“I’m okay,” I promise, holding my glass in my left hand and grabbing my journal with the other. I’ve taken to keeping one, ever since Aaron got me that one for Christmas during senior year. This is where I write the first drafts of my poems. There’s just something so … visceral about seeing my hand move, the page indenting with the press of a pen. After, when I’m ready to edit my raw work, I type it out on my laptop, format it for digital eyes. I’m damn near ready to publish my first book of poetry. Since, you know, getting published as a poet through traditional means is damn near impossible, I’m going the self-publishing route. I’m a soon-to-be indie motherfucking author, baby. “I’m just processing.”

“It’s fucking hard, right?” Aaron asks, drawing my attention over to him as he sits next to me on the couch, reminding me of that first night we spent at Oak Valley Prep. This is like a mirror to that except instead of my being upset about Pamela and Penelope, I’m celebrating Heather and Kara. “Seeing them leave with dates and wicked intentions. Kara was practically drooling over that Brody guy. And isn’t prom when most teens lose their virginity?”

I give him a look that says bro, do you remember what we did in high school? But he isn’t paying attention to it, staring at the fire as Hael pulls kindling from the basket nearby and lights it up for us. Teenagers are fucking skanky hos is what I want to tell Aaron, but sometimes parents just need to pull the wool over their eyes so they can sleep better at night. Also, I gave Kara a giant box of condoms last week when I found her naked with Brody in the pool out back.

She’s just fucking lucky that I’m the one that caught her. The Havoc Boys are too goddamn overprotective for their own good.

“Virginity is a patriarchal social construct,” I remind them, but that doesn’t do much to assuage Aaron’s fears. He downs the rest of his drink as I chuckle, letting my pen drag across the page as I contemplate starting a new poem. Sometimes, I sit here for hours and hours and nothing comes to me. Other times, I have to leap out of the shower and grab the nearest tube of lipstick so I can scrawl messy words across the bathroom mirror. “Anyway, they’re safe with our crew. That’s all that matters. Let them make their own decisions, find their own tragedies, and dig up their own triumphs.”

I write that down, just in case.

“So,” Hael begins, perching on the arm of the couch opposite where Aaron and I are sitting. Victor takes his drink over to the fire so he can rest a hand on the mantle and stare down into the flames. Oscar, surprisingly, is also having a drink tonight. Most of the time, he stays sober while the rest of us get fucked-up and it works out great in case there’s a crisis that needs to be handled. Seeing as we’re still Havoc, there’s always a crisis, but we get through it each and every time. Together. As a family.

“So, what?” I query back, tapping my pen against the page and lifting my eyes to look at him. He meets my gaze with a warm honey-brown one, his smile more than enough to tighten the muscles between my thighs. I decide then and there that tonight is a group night meaning nobody is allowed to retreat to their own bedroom. I’ve got like, empty nester syndrome or some shit.

“Since Heather and Kara are leaving …” Hael trails off and shrugs his big shoulders. “Do you want to start making babies?”

I snort and give him a look that very clearly says fuck off and die, Hael Harbin. He howls with laughter at the sight of my expression while Cal very carefully pulls his hood down, revealing that beautiful blond hair of his.

“We could start having kids,” he suggests with a loose shrug of one shoulder. “Or we could travel first. I hear Nantucket is nice this time of year.”

“Nantucket,” Aaron snorts with a laugh of his own, shaking his head as his green-gold eyes blaze in wonder. How we managed to get here, to this beautiful happy ending, is anybody’s guess. But we did it. We made it. And all I had to do was die to earn it. “Fuck Nantucket.”

“How about Paris?” Oscar asks, musing aloud as he finally sets his iPad aside, loosens his tie, and kicks off his shoes. His eyes are so sharp and so beautiful that when they fall on my face, I swear that I’m bleeding and I never want to stop. My head gets light and dizzy, and it feels like I’ll be forever falling into him.

“Paris?” Vic asks, turning around with his obsidian eyes dark and a wry smile on his lusty menace of a mouth. “You fucking think we’d fit in there? Frankly, I’m down for a staycation that involves fucking, fucking, and more fucking.” He moves over to stand beside me, and I drag my attention away from Oscar to look at him. Each and every time, it’s like a punch to the gut, but in the best possible way, like my breath is being siphoned from my lungs but I’d pay for the privilege of dying in such dark bliss. “And yeah, if it involved getting you pregnant, all the better.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Cal breathes, pouring himself another drink as he points at my journal. “As much as I’d be down for a Havoc baby, Bernie has other dreams. Let her write her poems. She’s a brilliant fucking poet.”

“I mean, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I mumble, but then Aaron is taking the empty glass from my hand and curling his fingers around mine.

“I think we’d all go that far,” he says, and then he stands up and pulls me to my feet, even as my mind starts to twist words together the way an oil painter mixes colors on her canvas.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who dreamed in prose and pretty phrases.

She quickly learned that life is at its best unfair and at its worst perversely cruel.

Her dreams became nightmares, nightmares made of monsters new and old.

And so she summoned them, her five dark horsemen, to wreak havoc and sow chaos, to twist mayhem and denote anarchy, to declare victory over every wicked, ugly thing she’d ever seen.

They came to her, those horsemen, and in return for their vile vengeance, they took her heart and held it in their inked hands. They claimed her flesh with carnal delight, but it was her soul that they craved most of all. And to them, she gave it freely and without restraint.

“Your brilliance is a jewel in a wasteland of a world,” Oscar tells me, snapping my reverie, making my heart race. I throw my arms around his neck, and he shudders. But not in the way he used to, when my every touch made him remember the worst parts of his childhood, but in the way of lovers well-familiar with each other’s bodies, in the way two soul mates find comfort in one another.

Because that’s what they are, all five of them: soul mates.

That is, if you believe in that kind of thing.

We head upstairs together, shedding clothes, ten worshipful hands caressing my body. When I fall into bed, I fall into it with five beautiful monsters. Five beautifully broken Havoc Boys turned men. We kiss; we fuck; we meld.

That’s how I get my happily ever after, wrapped up in ink and bullshit. Wrapped up in motherfucking Havoc.

Confucius says dig two graves before embarking on a journey of revenge.

I guess he was right.

When you go seeking revenge, some small part of you will die a death … someway, somehow. But from the ashes of that, something new will rise, something different, something better.

“When you’ve been lied to by everyone around you, when you have nothing else, you realize the one currency you can carry is truth. So a single word does have meaning. A promise does hold importance. And a pact is worth carrying to the grave.”