the throaty moans escaping my painted lips. Today’s color: Broke-ass Bitch. It’s the shade of obsessive love and irrational desire, caught somewhere between gray and purple. I swipe my tongue over it as Oscar fucks me in a pink-lined casket in some broke-ass funeral home in the worst neighborhood in town.
I come so hard that I actually bite my lip and make it bleed, my body shuddering and spasming as I struggle to stay upright. My inner muscles clench around Oscar’s inked cock, his piercings stroking me and making me purr like a kitty cat.
The orgasm rips through me and I collapse, my cheek pressed against the soft interior of the coffin as Oscar uses my body however he pleases. He fucks me until his hands clench so hard around my hips that I bite down on the pink cushion beneath my head. Oscar spills himself inside of me with a long, satisfying groan and then collapses on top of me
.
We stay like that for several minutes, panting, catching our breath, readjusting to reality. Because when you get fucked like that, it’s as if nothing else in the entire world matters but for the joining of your souls.
Eventually, Oscar stands up, fixes his slacks, and then offers out a hand. This time, I take it, letting him pull me out of the world of the dead and right back into the nightmare of the living. He yanks me close, much closer than I expected, and actually holds me there for a moment, looking down and into my face.
“I don’t understand it all,” he says with a slight shake of his head, reaching up a hand to rub at the side of his face. There’s a smudge on his glasses right now, an actual smudge. And if you know Oscar Montauk, you know that he doesn’t allow simple human error like smudges on his fucking glasses. It’s monumental, that smudge. Life-changing, really. “Why you like me, that is. Or any of us.” He cups the side of my face with his pretty inked fingers and my eyes close of their own accord. I lean into his touch with a small sigh, feeling the proof of his obsession trickle out of me. “You could’ve been a model … or something.”
I smile and open my eyes.
“Or something. I’d much rather be a Havoc Girl.” I press up to my tiptoes, plant a lipstick smudged kiss against his cheek, and then drop back to my heels just in time for a tentative knock to sound at a door marked Employees Only. “Come in,” I say as the funeral director hesitantly cracks it open and slinks into the room like a kicked dog. I point back at the pink-lined casket behind me. “We’ll take that one.”
“Yes, miss,” the man murmurs, refusing to make eye contact. If he knows we fucked in his funeral parlor, he doesn’t have the balls to say a thing about it.
I take Oscar’s hand in mine, the way Callum has no problem doing with me. “It makes me feel human.” He was so damn right about that. There’s like nothing like a coffin-fuck followed by some chaste handholding to put the human experience into perspective.
“Hey,” I start as I lead Oscar to the exterior door. The way he looks at me, it’s a pinch of wariness mixed with overwhelming confusion—and tainted by love. He really does love me, doesn’t he? This knave known as Oscar motherfucking Montauk. “Do you think you could show me a little of your knot mastery?”
The look he throws me is full of innuendo, but that’s not the only thing I have in mind.
Murder is right up there alongside it.
The feds know exactly where our safe house is. There was no way to hide our move across town from Sara Young. It’s always a possibility that they’ll leak our location to the GMP, but that’s exactly why we’re here. If Maxwell sends his goons into the heart of Prescott, they’ll see exactly how influential our crew can be.
“Bernadette,” Sara says after I open the door wearing pajamas and a yawn. Today is Stacey’s funeral. There’s always the possibility of trouble there, too, but we have to attend. We owe that much to her girls, at the very least. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
She offers me up a Styrofoam coffee cup with a plastic lid. Since it has no logo and looks jank as shit, it’s likely from my favorite coffee shop two blocks over. The place doesn’t even have a name, just a neon sign that says Coffee. It used to be a bakery, but everything else they served was crap, so they scrapped that part of the business and now just sell cups of coffee for a dollar out an old drive-thru window.
I take it, eyeing Sara warily as she stands there with her blond hair in a bun, her face cool and composed as it usually is. I’m aware that I’m balancing on the fine edge of a knife, caught somewhere between victim and perpetrator in the black-and-white depths of her mind.
“Your nails look amazing,” she offers as I lift the cup to my lips, the little ring on the end of my pointer finger catching a stray shaft of early morning sunlight. It’s Friday now, February seventh. It should be a normal school day, but there’s nothing normal after a school shooting, is there? Just a shaken and altered reality that makes you question everything you know about the world at large.
“Can’t take credit,” I say with a shrug of one shoulder. “One of Stacey’s girl’s aunts did it for me. Also, we draw heavily on black culture here in Prescott, so I kind of need to acknowledge that, too.”
Sara just stares back at me and blinks her doe-like eyes. Constantine stands about ten steps behind her, scowling and flicking his eyes around like he’s preparing to be mugged or shot at any moment. To be fair, he’d probably deserve it. I’m not certain that anyone in this neighborhood has had a positive experience with a cop.
