Havoc at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #1) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,14

band from a slingshot.

Victor gives me a long, studying sort of look, dressed in a black wifebeater and jeans. He’s the picture of delinquency with his violet hair, ebony eyes, and inked body. His muscles are hard, long, and lean, built up from use and not just workouts. He most definitely doesn’t look like a high school student. Pretty sure most of us don’t, not with the darkness in our pasts or the shadows under our tired eyes. I’ve lived more nightmares in my seventeen years than most have lived their entire lives.

“You didn’t think we wanted you just for sex, did you?” he asks, his bemused tone making me bristle, like I’m an idiot. But of course I did. What else could a bunch of horny teenage assholes want with a girl they don’t even like? “If I’d wanted that, I would’ve asked you to be my whore, not a member of my crew. Now fuck off to class, and let me know if anybody gives you any trouble.”

“Stupid, piece of shit, asshole Victor Channing!” I shout, throwing an empty glass beer bottle against the side of an abandoned convenience store. I haven’t even made it home yet because one, Heather is still at her after-school thing, and two, I’m too pissed off to go back to that hellhole.

It’s the Thing’s day off, and if I walk in there in a blind rage, he’ll know it. He’ll take advantage of the situation and poke at me until I snap. I’ve come close to killing him before, and we both know it.

Wouldn’t that be ironic justice? The teenage girl sent to prison for life for murdering her cop/pedophile stepfather.

I choke on the feeling of helplessness, as familiar to me as my own breath. It comes in uncontrollable waves, an ebb and flow that I couldn’t resist if I tried, just as impossible to resist as holding my own breath until I pass out.

Who cares about a fake marriage? I ask myself. It’s a common enough trope, a central focus of dozens of TV shows, movies, books. What’s so much worse about pretending to be a bride? Isn’t that better than finding myself in the beds of all five Havoc Boys?

Hmm.

“You’re on my orders and nobody else’s.”

What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway?

I slump down the wall and wait there until my anger subsides. I’m committed to this. I spent the entire summer hiding out with Heather at the lake and the park, mulling this over.

There are people in my life that have to pay, and I don’t have the strength or the resources to make it happen on my own.

So if I have to slip on a ring for Victor’s mommy, so be it.

It won’t be the worst thing I do this year.

Not by a long shot.

Besides, if I try to leave, I don’t know what they’ll do. Well … actually, I guess I do: they’ll kill me.

That much, at least, is a definite.

Sitting with Havoc at lunch every day is disconcerting; I'm pretty damn sure the whole school is staring at us. Other stuff I noticed: Jim Dallon didn't ask to bum a cigarette from me, Mark Charlin didn't hit on me when I was digging through my locker, and my ex-bestie, Kali Rose-Kennedy, saw me coming down the hall this morning and went running.

She's coming down, like all the rest of them. The people who ruined my life. Havoc did a good job. Hell, they really are professionals, but they were the symptoms, not the cause.

I'm taking down the ringleaders of my destruction.

Sometimes, when I feel like this, I'm certain that I'm a ghost, come from the grave for vengeance. There's no way I could be alive, not with the way I feel. Living things shouldn't be so full of misery.

“Where'd you get the sweet bike?” Callum asks, his voice low and dark, rough. Stacey claims a rival gang member once hit him in the throat so hard that he suffered permanent damage. I'm not sure if I believe that, but the guy has this coarse, shadowed sound to his words. “Did you pinch it?”

“I got the parts out of the dumpster behind the cycle shop downtown. Wait around long enough, and they throw out a little of everything. Some elbow grease and YouTube videos was all it took.”

I glance over at the shiny red ten-speed on the bike rack and shrug my shoulders.

I'm trying to eat my cafeteria food, this nasty ass greasy pizza plus