“Mm.” Victor makes a sound and leans forward. “You know we'll take any deal, no matter how savage, but there's always a price. The question is: what are you willing to pay?”

My voice is strong and clear when I reply.

“Anything.”

Victor smiles at me, and then pauses, looking up and over my shoulder.

“Sorry, I'm late.”

Aw, fuck, it's Aaron. My nostrils flare as he takes a seat across from me, and then freezes, green-gold eyes going wide. He doesn't move, doesn't say anything. We both know what happened between us before.

“Whatever. We know all we need to know anyway.” Victor stands up and comes around the table. I stand up, too, and he ends up coming so close to me that I can feel his breath stir my hair. “We'll get back to you on Friday. Remember, though, if you accept our price: you will pay up.”

Victor takes off, Hael following close behind him. Oscar and Cal share a look over the top of Aaron's wavy chestnut hair.

He, on the other hand, is still staring at me like he's seen a ghost.

“Of all people, I never expected you,” he says, almost like he's disgusted. He stands up and storms off, shoving chairs out of his way as he goes. I barely recognize him as he makes his exit, that sweet boy I once knew covered in tattoos, his body hard and taut with muscle. The only parts of him that are the same are the lips that gave me my first kiss, and that loose, mussy hair.

“He's going to have to learn to play nice,” Oscar murmurs as he flips open the cover on his iPad. I’m surprised he even has one. Other schools, nice schools, they have iPads and laptops. At Prescott High, we're stuck in the nineties. Or, rather, our funding is. We use lined paper, binders, and pencils. Lucky us. More than likely, Oscar probably stole the one he’s got in his inked hands.

“Yeah, we don't treat clients like that.” Callum pauses and then smirks at me. “Only marks. You know that, though, don't you, Bernie?”

I stand up and spin away in a whirl of white-blond and pink, storming out the door only to be snatched around the bicep by Victor. He pushes me into the brick wall and then puts a palm next to my face, leaning in.

“Is the first name on your list Principal Vaughn?” he whispers, and when I look away, Vic laughs in my face, his breath hot against my mouth. He pushes up off the wall, stalks toward the edge of the brick patio, and lights up a cigarette.

One of the math teachers—Miss Addie or something—sees us, but then puts her head down and keeps on walking. Pretty sure Hael’s fucked her. I walked in on them once. Well, I walked in on him with one of the teachers, her clothes disheveled, her lipstick smeared. I can't remember which of the blond math teachers it was.

“Principal Vaughn.” Victor laughs, and the sound is so twisted and full of malice, it makes my ears bleed. “Go home, Bernadette, and we'll see you in the morning. It's still 193 44th Street, isn't it?”

“Don't ever come to my house again,” I growl at him, and then I take off for home.

My home life is worse than my school life. I’ve tried to make it better on more than one occasion. I’ve called social services, but my foster family was even worse. I’ve tried running away, but then the cops dragged me back and put me on house arrest, and then I was just … trapped in hell.

Once upon a time, my family was wealthy. But then my father killed himself, and my mother lost the house, and well, I can barely remember what it’s like to feel safe and secure, to know there’ll be food on the table and a roof over my head.

Pamela, she still lives that old fantasy of having money.

“Bernadette,” she calls, trotting down the stairs in pearls and a designer dress. She probably charged them to one of the dozen stolen credit cards she keeps in her purse. My backpack is literally falling apart, and my little sister doesn’t have any shoes that don’t have holes in them, but sure. Buy yourself a nice dress and some fancy jewelry.

The thing about my mother is, she doesn’t do drugs, she only drinks at parties, and she paints a very pretty picture with her blond hair and bright green eyes. I’m almost certain that she’s a psychopath. Once, when I spilled a cup of juice on the last of her fancy rugs, she locked me in the bathroom after filling the tub with bleach. The fumes made me so sick that I passed out.

“What?” I stand there in the front entry with my backpack on one shoulder, hating her with every breath and wishing she’d move out of the way, so I could retreat upstairs to my room. Heather will be at the after-school program I signed her up for, so at least for an hour or two, I don’t have to worry about my little sister.

Besides, the thing I call my stepfather won’t be home for hours yet. He works the swing shift at the police station, an on-duty cop with a taste for depravity. And he has so many friends, so, so many. It’s terrifying. I don’t feel safe anywhere.

“Can you do that thing with my hair? What’s it called? A fish-mouth braid?”

My own mouth tightens, but I don’t bother to correct her. If she wants to call a fishtail braid, fish-mouth then who am I to stop her? Maybe she’ll look like an idiot in front of all the fancy friends who’d drop her in a hot second if they knew how poor we really were?

“I have homework,” I say, refusing to make eye contact with her as I brave the stairs and push past her. Her freshly manicured nails tighten on the banister, and I do my best to hold back a flinch. I can remember those shiny perfect nails digging into my skin, leaving tiny crescent marks that hurt for hours. The trauma runs so deep, in tracks and canyons across my heart, that I forget that I’m just as tall as she is now, just as capable. The physical violence between us has lessened, but the verbal and emotional abuse remains the same.

“Homework? Since when do you care about homework? That school for delinquents is hardly an academic palace.” I ignore her scathing words and head straight for the room I share with Heather. I don’t look at Pen’s room or think about how I should’ve made her sleep with me, in a locked bedroom, as far away from the Thing as she could get. I didn’t know I had to protect her, my older sister. Maybe in her own way, she was protecting me?

My throat tightens up, and I slam my door as hard as I can, making the walls shake. Mom screams something at me from the hallway, but I flick the extra locks I installed, and then jam my headphones over my ears. When the Thing realized I’d added a chain lock and a deadbolt, he’d looked me right in the face and laughed.

“You think I couldn’t get in there if I wanted?” he’d sneered, and then he’d let his fingers dance over the gun on his hip. As if I could ever forget that he’s a cop, and I’m just a seventeen-year-old loser who got bullied so bad she was afraid to go to school.

My life is a perfect storm, full of lightning, thunder, and rain clouds, swirling in from all directions. No matter where I go or what I do, I can’t escape it. And that’s why I spent all summer thinking, wondering if I should call on them, those Havoc Boys, wondering if their price is worth a pound of flesh.

I finally came to the conclusion after I found one of Pen’s journals: it is.

It really, really is.

No matter what it is they did to me.

No matter what it is they do to me.