Victor appears behind me, a six-foot-five monster of a man that I’m happy to take on as a personal shadow. He frowns down at police girl, shirtless and clearly annoyed at her intrusion. We all slept in, gathered together in one room for protection. Or so the boys say. Personally, I’d keep them with me every night, all the time, if I were to have my way.
“QUEEN OF THE FREAKS” by AViVA is playing on my new phone, left on the coffee table and turned up as loud as it can go. It makes me smile at Police Girl as she looks between Vic and me. This is my motherfucking personal anthem.
“To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” Vic says, letting the words roll off his tongue like a threat. Constantine moves a few steps forward but is at least intelligent enough not to provoke Victor. “Here to give us back our phones?”
Sara smiles. It’s a pleasant smile but no less dangerous than the wickedness etched into Victor’s face. It’s a threat, a challenge.
“We found the bodies in the apartment buildings, thanks to your boyfriend’s tip,” Sara says, and again, I have to give her credit for referring to Callum as my boyfriend when my husband is standing right behind. Vic just blinks at her as I glance up at him, returning my attention to Police Girl and smiling.
“And?” I query, wondering why she’s here when she could have easily called my new phone. I gave her the number when we left Aaron’s house. My chest tightens. Already, I miss our little refuge in the middle of suburbia. There was a certain sense of coziness in those walls that is most definitely missing from the safe house. Partially, I know I owe that coziness to Heather, Kara, and Ashley. My heart spasms slightly, and I exhale. Vic brought up the idea of Oak Valley again yesterday, but even though the thought of attending some snooty ass prep school makes me want to upchuck all over Sara Young’s sensible sneakers, I can’t shake the idea that he’s right.
We need a school and Prescott is shut indefinitely. They district has suggested online schooling for the rest of the year, the way they did back in the days of the ‘rona virus. Lord knows that if they manage to implement that, it’ll be a joke. Most of the kids that attend Prescott don’t have a safe place to study, a device to study on, or a reliable internet connection. In short, they’re about to get butt-rammed by the heavy hand of society. While Oak Valley Prep students enjoy university level education in their palace on the hill, the poor suffer and flail in the dregs.
“And one of the bodies we recovered was Russ Bauer, one of the enforcers for the Grand Murder Party. I’d love to pick Callum’s brain and figure out how a high school student managed to take down a man that we’ve been after for years.”
There’s something to that phrase that tells me ‘picking his brain’ is a really nice way of saying bring him in for questioning.
“Is he in some kind of trouble?” I ask as Sara does her best to maintain a placid and unthreatening facial expression. Underneath it all though, I can sense it: the intense focus of an animal on the hunt.
“Is he here?” she asks, tucking her hands into the front pockets of her wide-legged khaki slacks. “We really do need to speak to him personally.”
“I’m here,” Cal says, standing on the lawn to the left of the front walk. Constantine actually jumps, putting his hand on his gun but stopping short of actually drawing it on the teenage boy in the hoodie hovering next to him. Callum smiles, his pink lips drawing my attention before I flick my gaze up to his blue eyes. He’s watching me, but he car
efully turns his focus back on the pair of feds standing in our decrepit-ass Prescott style yard. That is, weeds and stray bits of trash, a plastic tricycle that belongs to some random kid from two doors down. “What can I help you with?”
“How did you …” Sara starts, glancing back up at the house. She takes a step back and spies an open window on the second floor. Her gaze moves back to Callum, thick with suspicion and twisted with confusion. She doesn’t understand us at all; we don’t fit into her good-versus-evil narrative of the world. Killers are bad guys, right? What about killers who kill killers? It doesn’t make any sense to her. “You came from the roof,” she deduces and Callum laughs, hands tucked into the front pocket of his hoodie. He—very carefully—removes them, palms out, nonthreatening.
“A magician never gives away his tricks,” he whispers huskily, his voice a dark, dangerous moving thing, something alive and twisted in a way that puts my entire body on edge. Thus far, the only boy brave enough to breach that tender barrier of my miscarriage is Oscar. How … ironic. “Let me put on some shoes and I’ll go with you.”
He pads across the wet lawn past Sara Young and then pauses beside me. With Vic’s huge body on one side, and Callum’s right in front of me … Shit, I’ve never felt safer or more turned-on. I look up at him as he reaches out and cups the side of my face in a pale, scarred hand. His thumb traces the curve of my lower lip.
“Save a seat for me at the funeral,” he says, leaning down to brush his hot mouth against mine. Goose bumps spring up across my skin as he skirts past and disappears into the shadows of the house. Apparently, this place is a rental. Vic is paying almost a thousand dollars a month to rent this shitbox. Fucking Christ, all this gentrifying is screwing us here in south Prescott. At the same time, I know better than to direct my anger at fleeing suburbanites: guilt always begins at the top. Those people move here because it’s cheap, because they’ve been pushed out of their own homes by the wealthy.
Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Page 15
