way and winks, trying to lighten the mood. Bit difficult here considering the air is quite literally perfumed with violence. It smells like testosterone and long-awaited revenge.
“Oh, Scott, come on,” Vic says, shaking his head slightly. “You were punished for a reason. To be quite frank, we went easy on you. But you just had to come crawling back. Even a snake knows that when its burrow is kicked in, that it should slither away. You know what that makes you, Vaughn?” He continues as Callum and Hael step forward, shoving Vaughn into a plastic chair, each of them with a hand on the principal’s shoulders. As usual, Oscar stands to the side in his suit and tie, observing but keeping his hands relatively clean.
“Please,” Vaughn whispers, looking around the room and finally settling on me. “Please don’t do this.” He leans forward, teeth gritted, eyes wide. His glasses slip down his nose. He must think because I’m a girl, that I’ll be softer on him somehow, the most likely person in this room to grant him mercy.
Silly him.
“It makes you a rodent, Scott,” I finish, filling in the blanks in Vic’s metaphor. “I told you my stepfather was raping my sister, and you felt me up. You invited me to do pornography for you, at the age of fifteen. Don’t look at me like a savior. Vaughn, part of the reason you’re here is because you did me wrong.” I nod my chin at Aaron, and he steps forward, bolt cutters in hand.
“No, please!” Vaughn screams, his voice echoing around the small room. That’s when I hear the speakers in the hall begin to play music, disguising our wicked intent from the world. It’ll take Ms. Keating a while to figure out how to stop it, I’m sure.
Part of me is worried about that detective guy—Constantine or whatever the fuck his name was—but I know how thorough the boys are, so I figure he must not be on campus today.
“Quiet,” Vic snaps, going dark as he lowers his head, his dark brown eyes turning black, like a demon’s. “You’re going to take your punishment and your lover is going to patch you up. Afterwards, you’re going to consider doing what we say. A trained dog is fed treats, Vaughn. A rabid one is put down. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No, no, no, please,” Vaughn is sobbing as Aaron pushes the metal rolling table toward him. Callum takes the principal’s hand and puts it flat against the surface, splaying his fingers out. That’s when it clicks, for both me and Vaughn. He begins to keen like a cornered animal as I watch sweet, little Aaron Fadler slip one of the man’s digits between the end of the bolt cutters.
“Bite down on this,” Oscar offers up, passing over a leather whip that he removes from his bookbag. “You left it at the cabin; we thought you might want it.” Hael slips the item in Scott’s mouth as tears roll down his cheeks, staining his blue-striped button-down. “Now, bite down and taste the sweet metallic bite of vengeance.”
Aaron glances at me one last time, his green-gold gaze connecting with mine, and then squeezes the bolt cutters closed, severing the tip of Vaughn’s middle finger. His scream is muffled by the handle of the leather whip as blood floods the surface of the metal table. Not two seconds later, his eyes are rolling into his head and he’s passed out.
“Pathetic,” Oscar murmurs as he steps forward and cracks some smelling salts beneath the principal’s nose, reviving him. Scott’s eyes flick wildly around the room as Aaron moves onto his next finger, positioning the bolt cutters just below the first knuckle of his pointer finger. Reminds me of this one time when I broke the tip of my finger in the panels of our garage door. I was trying to close it manually from the outside, but my finger slipped in and was crushed. The pain was nearly unbearable, especially for a fourteen-year-old, but I survived.
So will Vaughn.
Lucky him.
“Wait,” I say, before Aaron can squeeze the ends of the cutters together. All five boys glance my way, and I see something like triumph flash in Oscar’s gray eyes. Asshole. He thinks I’m here to free Vaughn? What an idiot.
The way Aaron looks at me though, like I’m both more and less than he ever thought I would be, I can tell he knows what I want. Without a word, he hands the cutters