Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,157

doesn’t even shift the slightest bit. His breathing remains even, his eyes fixated on my face.

I slice my hand next, pressing our palms together with an abrupt inhale of pain.

“Blood in,” I reconfirm, squeezing hard. “Blood out.”

I move onto Hael next, slicing his palm, pressing our hands together. His honey-almond eyes are soft, pupils thick and irises darkened with affection as we share blood. Callum is next, and I wonder for a brief minute if this isn’t going to be too much for him, considering he’s already got a body covered in scars. But when I hesitate, he takes the wrist of the hand holding the knife and moves it so that the blade is pressed into his skin.

“Do it,” he tells me, so I slice into his pale flesh and make him bleed. Again, we share blood, looking into each other’s eyes. Oscar is next, and I don’t need to ask if he wants this; I can feel it. It’d be obvious to anyone that walked into this room, that this is all he craves. Belonging. Family. And most especially if all that belonging and all that family was drenched in blood.

Our fingers tangle together, blood smearing between our palms. And then it’s Aaron’s turn.

It’s fitting that he’d be last in the circle today, since he was my first romantic love. He was always first, and nobody can ever take that away from us.

“Hello Bernie,” he whispers as I sit in his lap and we press our foreheads together. I cut him and we squeeze our hands together at the same time that we shut our eyes. Once we’re done, Aaron reaches out his palm and presses it against Victor’s.

A shudder passes through me just as one of the boards on the back window shifts and adjusts itself, letting a breeze blow into the room and extinguishing all of the candles in one, single breath.

“Blood in,” I repeat, shivering as Oscar and Callum get up to check the window, just to make sure that it really was just a side effect of an old house shifting and not a member of the GMP sneaking up on all of us, naked and sated and covered in blood. “Blood out.”

Aaron lies down with me in the blankets and we pass out.

Several hours later, I wake up to find the boys eating the last of the cake and digging into the remaining takeout. Scooting up to join them, I take another swig of whisky, dress myself, and then dig into a cake slice of my own while Aaron relights all the candles with Hael’s help.

Afterward, with just my pink jacket and my panties on but nothing else, I kneel in front of the fireplace on the old wooden floors. Sucking one finger into my mouth, I make it wet and then I draw a word on the hearth of the fireplace, tracing the letters H-A-V-O-C into the dust. Somebody puts the crown on my head, but I’m not paying attention to them right now.

In this moment, with the candles’ flames dancing and writhing around me, I take that tube of Penelope’s pink lipstick and I cross out the final name on my list.

7. the mom

With a quick swipe, I apply the lipstick to my own mouth and then kiss the bottom of the page, leaving the imprint of my lips like a signature.

“Goodbye, Mom,” I say, my mouth in a sharp frown but my eyes dry. “Good night.”

I set the envelope aflame with a single flick of my lighter and then I toss the remainder of it into Victor’s grandmother’s fireplace to burn.

“So it’s done then,” Victor says from behind me, but I know he isn’t really asking. He’s just stating a fact. Even so, I reply because we all need to know for sure.

“It’s done,” I agree, and then he sweeps me into his arms and fucks me into the floor.

Things are different after that night. Better. Blissful, almost. Every day that I wake up surrounded by Havoc, every day that I attend that snooty ass school and sleep in that fancy ass apartment, is a blessing I never expected to count.

Something changes between us all—as you might think, considering the orgy and the bloodletting—but in the best possible way. We’re connected, intertwined, bound and twisted together. It makes it easier to pass the time as we wait out the end of school, a year of marriage, all the steps that will bring us that much closer to Victor’s inheritance and