That’s all I remember until the following afternoon.

There must be a reason I wake up screaming, some nightmare that won’t resurface without years of therapy. If there is, I don’t remember it. All I know is that Victor is shaking me awake and glaring down at me with a furiously protective gaze.

“You have no idea the shit you put me through, do you?” he asks, like he’s too afraid to show me affection or he might break. Or maybe that’s just a fantasy because a man like Victor Channing never breaks.

“What time is it?” I ask, trying to get my bearings but then shutting my eyes against the bright white walls of the room.

“About a quarter after four,” Victor answers with a sigh, his big body relaxing at the sound of my voice; the mattress shifts with his considerable weight. Even now, in a state of half-delirium with my eyes squeezed shut and a massive migraine knocking at the back of my skull, I can’t escape his scent. He smells like bergamot and tobacco, amber and the heavy weightiness of a musky male with his eye on the prize.

I crack a lid to look at him. I’m in a hospital bed. In a hospital.

“Where am I?” I blurt suddenly, because I need answers and I need them quick. Do we have a story to tell? We must, if we’re here.

“At Joseph General,” Victor tells me, grinding his teeth and glancing away for a moment. He looks obscene in here, his tattooed, muscular form a blight against the sterility of the hospital room. “But not for long. They said you could go home as soon as you woke up.” Vic looks me over, like he’s sizing me up. If he is, he might find me wanting. Some Havoc Queen I am, holding back and letting Kali get the upper hand.

I will never hesitate again, not for as long as I live.

“Sure, bitch, sure.” I hear Kali’s voice in my head, and when I glance toward the open window, I swear I can see her ghost standing there, wearing a green party dress and bleeding from half a dozen bullet holes.

Jesus, they must’ve given me the good drugs last night.

“And yes, Aaron, too,” Vic says before I get the chance to ask, licking the edge of his mouth in a way that’s either thoughtful or planning awful, future things to do to me. He glances back and steals my breath away, choking me with a single stare. I remember his hand on Logan’s throat and try to decide if that’s still an okay metaphor to use. I’ll put it in one of my awful, fucking poems. “He’s fine. Strange, isn’t it? How these teen parties go south real quick?” Vic puts his palm flat on the white linens of the bed and leans in toward me. If I were someone else, I would say he was menacing. Because I’m, well, me, I say he’s perfectly fucking lovely.

I’m obsessed with the man, always have been. Now he’s mine and I’m never letting go. Again, not for as long as I live.

“You fell on a piece of rusty playground equipment,” Vic whispers, tasting the very corner of my mouth and making my fingers curl in the blankets. My heart monitor beeps as my pulse races, and I exhale sharply as he pulls away.

We play nice for the doctor; they unhook my machines and send me home with narcotics. The stitches in my side are killing me; the spot where they gave me a tetanus shot hurts worse.

We stop by briefly to visit Aaron, but he’s asleep and I don’t want to wake him. I do, however, brush his wavy hair from his forehead and plant a gentle kiss on his quiet mouth. Butterflies take flight in my belly, and I let them soar. I’m so happy to see Aaron’s face in the sunlight, alive and breathing, that I almost break down and start weeping.

But then, that’s not really my style, now is it?

“Go home and get some sleep, Blackbird,” Hael tells me when I turn away from Aaron’s bed and toward him. He puts his hands on either side of my face and smiles in a sharp, sad way that says he’s both pissed off at me and terribly happy that I’m still alive. I used him, I know that. I fucked-up. When he told me to get back in the car, I should’ve listened. “I’ll watch over your childhood sweetheart for you.”

“You are all my childhood sweethearts,” I whisper, my voice cracked and strange. Kali’s ghost laughs at me from the corner, but I ignore her, looking up and into Hael’s classically handsome face. He was made for billboards and glossy online ads, for social media and Instagram posts with no filters. “My Havoc boys.”

Hael laughs at me, but the sound is a bit hollow. When he rubs his thumb over my lip and leans in to kiss me, he tastes like the sweet agony of first love, the raw carnal heat of a one-night stand, and the bliss of a forever romance, all at once.

I lean in for more, but he pulls back from me, giving me a harsh look that I know I’m going to yield to, if only to make up for last night.

“Get. Some. Sleep.” He kisses my nose, my forehead, strokes my tangled hair back. “I need you rested, so I can properly chew you out later.” He steps back and makes a circle in the air with his finger. “Out, out, out. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out: that’s my job.” He smirks at me as I flip him off and follow after Havoc’s leader to the exit. If this were any other hospital—meaning not a south Prescott shithole—I might be in a wheelchair right now. Alas, the ER is stretched so thin you can see right through it to the other side.

“Hael will drive Aaron home when it’s time,” Victor tells me, checking his phone as we pass through the automatic doors of the emergency room and into the diffused gray of a December evening. Even that small amount of light makes me want to claw my eyeballs out of my skull with the chipped remains of my coffin-tipped black nails. Vic glances my way again, like he can hardly believe I’m still here with him. It’s a vulnerable sort of look that lasts about one one-hundredth of a second and then disappears just as fast. Then he’s back to being an asshole. “If you think being my girl gets you out of trouble for deliberately disobeying my orders then you’re wrong.”

“Not tonight, Vic,” I say with a small sigh, hugging Callum’s hoodie closer around me. He left it on the chair in the waiting room when he stepped out with Oscar for a smoke. They don’t know I’m awake yet so this should be fun. “Let me get some real sleep and then you can piss all over me, mark your territory, assert your dominance, that sort of thing.” I shrug one shoulder loosely and then groan in pain. My entire body hurts. And when I move, my skin tugs on the stitches.

“I’ll save your spankings for a different day, but you’re not getting out of this, so don’t fucking bother trying.” He lights up a cigarette and then snorts. “If I were a different sort of man, I’d beat the shit out of you. Hell, that’d be the feminist thing to do, treat you just like I’d treat one of the guys that did something so stupid.” He shakes his head and takes a drag, pausing at the edge of the curb to look down at me. “In this case, I think it’s okay we keep the double standard, at least for a little while.” Vic smirks, and I punch him in the arm. It’s lacking my usual force, but oh well.

“She lives,” Callum says with a small smile, pushing off the edge of Aaron’s Bronco where he was smoking. His blue eyes look me over, from head to toe, just like Vic. Unlike Vic, he isn’t assessing or delving, just observing. Cal tests my mettle in one glance, finds me worthy, and grins. “You almost ended up buried on Tom’s land last night,” he adds sadly, and it’s said in such a way that I can tell it’s meant to be comforting rather than admonishing. As in, thank fuck you didn’t, you’re here.