Page 13 of Havoc at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 1)
Victor releases me, swipes the blood off on his jeans, and then tosses the knife back to Callum who catches it effortlessly.
“Just to be clear,” he continues, his gaze sweeping across the others before returning to me. “You’re on my orders and nobody else’s.” There’s a harsh bite of threat in his words, but I have a feeling it’s not exactly meant for me. He flicks his attention to the other Havoc Boys in warning. “And now that we’ve got our own Havoc Girl, we’ll start dealing with one problem at a time, beginning with the issue of my mother.” This last word comes off his tongue like a curse, like Victor Channing can’t think of anything worse than a mom.
“What issue with your mother?” I ask, wondering if I’m overstepping my bounds here. He said I’d belong to them, to Havoc, but what, exactly, that means I’m not sure. Vic told me I’d have to obey his every word, but he didn’t say I had to be a meek, kowtowing bitch, right?
Vic laughs, and the sound gives me such chills. He almost sounds like I do when I look in the mirror and wonder what the point of all this is.
“She’s gripping my inheritance in her overly manicured claws on some stupid ass technicality.” Vic gets out a cigarette as Oscar scribbles something down on his iPad and Hael gets up to molest the shiny surface of his car. Callum just sits there and eats while Aaron glares at the pavement, his shoulders so taut it almost hurts to look at him. “I have to be married before I can collect.”
“Married …” I start, and then the realization hits me like a freight train, and my eyes go wide. “Wait, what?” I snap, that last word flinging from the tip of my tongue like a rubber band from a slingshot.
Victor gives me a long, studying sort of look, dressed in a black wifebeater and jeans. He’s the picture of delinquency with his violet hair, ebony eyes, and inked body. His muscles are hard, long, and lean, built up from use and not just workouts. He most definitely doesn’t look like a high school student. Pretty sure most of us don’t, not with the darkness in our pasts or the shadows under our tired eyes. I’ve lived more nightmares in my seventeen years than most have lived their entire lives.
“You didn’t think we wanted you just for sex, did you?” he asks, his bemused tone making me bristle, like I’m an idiot. But of course I did. What else could a bunch of horny teenage assholes want with a girl they don’t even like? “If I’d wanted that, I would’ve asked you to be my whore, not a member of my crew. Now fuck off to class, and let me know if anybody gives you any trouble.”“Stupid, piece of shit, asshole Victor Channing!” I shout, throwing an empty glass beer bottle against the side of an abandoned convenience store. I haven’t even made it home yet because one, Heather is still at her after-school thing, and two, I’m too pissed off to go back to that hellhole.
It’s the Thing’s day off, and if I walk in there in a blind rage, he’ll know it. He’ll take advantage of the situation and poke at me until I snap. I’ve come close to killing him before, and we both know it.
Wouldn’t that be ironic justice? The teenage girl sent to prison for life for murdering her cop/pedophile stepfather.
I choke on the feeling of helplessness, as familiar to me as my own breath. It comes in uncontrollable waves, an ebb and flow that I couldn’t resist if I tried, just as impossible to resist as holding my own breath until I pass out.
Who cares about a fake marriage? I ask myself. It’s a common enough trope, a central focus of dozens of TV shows, movies, books. What’s so much worse about pretending to be a bride? Isn’t that better than finding myself in the beds of all five Havoc Boys?
Hmm.
“You’re on my orders and nobody else’s.”
What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway?
I slump down the wall and wait there until my anger subsides. I’m committed to this. I spent the entire summer hiding out with Heather at the lake and the park, mulling this over.
There are people in my life that have to pay, and I don’t have the strength or the resources to make it happen on my own.
So if I have to slip on a ring for Victor’s mommy, so be it.
It won’t be the worst thing I do this year.
Not by a long shot.
Besides, if I try to leave, I don’t know what they’ll do. Well … actually, I guess I do: they’ll kill me.
That much, at least, is a definite.
