There are only three men left now. With Cal and Oscar together, that’s basically nothing. They could take down a dozen men. Two dozen, maybe.

Maxwell veers off from the group, and I take off after him, chasing him into the trees in the same direction as Ophelia and Heather. I don’t see them—Vic either—but I’m focused on one thing and one only: Maxwell Barrasso.

This is our chance.

If Vic can take Ophelia down—he will—and I can deal with Maxwell, then that’s it. Game over. Obviously, explaining what happened to the VGTF will be interesting but really, how can we be charged for any of this? Attacked on schoolgrounds by a notorious gang yet again and all with the plausible idea that it’s only about Victor’s inheritance and nothing else.

Adrenaline surges through me as I catch up with Maxwell and grab onto the back of his jacket, knocking him to his knees in the leaves. He’s good though, much better than that man I killed on the hill after I escaped the cabin. A man that, I know now, was probably a member of the GMP.

Maxwell spins so quickly that he’s able to kick the gun from my hand before I can stop him. His own weapon is long gone, and I wonder if he wasn’t running out of ammo back there in the first place.

Without a gun, this is going to be more difficult, but not impossible.

I throw my body onto Maxwell’s, utilizing both gravity and weight as I wrestle him into the leaves. He throws a punch that manages to connect with my face, and stars flicker in my vision. Doesn’t matter though. The well-dressed asshole beneath me hasn’t been in the trenches recently. I’m not afraid of him.

Only, Maxwell is good.

Much better than I expected.

Like, he’s Mason Miller good.

Fuck.

I know as soon as he manages to roll us over, somehow taking the advantage of gravity away from me. My fist manages to break between his arms as he struggles to hold me down, and my knuckles connect with his face. In retaliation, Maxwell backhands me so hard that blood fills my mouth.

“You took my son from me,” he says, in such a smooth and even tone that I really start to worry here. “Do you really think I’m going to let a high school student wrestle me in the woods?”

His hands grip my wrists and shove them into the ground as he uses his knee to hit me in the groin so hard that the breath is knocked out of me. Blackness sweeps at the edges of my vision, but I take advantage of that single second when he’s balancing on one knee atop me, and I roll.

Maxwell is knocked off as I scrabble for the gun. My fingers wrap around the grip, but my opponent is right there, putting a knee on my back and hitting my wrist so hard that the weapon drops back to the ground. He reaches for it, and that simple movement puts him off-balance yet again.

I shove up to my feet, throwing Maxwell aside. It doesn’t last; he’s up on his own feet and lunging for the gun in less time than it takes me to steady myself.

We’re standing on the edge of a sharp incline, where the woods sweep down toward the perimeter wall that surrounds the grounds of Oak Valley Prep. I just let myself fall backwards, even though it’s a risky move.

With a grunt, I hit the ground and then I just start rolling. But my movements are quick enough and erratic enough that even when Maxwell takes a few shots at me, he doesn’t find his target. Once I stop rolling, I’m so dizzy and breathless that I lose several precious seconds trying to suck in air. My entire body hurts now, throbbing and screaming as I shove back up to a standing position.

Maxwell is already sliding down the incline toward me, the gun still in his hands. He aims for me and pulls the trigger; if the gun were still loaded, he might’ve actually hit me. Unfortunately for him, he’s run out of ammo, so he simply chucks the weapon aside and comes at me anyway.

This time, as he’s moving through the trees and I’m stumbling back looking for a branch or rock or anything that I can use as a weapon, Maxwell pulls a knife from an ankle sheath hidden beneath the finely pressed lines of his slacks.

Licking my lips, I think about Bernadette, about how beautiful her mouth is when she smiles at me, how kind her eyes are even when she tries to be a hard-ass. I think about how good it felt to take her at the same time as Victor, how tight and warm and perfect everything was. And I imagine living in that house with her, with them, with the girls. We could have it all. If only one of us doesn’t die here today.

Because if somebody does, Bernadette will never be the same again. She will never recover. I know that because I lost her once, and even though it was a temporary state, something that could be rectified later on, I was devastated, broken, bitter. No, if one of us dies we might as well take her with us.

Maxwell’s brown eyes are dark with violence as he moves toward me like a man who’s used to wielding knives, used to drawing blood and hurting people.

See, if he’d had his whole army behind him, we would’ve lost.

If it were just me and him in these woods, then I might die. It’s becoming quite clear that as good as I am, Maxwell Barrasso is better. Plus, we killed his son. He has a very personal vendetta against us that demands bloodshed to be satisfied.

But, as we explained to Mason Miller, wolves have packs.

A gunshot goes off and Maxwell lets out a violent shout of pain, collapsing to his knees in the leaves as blood blooms on his thigh, staining his navy slacks an even darker color and turning the faint pinstripes red.

“What do we have here?” Cal muses, coming out of the woods with the pistol held up by his shoulder. He even itches the bright yellow blond of his hair with the grip, as if everything about this moment is calculated and casual and planned. Really, this is just Havoc in a nutshell. This is what we do.

Panting, I use the trunk of a tree to catch my breath while Cal gets close enough to Maxwell that the man actually tries to swing that knife of his. Callum just shoots him in the hand and the man screams. It’s fitting, a mimicry of what we did to his second-in-command. Only, I was the bait this time instead of Bernadette.

“You okay, Aaron?” Cal asks, and I nod, watching as Callum crouches down beside Maxwell. “You could’ve left things well-enough alone. You could’ve left our territory. You could’ve resisted the temptation to rape and pillage our school. And now, today, here, you could’ve resisted the urge to plunder that child. Everything you have done, Maxwell Barrasso, is what led you here today.”

Maxwell spits in Callum’s face, but it doesn’t faze him. Callum just swipes a hand over his cheek to wipe it off.

“Prescott trash,” Maxwell bites out, scowling and panting. He must know he’s going to die, but he doesn’t show fear or pain. Just hate and rage and frustration. Something about his expression, his demeanor, reminds me of Neil Pence. What was it that Cal said then? They always break, eventually. “If you kill me, my people will never stop hunting you. There won’t be a moment of peace in your lives. Not a single second of it.”

“Mm, I find that hard to believe,” Cal retorts, and then he stands up as Oscar steps out of the trees with a bit of rope in hand. He slips it around Maxwell’s neck, puts a foot between his shoulder blades, and then pulls.

The man scrambles to claw the rope from his neck, thrashing and fighting beneath the easy strength of Oscar’s grip.

“Ah, there it is again,” Cal remarks, just like he did when Neil finally began to scream inside the pretty coffin we picked out for him. “He just broke, too.”