Havoc.
One year later …
The air is poisoned with white dust. It floats everywhere as we make our way through the main floor of the house.
Now, with Victor’s inheritance money in hand, we’re knee-deep in the middle of a renovation that’s just now nearing its zenith. To be fair, the place was a goddamn mess. There were holes in the ceiling, and pieces of the flooring missing, drywall covered in rot, and a fireplace with the stones tumbling out. The kitchen was nonexistent, the bathrooms were holes where toilets and sinks and showers used to be (which is a serious fucking shame because Oscar told us this place had all original fixtures until Ophelia sold off all the parts).
But now?
It seems almost impossible to remember that Eric and Todd Kushner were murdered here. Actually, I can only remember it when I’m stoned and the light falls in the upstairs bedroom just right and even then, it doesn’t matter because they were fucking pedos, so their death is nothing but a blessing for the world.
Mostly, I remember getting married here in an expensive-as-fuck black Lazaro gown that still hangs in the closet at Aaron’s place. Seeing as his mother still technically owns the house, and she’s nowhere to be found, we can’t sell it. We can, however, keep making the mortgage payments and letting Marie live there until we find her to buy it.
If we ever find her.
Not that it even matters.
“This looks so goddamn fucking amazing,” I say, standing in the middle of the nearly finished kitchen. There are cabinets and countertops, and holes where all of the appliances are supposed to fit. It looks … grown-up and strange and not like anything I’ve ever been a part of. “Who’s going to cook in here? Hael? Aaron?”
“Well, it definitely won’t be me,” Vic says, and I snort in agreement. We’re both shitty cooks. Nothing has changed since high school. Not a single goddamn thing. Alright, nothing in regard to cooking. Plenty of other things have changed.
First off, the fingers of Havoc’s influence have crawled into every single corner of this city, every dark space or shadow that seemed off-limits before. With our money, with our experiences, we hold this place in thrall. Fortunately, since dealing with the GMP, things have been much quieter.
I almost miss being chased around by Sara Young. Almost.
“I’m happy to cook in here,” Aaron says, lifting up a bit of tarp and revealing the cooktop, embedded in the counter and ready to go. The double ovens are still missing though, and the fridge, and the dishwasher. “Shit, this is fancy.”
“We’ll cook together,” Hael informs him, making a picture frame with his fingers and squinting. “I can see it now: me in an apron, naked. My beautiful blond husband, Callum, standing by to massage my feet after I’ve cooked a hot meal.”
Callum snorts and flicks Hael in the back of his ear, making him wince and swat at him as he climbs up onto the counter, just to test out the crouching abilities of this new kitchen. Looks very crouch-worthy to me.
“I’ll eat the hot meal, and I’m cool with you cooking naked in an apron, but a foot massage? I don’t know about that. You’d have to really earn it.”
Hael throws a loose screw in Cal’s direction as Oscar pauses at the back windows, peering out into the yard and the gray mist drifting across the grounds. I move up to stand beside him, and he takes me in one arm, dragging me close and pressing his lips against the side of my head.
He’s gotten so much better about touch lately. So, so, so much better. One night, he even got drunk with Aaron and me and told us how he used to crave the pain of a tattoo, the pain of a piercing, because it was the only way he could fight back the nightmares of his mother’s cool arms around his neck or the feel of his father’s hands at his throat.
Things are different now. For all of us. When we’re all in bed together, I don’t see him shying away from touch anymore. He even lets the girls hug him now which is something I never thought I’d live to see.
Once we’ve spent an ample amount of time tramping around inside the house, we head back outside to where the girls are playing in the sun. I’m pleased to see them exploring the yard and ignoring their phones for once.
Shit, you sound like a fucking boomer already, Bernie. “Back in my day …”
But I don’t say anything, just try as hard as I can to keep the smile that’s slowly sliding from my face. Heather asks me to take her to Pen’s grave a lot, and that’s okay, I’ll go. I don’t mind. Even if I believe that my older sister has been reincarnated in some far-away place, and that she can’t hear us, it feels good to talk to her.
