going to be your new daddy. You will show him respect, or I'll beat it into you.”
The front door flies open, the knob smashing into the wall, and Hael storms in, sweaty and shaking as he kneels down in front of his mother.
“Maman, listen to me,” he says as she fights against him, trying to tear her hands from his.
“They're coming, mon fils,” she murmurs, eyes flicking to the doorway as Vic walks in, scowling and speckled with blood. He gives me a look that says he isn't happy with my escalation of the situation, but fuck him. I'm not happy about the video; we all have to learn to live with disappointment. “They're out to get me.”
“What on earth is she muttering about now?” Oscar asks, flicking an imaginary piece of dust from the arm of his dark suit as he joins us, closing the door behind him.
“Show some goddamn compassion, would ya?” Hael snaps back at him, moving to sit on the sofa beside his mother and smoothing back her hair. He murmurs quietly to her in French until she stops fidgeting, her honey-brown eyes remarkably similar to her son's. She darts her gaze between us, finally landing her attention on me.
“Who is this?” she asks in a heavily accented voice, gesturing at me. “I'll make cookies. You want some? Of course you do,” she mutters this last part, like she really doesn’t care what Hael’s going to say; she’s making those goddamn cookies.
“We don't need any cookies, Maman,” Hael groans, closing his eyes in a way that reveals how tired he truly is. And I don't mean physically, I mean in his fucking soul. It's a weightiness, a heaviness, that sort of melancholic fatigue. It eats at you like moths at a sweater, leaving little holes, weakening the knit. You can still put it on, but it'll never keep you warm, not ever again. Eventually, the whole thing just unravels.
“All little boys like cookies,” his mother says, pushing away from him and standing up with a smile, like she didn't just see two dozen teenagers brandish illegal weapons at each other in her front yard. Hael scowls as his mother totters off, pausing to pat me on the cheek. “You Hael's girlfriend?” she asks, but before I can think up an appropriate answer, she's talking again. “You like chocolate chip? Nobody don't like chocolate chip.”
His mother disappears into the kitchen area, leaving the four of us in a bubble of awkward-as-fuck. I raise an eyebrow as Hael swallows and swipes a hand down his face.
“Interesting accent she has,” I remark, and he shakes his head with a sigh.
“She's from Louisiana,” he tells me, shrugging his big shoulders. “My maman is Cajun.”
Ahh, so that explains both the French and the unusual accent.
“And as far as who's actually coming for her …” I start.
“My mom's sick, okay?” Hael snaps, a bit of that darkness I remember seeing in him during sophomore year coming to the surface to play. Doesn't offend me, but at least he has the common decency to look chagrined. “Sorry, Blackbird. I just … I don't want to talk about it, okay?” He gives me a look that says this is as deep as he goes, this thing with his mom. I'm not going to get to see this part of Hael, not yet. Maybe not ever. All of his playfulness, his flirting, his smirks and his sultry chuckles, all defense mechanisms to keep the world from seeing this part of him.
“Marie suffers from various mental illnesses,” Oscar explains in a deadpan, causing Hael to grit his teeth and clench his fists in a way that reminds me of Vic. For his part, Havoc's leader says nothing, staring at me from dark eyes in such a manner that tells me I better get the hell out of Dodge or pay the consequences. “I maintain that while some are a matter of imbalanced brain chemistry, most are Martin's doing.”
Martin, who the fuck is Martin?
“Enough,” Hael growls out, the word the final nail in the coffin of this conversation. “Mitch and his crew just rolled up into my neighborhood and dragged my mother to the lawn. What else would they have done if we hadn't shown up?”
“Moot point, we did show up,” Vic says as Marie begins to hum in the kitchen. “This was all just a farce to get us out here, to spew some bullshit about Danny.”
“Yeah, well, it hit a little too close to home