“Could you just not with the ice cream?” Aaron asks, looking at me like he’s very much interested in recreating our visit to the drive-in when he fucked me in the backseat of the Bronco and smacked my ass. “Lick it like that, I mean?”

I open my mouth nice and wide, sliding the length of my tongue up to the pert pink tip of the ice cream. Aaron groans, slouched on the top of one of the tables, his foot outstretched, his medical boot still conspicuously absent. He says he’s okay to walk, but I caught him wincing when he climbed out of the Eldorado.

“I will eat my ice cream however the fuck I want,” I declare, leaning back in the skeleton hoodie, booted ankles crossed. My miniskirt rides up a little further than it should, the black buckles of my garters glinting in the lights from the diner window.

“Let her do it,” Hael purrs, hopping up beside me on the hood of the Eldorado. “Personally, I’m enjoying the show.”

“It’s not that I’m not enjoying it,” Aaron says, cupping his denim-clad crotch with a bit of a groan. “It’s that I’m enjoying it too much.”

“Why don’t you two just fuck in the backseat the way you did last time you were here?” Vic suggests, and I smirk at the jealous note laced through his voice. He’s watching me from the bench seat of the table where Aaron reclines, dark eyes drifting toward the street and then over to the woods on the other side of the lot.

“No fighting,” Cal warns, shaking one of the cans of spray paint as he glances over his shoulder. “We’ve had a good night tonight. Don’t ruin it by being jealous, Vic.” He stands up and strolls off in the direction of the portable toilets that line one side of the parking lot. This place gets busy enough that the single toilet inside isn’t enough, particularly when Prescott girls are always in there fixing their makeup. Or screwing. Plenty of kids go in there with that specific purpose in mind.

Anyway, Cal is able to slip into the shadows and out of Sara and Constantine’s view. I surreptitiously flick my eyes toward the metal pole of the now defunct sign as he begins to climb, shimmying his way up to the top. Once there, he makes quick work of the clown face, replacing it with one simple word.

That one word you definitely don’t utter at Prescott High.

Not unless you want them to own you. Destroy you. Consume you.

Not unless you want their love to obliterate you, to burn away your inhibitions like a moth drifting too close to the precarious twist of an orange-red flame.

Havoc.

“You did well tonight, Bernadette.” Oscar toys with the tray of food beside him, the tray he ordered much to my surprise. After a moment, he sits up straight and unwraps a burger, staring down at it with an intensity that would scare the shit out of me if, you know, I was the hamburger in question.

“Don’t act so shocked,” I say, sitting up fully and swinging my feet, heels bumping against the side of the Caddy. It fits in well here, with all these poor kids and classic cars and nostalgia. “I’m more than just a slippery cunt, you know.”

“As if I’ve ever treated you that way,” Oscar retorts and then, after another agonizing moment of staring at his food, he takes a bite of the burger. Good boy. He really is human after all.

“You’re right, you’re right,” I say, slicking my tongue around the ice cream cone in a way that really isn’t fair to poor Aaron. “You never treated me like a piece of ass—just a thorn in your side.” I wink at him to soften the blow, but it’s hard to stay mad at the guy when he’s got just the slightest bit of ketchup at the edge of his sharp mouth. He swipes it away with a quick flick of his tongue and I shiver. “But we’re all better now, aren’t we?”

“How could I mistreat you now?” he queries back, taking another bite of his food and closing his eyes for a moment while he chews. He opens them again, directing his attention back to me. “After what happened with the …” Oscar trails off for a moment, setting the remainder of his food down on the wrapper and meticulously cleaning his fingers with a napkin. It always throws me off when he’s wearing anything but a suit. Right now, of course, he’s got on the same matching black hoodie and black jeans as the others, but he’s the only one of the Havoc boys with a bit of white shirtsleeve peeking out against his tattooed wrists. “Miscarriage.”

“Ah, that,” I say, finally giving up on my sexual exploration of the ice cream and biting off the edge of the cone with a crunch. My eyes drift back to Cal as he slides down the pole of the sign just in time for Sara Young to glance his way. I swear, I can visibly see her sighing inside the Subaru. After a moment of what looks like arguing with Constantine, she starts the car and the two of them leave.

Guess they’ve had enough of watching us fuck and eat and chat like normal teenagers. Nothing to see here, folks. We totally didn’t just murder a nasty fucked-up pervert named Mason Miller. I have to say, I most definitely will not be seeing his ghost or James Barrasso’s ghost now or ever. I’ve got absolutely zero guilt about their metaphorical blood tainting my fingers.

“That,” Victor repeats with a long sigh, finally turning back to me. That stark possession in his gaze makes me shiver all over, and I know that when we get back to the hideous refuge of our safe house, I’ll probably spread my legs for him and submit beneath the wild, primal thrusting of his hips. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“It wasn’t even really a miscarriage,” I start, but that’s sort of a cop-out thing to say. “It was a chemical pregnancy—meaning the egg is fertilized but it never fully implants in the uterus. If they hadn’t drawn my blood at the hospital, I might not even have realized …”

“Don’t downplay that shit to me,” Victor says, and his words are rough and very close to the cadence of his usual orders. But there’s pain there, too, and I have to remember that I wasn’t the only person that experienced that. It hurt him, and if it hurt him then it hurt me, too. I give him an apologetic look and he sighs. “But I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I’m not okay,” Aaron says as Callum rejoins us, chucking the spray paint into the nearest garbage can before he crawls up onto the hood of the Camaro and crouches there. Hael watches him for a moment, but then turns his attention back to me. I remember that day outside Billie Charter’s rachet ass trailer when Vic warned me against touching Hael’s car. Guess his sweet little bromance with Callum also allows for an exception to that rule.

“I’m not either,” Hael adds, shrugging his big shoulders. “But I feel marginally better knowing that Mason is a smear of crimson on the wall of KKKay’s.”

I shove the rest of the ice cream come into my mouth, chewing it thoughtfully.

“This will garner us a lot of respect among the lesser members of the GMP,” Callum muses as Victor hands him the rest of his chili cheese fries. Cal takes them, parking the basket between his booted feet as he maintains his crouch on the hood.

Across the lot, I see Vera climbing out of the passenger side of another pretty little vintage car. She’s wearing a completely different outfit than she had on at the club, and she pauses briefly on her way inside to wave at me. I wave right back.