After all those visits however, I started to dislike the austerity of her grave, the prepaid plot with a family stone. Penelope’s epitaph was etched on one side of an obelisk, just a simple scrawl of her full name and the two most significant dates of her brief existence—dates that Pamela Pence formerly Pamela Blackbird was responsible for.
So I did something about that.
I stayed up every night for a week, curled up in a chair, poring over a poem that I scrawled in the notebook Aaron gave me. Even after all that work, I’m still not sure that I’m happy with it, but that’s the true curse of an artist, right? A constant running critique and questioning of your own work.
Anyway, I wrote a poem.
I never knew that missing hurt this much
Until you.
I never knew that love was a double-edged sword.
It cuts.
But the best parts of me are my memories of us.
Forever your sister, forever your heart.
It isn’t long, but I was limited by the size of the gravestone I was able to add to Penelope’s plot. Obviously, money wasn’t an issue, but nobody wants to read some gigantic, hulking piece of literature etched into the side of somebody’s grave. It just needed to be short and sweet and honest, and so that’s what I tried to do.
“Alright, let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say, gesturing at the girls to climb into the Eldorado.
We drive to Our Lady of Mercy, the cemetery where Penelope is buried, and I try really, really hard not to think of the Thing chasing me through these very gravestones.
The nine of us end up at her grave together, studying her new headstone which suits the space so much more than the plain and austere shimmer of the obelisk. After we’ve laid our flowers down and said some frilly, fancy words that are more for us than for her, the boys excuse themselves and I sit down with Heather.
I pull her close and I tell her about Pam. Not all the worst parts because she isn’t quite ready for that. But I explain to her that Pam and Neil hurt Penelope, and that they’re both gone now. Both of her parents are gone.
She sits in silence for a long, long time.
“Are you mad that I waited so long to tell you?” I ask, and I wonder if she hadn’t already Googled their names and found out. We try to keep tabs on the girls’ internet activity, but like, fuck, it’s so easy for kids to find ways around that shit. She could’ve seen news stories or headlines from anywhere.
Those first few weeks after the raid, the boys kept her offline completely, until some of the buzz died down. But still … I wonder how much she really knows.
“I’m not mad,” she admits after a moment, sniffling as I hug her close and we look at Penelope’s final resting place together. “Because you were trying to keep me safe.” She looks over at me and I wonder if she knows how much I truly love her. I tell her all the time, but you can never say that sort of thing too much. I only wish I’d savored it each time Penelope said those three little words to me. I love you. “I still miss them,” she hazards after a moment. “Mom and Dad.”
“You can miss them if you want,” I tell her, giving her another squeeze. “There’s no rulebook for grief.”
So we sit there together, and she tells me all her best and favorite memories of Pam and Neil, and then she starts to cry again and I let her. I let her and I hold her, and then we say goodbye to Penelope and head home for movie
s and popcorn and hair-braiding that Aaron is getting better at but that Victor sucks at.
The girls attend Oak River Elementary; the boys and I build an empire; our love blossoms and amplifies and turns the entire world into a dream that I never, ever want to wake up from.
Five years later …
Vera and I stop by the same rachet ass coffee place that has no name, just a sign in the window that reads Coffee, and we take our drinks across the street to the newly created park funded by some of the inheritance money.
Shit, we meant what we said about staying here and improving the city. Already, Prescott High is thriving, lead by Breonna Keating and rife with fresh funding for structural improvements and iPads, new desks and staff members with proper degrees under their belts. There are grief counselors and tutors and after-school programs for teen mothers.
Because even if I quite literally saw my husband put bullets into the heads of five people last week during a meeting with an overzealous motorcycle club, we’re still community members, too. Really, we’re community members first and foremost: we just clean up the blood and the shit and the darkness that rolls in every now and again.
It isn’t in our nature to just sit back and relax, sip Prosecco out of fancy fluted glasses, and donate money here and there. No, we have to rule. We have to conquer. We need bloodshed and control.
