“Tell me: do either Maxwell or Mason like call girls?” I wonder aloud, thinking about Stacey’s face that day in the cafeteria. I can’t get it out of my mind. I know we were wrapped up in our own shit, but I can’t help feeling like we let her down. She was Prescott High incarnate, our queen bee, Havoc’s ally.

She deserves justice, and I intend to wreak some havoc on my quest to get it.

“Oh, Mason is nefarious for his treatment of prostitutes. He’s gotten so bad that his boss forbade him from using any of their girls. Now, he just kidnaps women, uses them, and dumps their bodies.” Oscar taps his long fingers on the arm of the sofa. I hear he retrieved a hidden precision rifle from under a liner of an outdoor trash can and set up to snipe GMP fuckers from the roof.

I honestly have no words to describe how I feel about that.

Another cramp rips through me, and I groan, pressing the hot water bottle into my belly. The boys all turn their attention to me, but I ignore them. We have shit to do and likely not a lot of time to do it in.

“What about his house?” I ask, but Vic is already shaking his head, his black eyes on me, his fingers pressing just a bit too hard into the arm of the couch.

“Same deal,” Vic says succinctly, his voice this primal growl that just barely passes for human. Demonic, is how I’d probably describe it if I were scribbling down one of my shitty poems. I remember once when Kali dug one of them out of the trash and tried to claim that I’d sent her hate mail. What a crock of shit. That bitch really thought she ranked high on my radar, huh? I had better shit to do in tenth grade. You know, like mourn my dead sister, worry about whether Heather was going to be molested by the Thing, or keep myself alive in the face of Havoc’s wrath.

Like I said: liar, thief, coward. Good fucking riddance.

“Same deal,” I repeat slowly, looking over at Victor and watching as the edge of his cruel mouth turns up in the slightest smile. For as long as I live, I will never forget the weight of that crown on my head or the words he said to me in those final few moments before the cops stormed the building. “I told you not to worry about being queen.”

So I guess I won’t. Worry, that is.

Nah, I’ll just act like royalty until it fucking sticks.

The way Vic is looking at me, I know he’s waiting to see what I’ll come up with, what ideas I have. This is what he’s wanted all along, for me to stand beside him, a true Havoc Girl. Now that I can see his true intentions, it isn’t hard to imagine why he was so pissed at me when I suggested ‘performing my duties’ or being ‘Havoc’s girl’. He wanted a partner, not just a plaything.

“I hate to take the risk, but what if we use one of Stacey’s girls to get Mason to a known location? I’m sure he’ll have security with him, but it’ll be much less than if we try to raid his or Maxwell’s places.” I flip the cover on the iPad shut and set it aside, going for the tea instead.

Hah. Tea. Like anybody in this house ever drinks tea besides Oscar. You should’ve seen that motherfucker’s face when Hael tried to put a cup of tap water into the microwave. I thought he might whip out his revolver and blow his friend’s head clean off. I’ve never heard someone say something as inane as “there’s a kettle in the cupboard” and have it sound like “I’m going to fucking murder you.” Impressive, I must say.

The taste of this particular tea—one of Oscar’s choices, obviously—is deep and earthy, like wet leaves on a warm summer morning after a rain. And there I go again with the metaphors and shit. I can’t help it. Language is just too much fun to play with.

“Special order Makaibari Estate green tea,” Oscar explains, as if his glasses give him enough focus to read my mind. It feels like he could, like he could read my heart, my mind, and my soul with a single glance. I meet his gaze and take another sip. Briefly, I wonder if the pregnancy I just lost could’ve been his. Really, it could’ve been any of them. That’s what you get when you let your five boyfriends run a train on you, am I right?

“He’ll want the girl to come to him,” Vic says finally, as if he’s been mulling my words over in the ensuing silence. “Although, considering his reputation, it’s possible that he’d venture out after fresh prey. Question is: how do we get him to hire one of Stacey’s girls after the whole robbery fiasco?” Vic pauses and clenches his jaw, grinding his teeth in frustration for a moment.

“Well, first off, I think we should officially bring Stacey’s girls into Havoc.” I look at Oscar and, finally, after about ten seconds of dead silence, he nods his chin almost imperceptibly. “We get one of them to talk to Maxwell, to apologize for the oversight of what they did to that John. Then, we have her offer up a girl but on the condition that Mason meets her somewhere public, like a hotel. If they refuse the gift, so what? They’re already after blood. If not, that gives us a chance to deal with him.”

“I’ll kill him,” Cal offers, lifting up his joint in solidarity with the plan. “Just give me a vent or an accessible exterior window.” He takes another drag and then reaches out to grab the ash tray off the coffee table.

“You need to rest,” I tell him when he glances back up at me, wearing a fresh black hoodie that hides all his wounds from prying eyes. “Somebody else can do it. We’re all capable of getting blood on our hands.” I pause for a moment, that old, familiar anxiety rushing through me. But Kali’s ghost doesn’t appear, and I don’t summon her. I don’t need that shit in my life. I need to move forward, and there’s only one way to do that: down the rockiest fucking path possible.

Because nothing worth having is ever easy to get.

“Oh, come on, Bernie,” Cal says with a dark chuckle, cringing slightly and putting his fingers to his throat. I can only imagine what it’d be like to have a garrote wrapped around your neck—especially one made of piano wire. Without those whip-fast dancer reactions of his, I doubt he’d have been able to escape. “You know there’s no rest for the wicked; I need to redeem myself.”

I give him a look, but I don’t plan on letting him out of my sight until he’s had a few days of downtime—and a hospital visit. Like, I’m not done harping on that shit. Fucker needs antibiotics whether he likes it or not.

“Whatever the details,” I say, exhaling and closing my eyes as another cramp rips through me like a slash to the belly. I swear, I can feel my insides tumbling out onto the floor. When I open my eyes, they’re all looking at me again. “We have one thing the GMP doesn’t. That is, us. We have hot, angry Prescott blood. That has to account for something.”

“For now, we need to move,” Vic says, mumbling around a cigarette that’s clenched between his teeth. “To the safe house. The feds are an okay deterrent, but we killed Maxwell’s son. He’s coming for us, sooner or later. It’s inevitable.”

Vic stands up and moves over to the front window, throwing open the drapes to reveal the cop car parked across the street. I glance over my shoulder to watch him.

“It isn’t difficult to listen in on a conversation with the right technology. Shit, you can buy that crap on Amazon now.” Vic tilts his head to one side, like an animal on the hunt. “I wonder exactly how interested in us the VGTF is.”