I lift my eyes up to his, impossible to read behind the thick lenses of his glasses, too distant to interpret. But I have the power to bridge that gap, to see all the way down, into the twisted complexity that makes up one of the most beautifully damaged people I have ever known.

Victor joins us, his aura making the room seem impossibly small despite the fact that it’s fucking huge and almost disturbingly austere.

I sit up, but I stay close to Aaron. Being close to Aaron makes me feel vulnerable but strong, too, like I can take that vulnerability and wield it as a weapon in the same way that Victor wields his anger.

After a moment, Oscar moves away, and my heart seizes painfully in remembrance of his past fuckups, his fleeing, his leaving me alone in the cold and the dark with blood between my thighs … But he comes back quickly and puts a glass of chocolate milk on the table in front of me, complete with straw.

“It’s a biodegradable straw,” he tells me when I lift incredulous eyes up to his stoic face, his inked fingers brushing gently against the front of his tattooed neck. “Since I know you give a lot of fucks about that sort of thing.”

“Well, technically, I think that corporations should take responsibility for their packaging and that blaming the state of our planet on straws is an irresponsible—”

Oscar leans down and captures my mouth, his fingers firm and possessive on the bottom of my chin. It’s enough to make me forget that twenty fossil fuel companies contribute a third of all carbon emissions. Shit, if climate change is going to kill us all, at least I’ll have this moment seared on my tongue like a brand.

“Just say thank you, Oscar and that will suffice.” He takes the seat next to me, making my stomach flip-flop dangerously. Tonight is our first night in the apartment, our chance to practice those ‘sleeping arrangements’ that Callum brought up the other day. At the safe house, we all slept in the same room. The bed was small and shitty, so the guys took turns rotating through some sleeping bags on the floor.

Here … is different. There’s a king-size bed in all three rooms. Also, the master is large enough that we could, like, maybe push at least two of them together …

I bite my lower lip, and the tension in the room winds into something tight and virulent. That’s what you get when you’re dating five red-blooded men all at once. They look at you the way you look at them: like something naughty and delicious that deserves to be licked. Only, I get whatever I give them back five times over.

“I have to see Pamela. Just … not quite yet. But soon. Then I’ll decide what to do.”

The easiest thing would be to just forget about her, make her disappear, but some part of me knows that I can’t just yet. I want some answers; I have too many questions. The biggest one, I suppose, is this: will Pamela Pence answer any of them?

Guess we’ll have to wait and find out, now won’t we?

“Your wish is our command,” Hael says, touching his fingers to his chest and throwing me a shit-eating grin. “So, Havoc Girl, who do you wish to take to bed in that big-ass room tonight?”

A snort escapes me as I glance over at the wall of windows and the sparkling lights of Springfield in the distance. Hmm. My nails dig into the black fabric of my sweats as I consider.

“Do you think … I mean, it’d be safest if we all stayed in the same room for a while, right?”

Aaron lifts a brow as I lean down and grab my drink off the table, a slight flush coloring my cheeks as I slip the straw between my lips. Somehow, even as he proclaimed to hate me with every breath, Oscar watched me enough to notice how much I love chocolate milk with straws, that this was my go-to drink in the Prescott High cafeteria.

“Don’t talk in circles around us,” Victor says, and I have to snort because I know he’s referencing that first day in the library when I sat down across from these assholes and asked for their help in extracting vengeance from a cruel and vicious world. “We don’t like it.”

“We really don’t like it,” Oscar echoes, leaning back against the arm of the couch and the few decorative throw pillows there like some sort of obscenely beautiful boy-king, set to inherit the earth in his tattooed hands.

“Maybe we should all sleep in the master bedroom?” I start, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the room where Vic and I fucked this morning. “It doesn’t have to be forever, but why not for now? While we finish school, while we deal with the GMP …”

I trail off, and I realize then that I’m still doing it, that I’m still asking.

I stand up quickly, moving over to one of the duffel bags still sitting on the floor near the front door. I extract the crown that Victor got me and set it on my head, moving back into the living room as Hael and Callum chuckle and Aaron smiles softly. Vic looks contemplative, and Oscar looks … enraptured? Is that even possible?

“What I meant to say was: we are all sleeping in the same room. Go get the other bed and drag it in there.” I turn on my heel and head down the hallway as laughter rings out behind me.

But guess what?

