Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,55

gets caught on his mouth on the way out, an ugly truth that bleeds. “Before that …”

My heart stutters and gets caught in my throat, and then I just know that I can’t stay standing anymore. I kneel down in front of him so that we’re facing each other, just two teenagers with old souls and a mountain of cards stacked against them.

But that’s the fun part, you know. Seeing the underdog pull through. That’s what I want, some proof that justice and vengeance both exist, that bad people can be punished, that good people can win—even if it’s a rare and distant sort of thing. Hope, right. The thing with feathers …

“She touched you, didn’t she?” I ask, because it’s the one thing I never expected from Vic’s past. He’s such a careful man; he hides his pain so well. He disguises it with his dominance. But he’s only just now becoming an adult, and he hasn’t left all of that childhood pain and trauma behind the way he thinks he does.

“Her …” he breathes, looking into my face with an earnest sort of expression that betrays all of that long-suffering fear. “Her friends. At the fancy parties …” He trails off and wets his lips, closing his eyes for a moment and scrubbing both hands down his face. He leaves them there for a long moment before dropping them to his lap and looking at me with an expression made of obsidian eyes and a mouth as sharp and dangerous as a knife. “This thing, this … perversion, it’s been running in Springfield for a long time. This isn’t new. None of it is.”

I sit there for a moment, fingers twitching in my lap. My head is filled with the white noise of rage. It’s something I’ve been dealing with for a long, long time. But, as Victor has warned me on multiple occasions, I need to control it and throw it at the right target at the right time.

“And then they took my baby …” he growls, and I close my eyes, my body breaking out in goose bumps. “They took my fucking baby from me.” A gasp slips from me as he wraps his arms around me and drags me into him. Somehow, I’m already anticipating the move, throwing my own arms around his neck and squeezing him like the fate of the universe depends on it.

Since he just so happens to be the center of mine, I guess it really fucking does.

Stacey’s girls are willing to meet me at the nail art place down the block. And by nail art place, I mean that girl whose aunt will do your nails for like fifteen bucks and make it look like you paid three hundred at the stuffy Oak Park place with the weird French name.

“RIP, my love,” one of the girls says, eyeing her coffin-tipped pink nails with a frown and watery eyes. “Shit, I’m sorry.” She dashes her hand across her face and shakes her head. “The nails are fly, girl. I just … it’s been hard without Stacey, you know?”

“It was all my fault,” one of the other girls says, her face swollen and mottled with bruises. Clearly, at some point recently, she got the shit kicked out of her. Worse than me, even. I’m guessing this is the girl that Stacey’s crew got back alive. “I picked the john. I … and I’m the one that told those GMP motherfuckers that I worked for Havoc.” She glances away sharply, braided hair swinging with the motion. “You sure you aren’t here to kill me?”

“I’m here to tell you that we want you in our crew,” I say, and several of the girls exchange glances with one another. They don’t seem nearly as surprised as I might’ve thought. I look up at the woman across from me, some gorgeous thirty-something that shapes my ragged ass nails into a feast for the eyes. Matte black, coffin-tips, each nail hand-painted with a filigreed letter pertaining to HAVOC and blessed with a jewel of some sort. On my right pointer finger, she pierces a hole through the tip of the nail and puts a ring on it that matches the ones I wear in my belly button.

“No surprise,” one of the others says, checking her purple nails over and tossing me a look that’s split between animosity and curiosity. As if she can’t help herself, her gaze strays over to Hael Harbin, sitting in a chair behind