And so, because there will always be an underground in every neighborhood, in every city, in every country, we hold the reins and guide the dark horse.
“Tattoo day?” Vera inquires after we finish our coffee and start walking again. I nod. Because it is. And it’s been too long. This is something that should’ve happened like, years ago.
“Tattoo day,” I confirm, glancing over at her. Her head is no longer shaved. Instead, she wears it in a glossy red wave down her back. Also, Vera only dates non-binary people and girls now. She says she’s done with men. We’ll see how long that lasts. I’d call her pansexual but really, she’s more of a pan-slut. Which, obviously, coming from me is a compliment. I don’t slut-shame.
“You sure you want to do it?” she asks me, glancing over and taking in my tatted knuckles. HAVOC stares back up at me when I follow her gaze, flexing and unflexing my fingers. In the past few years, I’ve added a few tattoos here and there. One says Penelope along the outside of my left thigh. One is a crown, inked into stark and mesmerizing detail on the back of my neck. There are others, too, more meaningless ones because not every tattoo has to mean something. That’s a lie. You are allowed to get pretty art for the simple sake of aesthetic beauty. “Get all their names carved into your skin?”
I lift my hand up for examination and she swats it away.
“That’s a gang tat, not a lovers’ tat,” she says dismissively, her pale eyes ringed in thick, traditional Prescott liner. “That will always mean something to you. I’m talking about the boys though. All five of them? Like, forever? Just you and them?”
“Just me and them,” I reply, because I’m not sure that Vera will understand if I try to explain how our relationship really works. It isn’t ‘just’ me and the boys. It’s us. We’re an us. A family. They are as intertwined with another as they are with me. It took me a while to see it, but once I did, I felt a sort of overall peace inside of me, that same peace that allowed me to relax when I thought my time had come.
Now that I’ve been there, now that I’ve seen death, I’m not afraid of it anymore.
“You know Scarlett Force, right?” I ask, and Vera rolls her eyes at me.
“Born and raised in Prescott, remember? Of course I know who Scarlett motherfucking Force is. She came to Stacey’s funeral, didn’t she?” Vera tosses her hair and adjusts her coat as we keep walking. As soon as we turn the corner onto the street where the tattoo shop—a place known only as Ink—waits, I see them.
Five boys in black, smoking cigarettes.
Or, I guess, now you could just call them men. They haven’t been boys in years. Shit, they weren’t even ‘boys’ during our senior year, were they? Just men. Just Havoc.
Aaron stands up from where he’s sitting as my chest tightens with that overflowing feeling, the one made up of beautiful things and happy dreams and hope. It feels like fireflies drifting through a sweet summer night or bubbles in a champagne bottle waiting to be opened in celebration.
“What about Scarlett Force?” Vera prompts me, and I reach up to rub at my nose to fight back a sniffle. Something about today feels emotional to me, even though it isn’t much different than any regular day.
“She once said, if you aren’t brave enough to risk mistakes, then you aren’t deserving of quiet triumphs.”
“And that means what, exactly?” Vera asks, but if she doesn’t get it, then she isn’t ready for it. So I just move forward and let Aaron sweep me up into his arms as if it’s been years. Really, it’s been an hour and a half, and we fucked in our custom-sized bed this morning, so I’m definitely being overdramatic.
But shit if he doesn’t smell like young love, roses and sandalwood. If his eyes aren’t the green-gold marriage of spring and autumn. His hair, chestnut with shimmers of red and gold, depending on the light.
“You’re here,” he says, his voice laced with a bit of dark wonder. Like, he can never quite believe that we made it this far, that we’re still together, that after everything we’ve been through we get to have this.
“I’m here,” I whisper as Vera makes a noise behind me, and Ashley comes tumbling out of the Camaro, shouting and bouncing around her as she tries to show off her favorite viral video. Vera swats her away, but she’s smiling, too, because she loves babysitting for us. Sometimes, when we go to pick Ashley up, and I see Vera staring at her girlfriend in the right light, I know that she’s thinking about Stacey.
