“Hey, I promised to be a Havoc Girl, but I never promised that I was sane.” I turn my blinker on, rocketing onto the highway behind the Camaro.

Aaron’s nice-boy smile turns a bit naughtier and he leans in, pressing his lips against the side of my throat. When he puts his hand on my thigh, I decide that we’re not going to make it to Portland alive if he keeps touching me. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—he draws his hand away and sits back.

“Nobody in our family is sane, Bernie. That’s why we work so well together.” Aaron turns up the music—“Determined” by Mudvayne—and then threads his fingers together behind his neck, closing his eyes against the rush of farmland on either side of the highway.

We make record time, pulling into a disturbingly dark parking lot outside of some industrial shitbox with the word Kay’s written in neon pink lighting across the front. Looks exactly like the type of place I’ve gone out of my way to avoid in life. This is the sort of establishment that girls go into and they don’t come out of. Or, if they do, they don’t come out the same person that they were when they went in.

I turn the engine off and, with one last look at Aaron, I open the door and climb out.

We have seventeen minutes. That’s it. There’s no time to dawdle.

“Set the timers on your phone,” Vic commands, hopping off the Harley and hooking his helmet over the handlebars. He’s dressed in a black hoodie and jeans, just like the rest of the boys. But Hael and Aaron are the only two wearing black fingerless skeleton gloves on their left hands. Even fingerless, the gloves cover up to the first knuckle, hiding that deliciously dark acronym from view. “Bernadette, call my phone and leave the line open; I want to hear everything that you’re doing in there.”

“Got it,” I say, pausing beside Oscar near the back entrance to the club. There are a few dumpsters out here, a wash of graffiti which includes that horrid silhouette of a clown face, but little else. It’s so fucking creepy. Apparently, this place used to be a bank once upon a time. According to Vera, there are old vaults in here that make up some of the rooms. The doors have all been turned inward, making them nearly impenetrable.

I text Vera as Hael and Callum do a quick check of the parking lot. Here, girl. That’s all I send, just in case the feds get another warrant to take our new phones. Not that it really matters. Even if Sara and Constantine figure out we were here, they’ll never know why. It’s not like the GMP is going to report Mason’s murder.

The underground operates within its own set of fucked-up rules.

Leaning my shoulder against the wall of the club, I can feel the pulse of the music from inside, a dirty heartbeat that speaks to the underbelly of the city, beckoning forth its darkest denizens. I make sure to keep my eyes on my phone, pretending to scroll as I wait for Vera to unlock the door from the other side.

If someone stumbles on me, they’ll think I’m a stripper or a hooker. Either way, I likely won’t be shot on sight the way the boys might.

Coming, Vera texts, and less than a minute later, I hear the sound of a chain-lock being removed, the metallic swish of a deadbolt. The door cracks open and within seconds, I’m surrounded by a sea of male shadows, pushing me forward and inside. Just me and a cloud of Havoc, baby.

“Be careful,” Vera hisses, reaching out to grab my arm with her pink-nailed hand. “Mason is edgy tonight.” She has to shout to be heard over the music, but I consider what she has to say, nodding before I slip down the hall with Hael and Aaron trailing behind me. “Grab a bottle of liquor and start pouring. Any girl that isn’t dancing or fucking is makin’ drinks.” Vera peels away from me, heading for the stage at the front of the room.

It’s hard to see in the dirty shadows of the club, but it’s clear that there’s someone sitting in the frontmost booth, the crest of his head barely visible above the back of the blue cushion. I straighten out the black miniskirt I’m wearing and turn to face my boys. They’re both hyper-alert, eyes darting around the club to take in any possible threats, cataloguing the exits.

Glancing down at my phone, I see that two minutes have already passed since we got here. Jesus fucking Christ, this is going to be tight. Shit, it might not work at all. Mason might not pick a girl, or he might decide that today of all days is going to be one where he takes an hour before selecting one.

Then what?

Will I snitch to the fucking feds to keep a girl safe from Mason’s perverted hands?

The answer to that question scares the shit out of me.

I know I would.

I seriously fucking would.

Forcing Aaron and Hael into a booth near the bar, I snatch a bottle of booze as Vera suggested and go about pouring them each a drink. I take my time doing it, waiting for them both to throw back the shots just so I can pour some more.

