Page 14 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
I take a bite of a burnt pancake, frowning at the taste of ash on my tongue. Victor is not nearly as good in the kitchen as Hael or Aaron. Shit, he’s almost as bad as I am.
“Tastes like shit, huh?” he asks, sighing as he flicks the stack of black pancakes with an inked finger. Clearly, he’s avoiding answering my question. Vic grabs the pack of cigarettes from the counter and lights one up, holding it between his lips as he watches me with a guarded look in his dark eyes. It’s like, as open as we were with each other upstairs, we’ve both buttoned-down and closed ourselves off.
This, this is a waiting game.
We need to see if the other boys come back from the station, and then we need to find Callum—before the feds do. Or the GMP. That is, if they don’t have him already.
“If the GMP took Callum,” I begin, watching as Vic pulls his borrowed phone close (this one’s from a member of our crew) and taps an app for a food delivery service. It reminds me of the night we spent together after he gave me a much-needed pep talk in that infamous closet of his. We’re so similar, me and Vic. I kept pretending like I don’t understand him and his motivations, but in reality, it’s just because I was too stubborn—or too afraid—to understand myself. “Then we’d know, right? I mean, they’d try to contact us somehow to hold that over our heads?”
Vic gives me a long, steady look that scares the shit out of me. And the reason it does that is because if I were to give somebody else that look, I’d be saying one thing and one thing only: I’m sorry.
I grit my teeth.
“It’s what you suggested before, when Aaron—”
“It’s what I thought happened to Aaron when Ophelia was just a conniving bitch with the Charter Crew as her pets. But the GMP …” Victor trails off and closes his eyes for a moment, swiping his hand over his face.
I just sit there and stare at him, and then I grab a cigarette from the same pack and gesture at him for a light. He flicks the flame on the lighter as he stares back at me, the orange glow highlighting the masculine lines of his face. Everything about Victor Channing screams primal, male, terrifying.
I keep my eyes on his until the cherry of my cigarette crackles with heat.
“I ordered pizza,” Vic tells me, and I can feel his eyes on me even when I look away.
We both pause at the sound of a key in a lock and exchange looks. If someone is here, and none of our crew bothered to inform us that someone was on the way …
That can mean only one thing: Havoc.
But which letter? Which motherfucking letter?
I stand up from the stool, heart pumping so furiously that if I were to nick my carotid the way we did Danny’s … this entire room would be bathed in blood.
The front door opens, and Oscar slips in, letting it swing shut behind him. It takes me a second to recognize that it’s him since he’s no longer wearing his suit. I imagine that, like with me and Vic, the cops took his clothes.
He reaches back and flicks the deadbolt. And then, when he turns his gray eyes over to me, I swear that his attention cuts through the shadows like a ghost on a haunt. Delving into me. Owning me. Possessing me.
My breath catches, and I have to lean back and curl my fingers around the edge of the countertop, just to stay standing upright.
“Shit, they give you the nth degree, too?” Vic asks, and Oscar turns his head very slowly to look at our boss. My husband. His longtime friend. So many fucking things. My eyes rake over Oscar’s body, taking in the long, lean lines of him, the myriad tattoos showing on his exposed arms, above the scooped neck of the white wifebeater he’s wearing. The sweats he’s got on—they look like they might be part of a Prescott gym uniform—sagging so low that I can see a band of ink between his lower belly and his waistband.
“They know a lot of things,” Oscar says, turning back to me and moving very, very slowly down the length of the living room toward the kitchen. As he goes, he grabs a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a light from the top of a shelf, flicking the wheel and firing up the end of one. By the time he gets to me, he’s pulling in a long drag and then exhaling pretty white smoke into the darkness surrounding me.
He taints it, too, Oscar does. He taints it fuckin’ filthy, and I love everything about that, about the way he poisons the air, the way his stare is venom and his heart ice, his trauma so deep it could make canyons in his soul. That’s what I like, all of it.
