told me sooner. You should've let me make that choice,” I growl, pointing to my chest as I grit my teeth and feel my lust quickly being replaced with anger. “After all your bullshit, all your reassurances, you and the others, you're exactly what I thought you would be.”
“And that is?” Vic asks, uncrossing his arms and moving toward me. He keeps a healthy distance between us—smart move on his part—but it still feels too close. He's always too close to me, always digging beneath my skin and into my soul with those depthless eyes of his. Unending. Infinite. Eternal. Victor Channing will outlast an apocalypse, I'm sure of it.
“Monsters,” I clarify, exhaling sharply and then moving past him to get into the kitchen. I forgot to eat yesterday and I'm starving. When I open the fridge, I find leftovers from a taco dinner: cooked ground beef in a Tupperware container, chopped green onions and shredded cheese, all of it wrapped up and carefully put away. Havoc is far more domestic than they first appear, and you know what? That makes them even scarier. There's nothing they can't do, no chasm they can't cross.
“Hael cooked for the girls last night,” Vic explains, without my even having to ask. “He's surprisingly good at it.” He lets out a low chuckle and shakes his head, stepping back into the archway and blocking me into the kitchen. I'd say I didn't think he meant to do that, that he's just big and muscular and the space is small, but I don't believe that for a second.
Nothing Vic ever does is by accident.
“Must be all those morning-after breakfasts he cooks for his one-night stands,” I quip, despite the fact that tacos aren't exactly a breakfast food. When I suck in a deep breath, I can smell the weed curing in the bathroom around the corner, just past the laundry room. There are joints all over this house; I just need to find some, light up, and try to calm my head.
“Bernadette, I need you to listen to me,” Vic says, but I ignore him, getting out the leftovers, and opening a fresh pack of flour tortillas. I turn the gas stove on and then throw a tortilla directly onto the burner. It cooks fast that way, and there's no oil involved. Win-win. Victor watches me as I pretend he doesn't exist. Pretend being the key word. I could never truly forget about Vic, no matter how hard I tried. Shit, I'm wearing the guy's family heirloom on my finger. “We never meant to keep that video from you. I'd always intended on showing you, but it got lost in the hustle and bustle of everything else. There's so much, Bernadette. So damn much. We're taking this one step at a time.”
“Why does it seem like everyone else in Havoc wanted me gone?” I ask, lifting my eyes up to look at Vic. He repositions himself on the opposite side of the peninsula, putting his palms atop the counter and leaning in to look at me. “But not you. According to every other asshole in Havoc, my being here was your idea.”
“Let’s talk about the video,” Vic says, redirecting the conversation and making me grit my teeth. “You're upset, understandably so. What you saw, no person should ever have to witness. But we didn't intentionally hide that from you, and we never lied.”
“You had the video for years and did nothing with it,” I repeat, feeling my eyes begin to sting, my lips quiver. I don't want to cry. I cried enough yesterday. But somehow, with my sister dead and gone, lost in the claws of a monster that makes Havoc look like good guys by comparison, it doesn't seem like I can truly cry enough. It'll never be enough, not when it comes to Pen. She was my older sister, my best friend, the only family I had that truly cared about me.
And now she's gone.
And I've sold my soul to see justice. My body. My heart. My dignity.
“I explained that to you yesterday,” Vic says softly. “And we did do something with it; Neil has known all along that we have that video. We leveraged it against him so that he’d keep his fucking hands off of you. We didn’t know Pen was going to die the next day. Nobody could’ve known that.” There's something about the tenderness in his voice that really gets me, cuts right through the flesh and bone of