Page 165 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
Besides, I’d always expected to graduate from Prescott High and let’s be honest: what’s more Prescott, more southside, than a raid by FBI agents?
This brings everything together for us.
It might not be ending the way we’d wanted it to—with some brilliant coup against Maxwell and Ophelia—but it’s ending. It’s a reprieve of sorts. Five months left until we get Victor’s money. Just five months. We can do that, can’t we? Even if we have to flee the area temporarily—not an ideal situation but a possibility—we can last that long.
We can do this.
The boys check the hallway before ushering the girls into the elevator, and then we wait behind in the lobby while they file outside. We don’t need anyone to see us together, not today. It might be the day of the raid, but it’s also a day when Maxwell and Ophelia will be on campus and within striking distance.
After they leave, we wait an appropriate amount of time before following them at a distance, just to make sure they connect with their teachers and disappear into the hordes of identically-dressed children being shepherded down the hill toward the massive outdoor amphitheater where the graduation is taking place.
Frankly, I wouldn’t bother going to the ceremony at all if it weren’t for the raid. You don’t have to attend to get your diploma, you know. But we show up as we’re supposed to and I spot Trinity Jade glaring at me from the grassy area behind the stage, the way she always does.
Just as an extra fuck-you to her, I curl my arms around Victor’s neck and press our robed bodies together, taking his mouth the way a queen should always take her king’s. Possessively and without mercy. After a moment, I have to stop and pry myself away because I can feel the thick length of his erection digging at me when our bodies rub together.
“Oh, come on, your majesty,” he teases, taking my hand and giving my wedding ring a lick. “We can sneak off for a quickie, can’t we?” Only he knows that we can’t because we have no idea when the raid is going to happen exactly or how things might go beforehand. The situation today is too edgy, too up in the air.
So, instead of sneaking off to screw like rabbits the way I wish we could, we allow our teachers to guide us out from behind the stage to the sound of polite clapping, and take our seats in wooden folding chairs decorated with bows and ribbons and fresh flowers.
“It looks like a wedding, not a graduation,” Aaron murmurs, but he takes his seat beside me anyway, and we settle in for what’s likely going to be a boring and uneventful series of performances … until it just isn’t anymore.
No part of me thinks Sara Young will come with guns a’blazing into a school, so I’m guessing the raid is going to play out like one of the children’s onstage performances. Agents will come in, targets will be located, people will be arrested. Nobody expects a shootout—not even the boys. But we do, of course, have guns hidden in our cars, just in case.
Hot early summer sunshine falls across my face and I lift up a hand to shield my eyes as I glance back at the ascending seats behind us. They’re filled with women in designer gowns—I wish there were men in designer gowns, too, but Oak Valley is too stuffy and patriarchally repressed for anything as forward-thinking as that—and men in suits. It’s so … banal, so expected, reeking of untamed wealth and profane sophistication. Just looking at those people bothers me so much that I turn back around.
Since Oak River begins with preschool, we’re forced to sit here and suffer through several earnest but heartless performances from the youngest children. Ashley is a joy to watch, if only because she has big floppy chestnut curls that make me think about Aaron. After her song is over, she files down to the grass in front of us to sit on blankets with the other kids her age.
Havoc never rests, so even as we’re sitting there and watching all of this, I notice the boys’ eyes scanning the crowd, checking the shadows, listening and waiting and wondering. Oscar keeps his phone on his lap, scrolling through texts from our crew.
During a particularly painful performance from the first graders, I turn around once again to see if I can’t spot Ophelia and Maxwell in the crowd. It takes me a few minutes—especially since I’ve only ever seen Maxwell Barrasso in photos—but then I spy them near the back row.
Ophelia is the one who catches my attention first. Likely, because she bears such a striking resemblance to her son that my eyes can pick her out, even in the midst of a well-dressed bourgeois crowd.
