Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,15

Which motherfucking letter?

I stand up from the stool, heart pumping so furiously that if I were to nick my carotid the way we did Danny’s … this entire room would be bathed in blood.

The front door opens, and Oscar slips in, letting it swing shut behind him. It takes me a second to recognize that it’s him since he’s no longer wearing his suit. I imagine that, like with me and Vic, the cops took his clothes.

He reaches back and flicks the deadbolt. And then, when he turns his gray eyes over to me, I swear that his attention cuts through the shadows like a ghost on a haunt. Delving into me. Owning me. Possessing me.

My breath catches, and I have to lean back and curl my fingers around the edge of the countertop, just to stay standing upright.

“Shit, they give you the nth degree, too?” Vic asks, and Oscar turns his head very slowly to look at our boss. My husband. His longtime friend. So many fucking things. My eyes rake over Oscar’s body, taking in the long, lean lines of him, the myriad tattoos showing on his exposed arms, above the scooped neck of the white wifebeater he’s wearing. The sweats he’s got on—they look like they might be part of a Prescott gym uniform—sagging so low that I can see a band of ink between his lower belly and his waistband.

“They know a lot of things,” Oscar says, turning back to me and moving very, very slowly down the length of the living room toward the kitchen. As he goes, he grabs a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a light from the top of a shelf, flicking the wheel and firing up the end of one. By the time he gets to me, he’s pulling in a long drag and then exhaling pretty white smoke into the darkness surrounding me.

He taints it, too, Oscar does. He taints it fuckin’ filthy, and I love everything about that, about the way he poisons the air, the way his stare is venom and his heart ice, his trauma so deep it could make canyons in his soul. That’s what I like, all of it.

“But not enough to keep me,” Oscar finishes finally, tossing the pack of smokes onto the counter and then removing the cigarette from his sharp and dangerous mouth with two fingers. He stares down at me, and I feel like I can hear it, the pounding of his heart. His signature cinnamon smell grabs me by the throat, pun intended. “We have to make some moves—and quick.”

“Do you know where Callum is?” I ask, and Oscar goes very still, like a vampire who’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. That’s a scary thing to witness, watching someone turn into a statue of ink and blood and bullshit.

“No,” Oscar breathes darkly, and Vic sighs, reaching out to take the smoke from Oscar’s fingers. As if this is one of Callum’s choreographed dances, Oscar’s hands find their way to my hips. In an instant, his breath is stirring my hair and my eyes are closing of their own accord. “The last I saw of him, he was outside the school, chasing someone.”

“Shit,” I grind out, because I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like it at fucking all. “Chasing who?”

Oscar gives a slow, simple shake of his head, and I grit my teeth in anger. Not at him. At myself. At Prescott. At the world in general. Callum Park should be at, like, fucking Juilliard or something, not chasing down Nazis during a school shooting.

See if the other boys come home, Bernie. Then call Ophelia. Make her put you in touch with Maxwell. If he has Callum, or he knows what happened to him, he’ll tell you. He’ll do that because he’s a monster, and monsters always recognize other monsters.

And their weaknesses.

The Havoc Boys are my strength, but they’re also my weakness. My life force and my demise. My rise and fall. Fuck.

“I was worried about you,” Oscar says, and a quip hops right to my naked lips, the ones that feel foreign because they’re not covered in brightly tinted wax, brilliant jewel tones of stolen color that represent so many different things. It’s part of my armor, that lipstick, that color, those opinions. Because if I can tell you what lipstick I’m wearing and why, then I don’t have to answer all those other pesky questions that a person can pose: who are you? what