Page 145 of Chaos at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 2)
If he hadn’t died, things would’ve been different. Penelope would probably still be alive. But then, would I have met the Havoc Boys? Can I quantify my love for my sister and my love for the guys enough to compare them?
No, fuck that.
You can’t change the past, but you sure as hell can dictate your own future.
I start walking, my dress trailing in the patchy grass, Aaron by my side. I wonder if, like Callum mentioned, I smell like leather and peaches to him the way he smells like rose and sandalwood to me.
Ophelia wrinkles her nose at me as I walk past, her obsidian eyes so much like her son’s that it’s scary. She made Victor Channing. She’s just like him. We should be, if not afraid of her, then at least wary. Because she’s coming, I just know she is.
I do my best to ignore her, climbing the steps of the small dais under the trees. Aaron gives me one, last kiss on the cheek and moves to the side with Cal beside him, like they’re my bridesmaids or some shit.
“Welcome, friends,” Oscar says, the word friends dripping from his lips like a poisonous joke. We all know that this wedding is as much an attack on Vic’s mom as it is a union.
I turn to look at Victor, his face filled with tenderness and dark, possessive domineering, all at the same time. My breath catches.
We didn’t need a wedding to become one; we always have been.
He reaches out his hands to take mine, our HAVOC painted fingers curling together on either side.
“Marriage is a dark and desperate sort of union,” Oscar begins, the words of the ceremony penned by his own elegant fingers and promptly memorized. I notice that, for once, he doesn’t have his iPad by his side. “It’s one person begetting the soul, the love, and the sins of the other. It’s about forging a bond in legality that tries its very best to adhere to the age-old adage: blood in, blood out.”
Vic grins at me, and I grin back. Meanwhile, Hael snickers with laughter and the tree branches above us fill with a murder of crows.
How ominous.
“My only question to you today is,” Oscar continues, reaching up to adjust his glasses as he looks between us. “Are you willing to bleed for each other?” Callum steps forward to hand the wedding bands to us. They’re artfully tied to a black rose, using silken ribbons that remind me of Cal’s ballerina tattoo. “Victor, please repeat after me. I, Victor Channing, am an asshole who in no way deserves Bernadette Blackbird, but who, through some strange fault of the universe, will be marrying her today. I will bleed for her; I will die for her. I agree to marry her.”
Victor laughs, even as his mother’s cursing drifts over the fading sounds of the music.
“This isn’t some sort of sick joke! Who does he think he is, Tom? Huh? Who?”
But there is no law that says that your dick of a friend can’t make up whatever vows he wants.
Speaking of …
Vic takes the wedding band and then leans in toward me, putting his lips up against my ear.
“I have vows for you, but I’m not about to read them in front of my mother. But tonight, I want to tell you everything. And then I’m going to tear that wedding dress off and fuck you until you’re mine.” I scoff at Vic’s words, but how can I respond to that now, up here in front of my sister?
Instead, I wait for Vic to lean back and repeat Oscar’s words back to me as he slips the simple wedding band on my finger, joining it to his grandmother’s ring. Oscar repeats the vows and asks me to recite them, and I do.
I do.
When Vic cups the back of my head and kisses me, destroying me with that hot slice of sin he calls a tongue, I am lost.
Forever trapped in Havoc.
We walk down the aisle together and head straight for his Harley.
The infinite black of my wedding gown ripples as we drive away. I’m not sure where we’re going at first, because my head is lost in both the clouds, and the soft earth in which we buried Neil Pence.
I’m not surprised, however, to find myself back at the cemetery.
Vic parks the bike, and I know what we’re here for.
Closure.
That’s what this is about: saying goodbye to Pen, saying goodbye to one of the monsters in my closet, and saying hello to whatever my next chapter is supposed to be.Victor can’t keep his hands off of me as we stumble through the cold, quiet of the cemetery, our panting breaths the only sound here, the only proof that life still goes on, even when the dead lie quiet and sleeping.