“He’s just fucking sitting there,” Aaron growls, checking his phone for the time. It just keeps tick-tick-ticking away. If the police cruiser arrives to find our cars empty, the six of us disappeared into the depths of a known gang hangout, then they’ll come in looking for us. We can’t risk that; it’s an emergency contingency plan for a reason. The last thing Havoc needs is to be seen as a pack of snitches in the southside. “What gives?”

I glance back just in time to see a man with dark hair and an uneasy smile rise from his seat at the front of the room, like it’s a dirty throne made of rusted nails and the bones of people he’s broken in the pursuit of his own sadistic pleasure. Vera is right there with him, working that curvy Prescott body of hers, flashing her tits.

None of it is working.

Mason moves right past her, pushing his way through the crowd toward the bar and ordering a drink. A part of me wonders if we haven’t misjudged him, if he isn’t, in some small way, distraught over the death of James Barrasso. Maybe tonight he isn’t looking for pussy?

But, of course, that’s a ridiculous thought.

Mason’s black gaze lifts up to mine and it’s like an arrow has pierced straight through my chest. I take a step back, my ass bumping into the edge of the table that Aaron and Hael are seated around. I often call Victor’s eyes black or—much to Mr. Darkwood’s chagrin—ebon. But there’s a depth to them, something poignant and organic, like the night sky or the darkened underbelly of a distant wood.

Mason … his eyes are voids to another world, one where compassion goes to die.

Four minutes have ticked past by the time he starts making his way toward me.

“Bernadette,” Aaron warns from the booth behind me. “Start moving.”

But I don’t. The way Mason is looking at me, I can tell that he’s already made his decision for the night: I’m the girl that he wants.

“You,” he says, pausing in front of me. The way he looks at me, it feels like he’s peeling my skin back so he can lap at the blood inside. Wild, primal fear takes over me, the most feminine part of my brain screaming that I need to run. Now. Fast. Go, go, go, and never look back.

The thing is, we cannot move forward without killing Mason.

And we’re never going to get a better chance than we have now, tonight, here.

I go to set the bottle of liquor aside, but Mason snatches my wrist so hard that I hiss in pain between my teeth. He smells like iodine and bleach; I kid you not. And there’s just something so much worse about that antiseptic sterility. I’d have preferred sour breath or the stink of booze. A neat monster, I think as Mason takes the bottle of liquor and lifts it to his mouth. Swigging a healthy portion of it, he lets his eyes sweep the crowd. If he looks too closely at Hael and Aaron, there’s a chance—however slim—that he might recognize them.

It’s dark in here, smoky and hazy, strobe lights flashing as topless girls flicker across the surfaces of the stages. It’d take an eagle eye to spot anything unusual in the anonymous pit of the club. The thing is, I don’t put it past a man like Mason Miller to do just that. If Callum says this man is dangerous, then I believe him.

I scoot closer to Mason, allowing my breasts to brush against his chest. He curves his left arm around my shoulders, looking down at me with a sneering expression that has me fantasizing about the blade stuck in the sole of my boot. It slides into a small sheath embedded in the rubber, and even if it’s only about the length of my hand, I could kill a man with it if needed.

Just … maybe not Mason Miller.

I don’t lose faith in my plan—it’ll still work, whether Mason chooses me or Vera—and allow him to lead me through the crowd, toward a dark hallway with a staircase. A chain is drawn across it, a small sign hanging from it that warns against trespassing.

That’s where we’re supposed to be going.

Instead, Mason leads me right past the staircase and down a separate hall. In my pocket, I feel my phone buzz, but there’s no way to answer it or even check to see who’s calling me. Mason is too focused, his gaze flicking down to mine every few steps we take. At least I know that the call I made to Vic’s phone outside the club is still connected; nothing else matters.

We make a right turn and Mason pauses at the sight of another man in the hall with us.

It’s Tom Muller.

His eyes drop to mine before lifting back up to Mason’s. He does a decent job of acting like he’s never seen me before, but the pulse in his throat jumps at the sight of Maxwell’s second-in-command, a dark fear and grudging respect etched into his gaze. Tom’s brown eyes mimic his son’s in color only; there is nothing of Tom’s cruelty in David Benedict.

“Mason,” Tom starts, nodding his head respectfully in the man’s direction. “Do you like the girls this week?”

“Oh, I love the girls this week,” Mason says with a harsh laugh, and then, before I can even think to react to his movements, he’s drawing a pistol outfitted with a silencer and pulling the trigger. A neat, little hole appears in Tom’s forehead just before he slumps to the ground at our feet, blood pooling in a circle of ruby red around him.