Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,31

needle, this thread, these scissors. I make a stitch, tie it off. Make another stitch, tie that off, too.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” he promises me, azure eyes like bright gems in a pale face. “Tonight, I’m staying with you.” I look up to find him watching me and not the needle. He’s more interested in my expression, in the way my hair falls forward like a red and blond shield when I lean down to continue the stitches. Once we’re finished, I start on the exit wound. I have no idea if this is proper medicine or not—very likely it isn’t—but we’re rachet as hell here in Prescott. We do our own thing.

“Callum, I was pregnant,” I say, before I lose my nerve. There’s a long pause in his breathing that freaks me out, so I move my eyes from his wound to his face, only to find him with his eyes closed. Panic sweeps over me in a wave and a scream gets caught in my throat. My worst fear in the world would be to lose one of my boys. But then he blinks a few times and exhales.

“Oh, Bernie,” he tells me, face breaking. There’s sympathy there, but behind that emotion, there’s nothing but the endless black of rage. It startles me enough that the needle slips and Cal sucks in another sharp breath. He isn’t dying, Bernie. He’s in pain. Each time the needle goes into his flesh, he stops breathing until I’m pulling the thread through. It must hurt like a bitch. At the hospital, they always numb the spot first. We’re just running on a wing and a prayer here.

It occurs to me that I should get him some fucking booze. Or weed. Or both.

“When you were beaten on the lawn,” Cal says next, surprising me. He saw that? I keep my attention on the stitches, trying to give him time to process what I’m saying. “They beat you into miscarrying.” It isn’t a question. I told you: Callum understands me in a way that nobody else does.

Each boy holds a different spark, like a different color in a single rainbow. It just isn’t complete without all those shades, now is it?

“I’m not upset,” I say, which probably isn’t true. I am upset. But in a way that’s hard to explain. There’s relief there, too, which I feel guilty about even though I know I shouldn’t. I think, if this had happened any other way, I’d be alright. It’s just the idea that unsolicited violence is what got me to this point.

My cramps squeeze again, and I choke on my next breath as pain washes over me.

“You’re in pain,” Cal observes, but that’s a funny thing for someone with a GSW, a stab wound, and a slit throat to say. “You don’t have to want a baby to be upset, you know. You can just be upset, even if it’s for no reason at all.”

“Don’t lecture me,” I warn him, finishing the final stitch on the exit wound. Next, I spread apart the fabric at his shoulder and grimace at the torn, ragged edges of flesh. He really needs to see a fucking doctor. But I can also understand that the endless chasm of rage that I see in him, it needs to be soothed, too. And he can only do that if he feels safe, if he’s with me. “If anything, I should be the one telling you that.”

I take a brief moment to touch my fingers to his throat, and he shudders, snatching my wrist so hard that I actually cry out from the shock of it. But there’s no pain, not the way he holds me. Instead, his face is sad, distant, a reflection of the involuntarily reaction to having his neck touched.

He almost didn’t have to live this life. He almost got the fuck out of here.

The thing is, you don’t always have to run to make things better. You can fight. You can inflict change on a world that rallies against it as if it’s the fucking plague. That’s what we’re going to do here, take this city under our dark wings and give it the underground it deserves, one that allows the normal people who dwell in the sun and live on the surface a chance to live a normal life.

People like Heather, like Kara, like Ashley. People like that girl, Alyssa, that we rescued from the beach house. People like Ms. Keating. Even people like Sara Young.

Because no