Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,100

rough lately. Crashing the Camaro, having the shit beat out of him, getting hit with Kali’s car. Tom stabbing him in the dick with the shotgun, breaking his hand, having to kill a girl we’ve been going to school with for a decade. He deserves a break. “Do you still think about her?”

Aaron’s quiet for a moment, almost like he’s holding his breath as we fly onto the track and then up the hidden side road. Glancing in my rearview, the only person I see behind me is Vic on his bike. No cops. Good. Eventually, this trick isn’t going to work anymore. But that’s okay. It just needs to last one more time, one final night.

“More often than I’d like,” he finally says, after we’ve emerged onto the suburban street and turned right at the next stop sign. The exit for the highway isn’t far off. From there, it’s about a two-hour drive without traffic. In traffic … fuck, it takes forever. This area was never meant to have so many people living in it. I just wish all the out-of-state transplants would fuck off and find somewhere else to live. Yeah, I’m that salty about it.

“Maybe we should use the handcuffs again?” I hazard, hoping that I’m not about to set off a PTSD trigger or anything. Aaron takes off his seat belt and scoots closer to me, making me wonder why every car doesn’t have a bench seat in the front. It’s sort of, like, optimal for cuddling or whatever. Totally new concept for me, but I’m embracing it.

“If you want to use handcuffs, Bernadette Blackbird, then we’ll use handcuffs, but not for my benefit. I’m okay, really.” I flick a quick glance in Aaron’s direction, but he puts a single inked finger up and pushes my face away, turning my eyes back to the road. “If you’ve been worried about me, don’t be. Obviously, what happened with Kali wasn’t ideal, but it had to happen. She was on your list. She was dealt with. I don’t take pleasure in it, but she isn’t appearing to me in ghost form.” He smiles to soften the blow of that, but it doesn’t bother me. I’m over that now.

“Hey, I promised to be a Havoc Girl, but I never promised that I was sane.” I turn my blinker on, rocketing onto the highway behind the Camaro.

Aaron’s nice-boy smile turns a bit naughtier and he leans in, pressing his lips against the side of my throat. When he puts his hand on my thigh, I decide that we’re not going to make it to Portland alive if he keeps touching me. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—he draws his hand away and sits back.

“Nobody in our family is sane, Bernie. That’s why we work so well together.” Aaron turns up the music—“Determined” by Mudvayne—and then threads his fingers together behind his neck, closing his eyes against the rush of farmland on either side of the highway.

We make record time, pulling into a disturbingly dark parking lot outside of some industrial shitbox with the word Kay’s written in neon pink lighting across the front. Looks exactly like the type of place I’ve gone out of my way to avoid in life. This is the sort of establishment that girls go into and they don’t come out of. Or, if they do, they don’t come out the same person that they were when they went in.

I turn the engine off and, with one last look at Aaron, I open the door and climb out.

We have seventeen minutes. That’s it. There’s no time to dawdle.

“Set the timers on your phone,” Vic commands, hopping off the Harley and hooking his helmet over the handlebars. He’s dressed in a black hoodie and jeans, just like the rest of the boys. But Hael and Aaron are the only two wearing black fingerless skeleton gloves on their left hands. Even fingerless, the gloves cover up to the first knuckle, hiding that deliciously dark acronym from view. “Bernadette, call my phone and leave the line open; I want to hear everything that you’re doing in there.”

“Got it,” I say, pausing beside Oscar near the back entrance to the club. There are a few dumpsters out here, a wash of graffiti which includes that horrid silhouette of a clown face, but little else. It’s so fucking creepy. Apparently, this place used to be a bank once upon a time. According to Vera, there are old vaults