They do it.

They put the other bed in there, wedging it in between the wall of windows and the original bed.

It should be awkward, right? All six of us lying there in the dark together. Only … it’s fucking not. Because underneath the claws and teeth, the guns and knives, the blood and pain, we’re all seventeen and eighteen and lonely and desperate for connections that we can count on, love that only hurts in the best possible way, and companionship.

Family.

We find it there, in that room, in the shadows with the curtains parted and the city sparkling beyond the ring of dark woods that surrounds the school.

“Question,” Hael whispers, taking up the side of the giant bed that’s closest to the windows. “How do we broach the subject of sex?”

“Jesus,” Aaron murmurs, but not like he isn’t curious himself. He’s lying on my right side, one arm banded over my stomach. Oscar is on my left, lying on his back, his profile the only part of him that I can see. Cal lies between him and Hael while Vic is on Aaron’s other side, a nightstand between him and the wall.

And I love it here.

I love this.

Does it make me selfish that I want to keep this arrangement forever and ever? I can’t decide. The only thing I know is that even if it does, I want it. I want it more than anything.

“The one thing about royalty,” I start, quoting a song by Bohnes called “Middle Finger”, “is that we love to feast.”

I turn toward Aaron and then gently encourage him onto his back with a palm to the chest. He whispers something that I can’t quite hear but that I’m pretty sure is thank fucking god before I start to slide that palm down his ripped abs, brushing across the thin trail of hair below his belly button. It’s a delicious sensation, an anticipatory moment, before I dip beneath his waistband altogether. Even though it’s dark, and I can barely see him, I’ve got the image of him in my mind’s eye, tousling his wet hair with the towel earlier, pants clinging to his slender hips.

And oh, the sounds he makes when I wrap my fingers around the base of him and squeeze. That’s poetry enough. My lips part as I scoot closer, searching out the hardened points of his nipples with my tongue.

“Oh, I see how it goes,” Hael starts, but then there’s the sound of rustling fabric and a groan from him that speaks to self-pleasure. “Hey Vicki?”

“Swear to fuck, if you call me that again …” Victor starts, and then he lets out a long, tired-sounding sigh. But not in a bad way. More like … he finally feels like he’s allowed to have a moment of rest? “What do you want, Hael?”

“Lube. I put like, four or five bottles in the drawer over there.”

I laugh, even as Aaron moans and bucks his hips up against my hand. Behind me, I can feel the tension in Oscar’s body. He isn’t sure what to do, and he doesn’t like that. Fuck, it’s a state the man doesn’t find himself in often. He always knows what to do. Just … not here, not tonight.

“Rules for sex are,” I continue as the bottle of lube makes its way from Vic’s hand to mine. Our fingers tangle in the dark, driving lust and heat and fire into my body even from such a simple touch. I briefly withdraw my hand from Aaron’s pajama pants, filling my palm with a generous amount of lube before passing it behind me. It goes right over Oscar and into Callum’s hand. “Whatever the fuck we want. Anything. As long as it stays within this group and we use a safe word for any situation that makes us uncomfortable. I think mare’s nest would be an appropriate one, if you guys are in agreement.”

Vic gives me a saucy look, likely because he remembers offering me that same safe word during our threesome with Aaron.

“There could never be another safe word,” Cal agrees, his voice as much a part of the shadows as the darkness itself. Husky, full of depth, crafted of violence but wielded with rough pleasure.

Aaron shoves his pants down his hips, giving me better access to the velvet heat of his cock. My slick fingers find purchase around the base, my hand tightening until he finally lets out a sharp gasp, his own hand lifting up to tangle in the loose blond hair at the back of my head.

Oscar shifts again, and I realize that he’s sat up behind me. When I glance back, I see that he’s leaning against the headboard, shirtless and limned in the faintest bit of moonlight from outside the window. As soon as he sees that I’m looking at him, he puts his hand down his own pants and my breathing gets a little quicker, a little more erratic.

I turn back to Aaron, my fist turning in a corkscrew motion as his own grip tightens in my hair.

“Harder,” he says, and I feel my nipples tighten into diamond points. For someone that’s so sweet to me outside the bedroom, he definitely knows what he wants when we’re in it. I oblige him, tightening my inked left hand even more and then pumping him with a ferocity that should have him crying out in pain but instead only makes him suck in a sharp breath.