Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,217

be forever falling into him.

“Paris?” Vic asks, turning around with his obsidian eyes dark and a wry smile on his lusty menace of a mouth. “You fucking think we’d fit in there? Frankly, I’m down for a staycation that involves fucking, fucking, and more fucking.” He moves over to stand beside me, and I drag my attention away from Oscar to look at him. Each and every time, it’s like a punch to the gut, but in the best possible way, like my breath is being siphoned from my lungs but I’d pay for the privilege of dying in such dark bliss. “And yeah, if it involved getting you pregnant, all the better.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Cal breathes, pouring himself another drink as he points at my journal. “As much as I’d be down for a Havoc baby, Bernie has other dreams. Let her write her poems. She’s a brilliant fucking poet.”

“I mean, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I mumble, but then Aaron is taking the empty glass from my hand and curling his fingers around mine.

“I think we’d all go that far,” he says, and then he stands up and pulls me to my feet, even as my mind starts to twist words together the way an oil painter mixes colors on her canvas.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who dreamed in prose and pretty phrases.

She quickly learned that life is at its best unfair and at its worst perversely cruel.

Her dreams became nightmares, nightmares made of monsters new and old.

And so she summoned them, her five dark horsemen, to wreak havoc and sow chaos, to twist mayhem and denote anarchy, to declare victory over every wicked, ugly thing she’d ever seen.

They came to her, those horsemen, and in return for their vile vengeance, they took her heart and held it in their inked hands. They claimed her flesh with carnal delight, but it was her soul that they craved most of all. And to them, she gave it freely and without restraint.

“Your brilliance is a jewel in a wasteland of a world,” Oscar tells me, snapping my reverie, making my heart race. I throw my arms around his neck, and he shudders. But not in the way he used to, when my every touch made him remember the worst parts of his childhood, but in the way of lovers well-familiar with each other’s bodies, in the way two soul mates find comfort in one another.

Because that’s what they are, all five of them: soul mates.

That is, if you believe in that kind of thing.

We head upstairs together, shedding clothes, ten worshipful hands caressing my body. When I fall into bed, I fall into it with five beautiful monsters. Five beautifully broken Havoc Boys turned men. We kiss; we fuck; we meld.

That’s how I get my happily ever after, wrapped up in ink and bullshit. Wrapped up in motherfucking Havoc.

Confucius says dig two graves before embarking on a journey of revenge.

I guess he was right.

When you go seeking revenge, some small part of you will die a death … someway, somehow. But from the ashes of that, something new will rise, something different, something better.

“When you’ve been lied to by everyone around you, when you have nothing else, you realize the one currency you can carry is truth. So a single word does have meaning. A promise does hold importance. And a pact is worth carrying to the grave.”

There are two sides to every story, but usually, only one of them is true. I’ve given you my truth, written my words, told you my tale. It’s up to you to decide what to do it with it.

The world is built of stories, crafted of pain, outlined with beauty; every story deserves to be heard.

This one, this one is mine.

There’s one word you don’t utter at Prescott High, not unless you want them to own you.

H.A.V.O.C.

Hael, Aaron, Victor, Oscar, Callum.

And of course, Bernadette.

Cry ‘Havoc’ and set us loose, baby.

Blood in, blood out.

The End

Dear Reader

Wow. Did that seriously just happen? I’m still reeling from everything Bernadette and the Havoc Boys have been through, but I’m also so, so glad to see them get the ending they always deserved. This was the longest and most difficult book I’ve ever written. At around 170,000 words, it’s the size of two normal novels stitched together, but oh so worth it.

I’m already missing these characters and looking forward to a few short stories about their future that I’ve got planned