Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,128

fingers firm and possessive on the bottom of my chin. It’s enough to make me forget that twenty fossil fuel companies contribute a third of all carbon emissions. Shit, if climate change is going to kill us all, at least I’ll have this moment seared on my tongue like a brand.

“Just say thank you, Oscar and that will suffice.” He takes the seat next to me, making my stomach flip-flop dangerously. Tonight is our first night in the apartment, our chance to practice those ‘sleeping arrangements’ that Callum brought up the other day. At the safe house, we all slept in the same room. The bed was small and shitty, so the guys took turns rotating through some sleeping bags on the floor.

Here … is different. There’s a king-size bed in all three rooms. Also, the master is large enough that we could, like, maybe push at least two of them together …

I bite my lower lip, and the tension in the room winds into something tight and virulent. That’s what you get when you’re dating five red-blooded men all at once. They look at you the way you look at them: like something naughty and delicious that deserves to be licked. Only, I get whatever I give them back five times over.

“I have to see Pamela. Just … not quite yet. But soon. Then I’ll decide what to do.”

The easiest thing would be to just forget about her, make her disappear, but some part of me knows that I can’t just yet. I want some answers; I have too many questions. The biggest one, I suppose, is this: will Pamela Pence answer any of them?

Guess we’ll have to wait and find out, now won’t we?

“Your wish is our command,” Hael says, touching his fingers to his chest and throwing me a shit-eating grin. “So, Havoc Girl, who do you wish to take to bed in that big-ass room tonight?”

A snort escapes me as I glance over at the wall of windows and the sparkling lights of Springfield in the distance. Hmm. My nails dig into the black fabric of my sweats as I consider.

“Do you think … I mean, it’d be safest if we all stayed in the same room for a while, right?”

Aaron lifts a brow as I lean down and grab my drink off the table, a slight flush coloring my cheeks as I slip the straw between my lips. Somehow, even as he proclaimed to hate me with every breath, Oscar watched me enough to notice how much I love chocolate milk with straws, that this was my go-to drink in the Prescott High cafeteria.

“Don’t talk in circles around us,” Victor says, and I have to snort because I know he’s referencing that first day in the library when I sat down across from these assholes and asked for their help in extracting vengeance from a cruel and vicious world. “We don’t like it.”

“We really don’t like it,” Oscar echoes, leaning back against the arm of the couch and the few decorative throw pillows there like some sort of obscenely beautiful boy-king, set to inherit the earth in his tattooed hands.

“Maybe we should all sleep in the master bedroom?” I start, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the room where Vic and I fucked this morning. “It doesn’t have to be forever, but why not for now? While we finish school, while we deal with the GMP …”

I trail off, and I realize then that I’m still doing it, that I’m still asking.

I stand up quickly, moving over to one of the duffel bags still sitting on the floor near the front door. I extract the crown that Victor got me and set it on my head, moving back into the living room as Hael and Callum chuckle and Aaron smiles softly. Vic looks contemplative, and Oscar looks … enraptured? Is that even possible?

“What I meant to say was: we are all sleeping in the same room. Go get the other bed and drag it in there.” I turn on my heel and head down the hallway as laughter rings out behind me.

But guess what?

They do it.

They put the other bed in there, wedging it in between the wall of windows and the original bed.

It should be awkward, right? All six of us lying there in the dark together. Only … it’s fucking not. Because underneath the claws and teeth, the guns and knives, the blood and pain, we’re all seventeen and eighteen and lonely and