“Alright, let’s get the fuck out of here and get some ice cream or something,” she tells Ashley as Heather and Kara lounge and strut and act all gross and fourteen. They don’t want or need a babysitter, but they’re also part of Havoc which comes with danger. So, while we’re at the tattoo shop, they can hang with Vera. You’d think the world was ending, but they’ll get over it.
“It’s far too cold for ice cream,” Heather warns her, and Vera makes a grumble of annoyance.
“Hot cocoa then. Or pizza. Or I don’t know, like books or something? You guys still like paper books?” Vera looks to me for confirmation, and I shrug. We can afford … anything now. Really, anything. Only, we don’t buy everything because we don’t need to buy happiness. We found it on our own, in a dark and quiet corner of the world where the police wouldn’t come and the people are poor and everyone calls us white trash but we wear it as a badge of pride.
Things could certainly have been worse. Truly, there are worse places. But for a while there, it was rough.
“Paper books are an institution,” Heather says, aghast and confident. Because she’s fourteen now and she knows fucking everything. “In a digital world, we all crave tactile experiences.”
Kara snorts at her as I roll my eyes.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I say, swatting her on the ass just before Victor pulls me into his arms and wraps his massive body around me. Heather stares at us for a minute before nodding and taking off after Stacey, like she is the one that delivered me to the boys rather than me delivering her to Vera.
After Vic found her in the woods that day, she’s been attached to him like the father she always should’ve had. A good one. A strong one.
As he always does, Vic smells of amber and musk, he’s big and warm and dominant and annoying and perfect. My soul mate with ebon eyes—one more time, ebon, ebon, ebon—and purple-dark hair and tattoos and a monster dick that belongs to one woman and one woman only.
“Let’s do this,” he purrs, licking up the side of my neck and making me shiver.
Oscar rolls his eyes, but he isn’t actually upset. He just likes to quip and pick and needle because it’s how he survived for so many years.
“Miss me?” I
ask as he adjusts his glasses on his perfect nose, as I take in the ink crawling up his neck and over his hands. The way he looks at me, with eyes the color of gravestones and fog and full moons edged in starlight, tells me all that I need to know. He does. He did. He’s as obsessive as I am, as any of the other boys are.
“Of course not. Why on earth would you think that?” he quips as I grin at him and give him a hug anyway, breathing in that distinctive cinnamon scent of his. His hair is still black, he still dyes it, and that’s okay. He can manifest his pain in whatever way suits him best.
“I saved you a seat,” Cal says, perching on one of the swivel chairs behind the counter. The tattoo artist looks on, unamused but also unable to say a goddamn thing. Because we’re still Havoc. And there’s still one gang you don’t want to piss off in the city of Springfield.
“I see that,” I say as he stands up and then hops over the back of the chair as easily as anything, moving over to embrace me in a sweet-smelling cotton and Tide scented hug. He still smells like talc and aftershave, and he still teaches dance in a big, beautiful studio in the southside that never charges a dime. His eyes are still blue and endless and perfect, and his mouth is still that of a fallen prince’s. His hair is still gold and reminiscent of sunshine. “Thank you for that. Because, you know, if I hadn’t gotten here soon enough, it’d have been taken.”
We pull apart with a bit of reluctance as I look up at Hael.
Hael, with the bloodred hair who still wears it in a fauxhawk, who still has a scar on his arm from a dad that didn’t love him enough, who still blames himself for what happened to me and sometimes wakes up with nightmares that I soothe away with the sweetness of my cunt.
We are a family, but we’re still broken in some ways. And that’s okay. Nobody expected us to heal into perfect model citizens overnight. Or in five years. Or, like, ever.
“Blackbird,” he says, indicating the chair with his hand, like he’s performing yet another chivalrous act. An act like, say, fixing our cars after that shootout so that I can still drive around in a Cadillac with the top down and my red-dipped hair tousled by the wind. This boy, he smells like coconut oil and grease, and he still plays with vintage cars. He just does most of that work in the five-car garage that Victor built beside the old house. “Your throne awaits.”
Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Page 48
