“Let’s go home,” I say, because as much as I dislike Oak Valley, as trapped as I feel there sometimes, anywhere that has the Havoc Boys is home to me. The guys exchange looks with one another, but they don’t argue, not even when I climb onto the back of Vic’s bike instead of into the driver’s seat of the Eldorado.

Somebody else will drive it home for me: Aaron, most likely. But back here, on Victor’s Harley, this is where I feel the safest, where I’ve always felt the safest. I can hold him, touch him, feel the breeze in my hair … but also, nobody can see me cry.

Once we get back to campus and ride the elevator to the eleventh floor, I can feel my body starting to sag with exhaustion. Mostly, it’s with the heavy mantle of reality wrapped around my shoulders. Pamela did it. There’s no denying that. Sara Young confirmed it. Pamela might as well have. Her lack of denial was more than enough to convince me.

“Bernie,” Cal starts as I take off into the apartment, heading down the hall to our bedroom. Our bedroom. That thought should fill me with joy. Instead, I’m so twisted up in rage and hate and melancholy that I can’t even appreciate it.

As tired as I am, I feel like I have to keep moving, like if I don’t, the reality of what I’ve been avoiding since the day after the school shooting will come crashing into me like a tsunami. With ice-cold fingers, it’ll drag every last part of me that’s still good and hopeful out into the sea to drown.

“Where are my gym clothes?” I snap as Callum leans in the doorjamb, watching me as the other boys stay where they are in the living room. Somehow, they’re really good at taking turns with their one-on-one time. It’s like, being together as long as they have, they can read each other without having to ask, without having to hash things out with words.

“For what it's worth, this particular incident wasn't just Victor's fault. Some boys just don't know how to share their toys.” Oscar said that to me once. The other four boys made Aaron give me up as his price for joining Havoc because, in part, they were afraid that they couldn’t handle seeing us together all the time. When Aaron and I were a separate entity from Havoc, two pure untouched beautiful things, it was okay. But not in the context of the group.

But that was only because they hadn’t realized how it always needed to be between us: there is no pairing off. Not for anything more than a brief period of time. We’re as interconnected as the strands in a spider’s web.

“Bernie.” This time, Cal’s voice is much firmer, much more commanding. I pause briefly with my fingers curled around the handle of a dresser drawer so that I can look up at him. “Maybe you should take a moment and tell me what happened?”

“I just …” The words won’t come out. They’re trapped. I’m frustrated. I wish I’d killed Pamela when I had the chance. But noooo, I had to get all savior-y and fuck things up with my Goody Two-shoes bullshit. I was looking for redemption in someone who had no such thing to give. “I want to go for a run.”

“A run?” Cal asks, tilting his head slightly to one side. He knows as well as I do that Bernadette Blackbird does not go for ‘runs’. First of all, running around for fun is a privilege not afforded to people who live in Prescott. It’s very likely that a girl will end up stalked or raped or at least beaten on their way around the block. I hate that. I hate rape culture. And I hate rapists. And I hate Pamela. And I hate Neil.

“Yeah,” I say dryly, standing up and popping a hip out. I’m looking for a fight, but I don’t want one with my boys. I really, really don’t. Closing my eyes, I take in a deep breath and try to steel myself. “Can you please help me find my gym clothes, so that I can go out and run this shit off?”

My eyes open as Cal pushes up off the doorjamb and comes over to stand beside me. He seems to know exactly what he’s looking for, opening the top drawer and handing me a pair of sweats and a tank top. He doesn’t even bother pretending that he isn’t looking as I strip down, wrangling my tits into a sports bra that might as well be a fucking tourniquet, and slipping into a pair of sneakers.

He goes with me when I head for the front door. Not surprising. I couldn’t run alone here either, not with the GMP still looming over our heads. Thus far, our planning has reached a bit of a dead end. Getting rid of either Maxwell or Ophelia is a problem; getting rid of both feels like an impossibility. If we take care of one of them, that’ll tip the other off. We have to get them both at the same time, and we have to do it while they’re under the watchful eye of the VGTF.

Talk about a rock, an erection, and a hard place. We are most definitely trapped.

“If we’re not back in thirty …” Cal says as I slip out the front door and he follows me to the elevator. As soon as we step outside the lobby of the building, I start running, my feet pounding the pavement so hard that I have to grit my teeth to keep from clacking them together. I’m digging my toes and heels into the ground like it owes me motherfucking money.

Callum says nothing. Instead, he keeps pace with me so easily that it’s embarrassing. By the time I’m stumbling, soaked in sweat, and putting my hand against the wall of one of the old buildings for support, he has just the barest glimmer of sweat on his forehead and none at all on the armpits of his sleeveless white hoodie.

“Are you ready to talk now?” he asks me, in that infuriatingly calm voice of his.

“Fucking stalker,” I grumble, thinking about all those nights that I lay in bed and trembled in fear over Neil, how all that time, Cal was right there. He would’ve saved me, would’ve killed Neil if he had to, even if it meant spending the rest of his life in prison. Before I even know what I’m doing, my arms are around him and I’m sobbing into his chest like somebody who isn’t hard-as-nails Bernadette Blackbird.

“I feel pathetic,” I moan as Cal strokes my hair with his pretty fingers, his big body curled around mine, trapping me against his cotton-y sweet scent. The faintest undertone of fresh sweat colors that smell, adding a certain sense of danger to it. My body immediately reacts in the most inappropriate way possible, nipples hardening to sharp points, cunt flooding with liquid. “Why am I crying again, when I’ve known about this for a whole goddamn month?”

“You’re crying because you have to finally accept that somebody you love has done something unforgivable,” Callum tells me with brutal honesty. I pull away just enough to look up at him, wondering if he’s talking about his grandmother again.

“I do not love Pam,” I tell him, because that’s true. I don’t. But maybe I did, once upon a time.

“You did,” he says, echoing my thoughts, as if those gorgeous azure eyes can read every single emotion that flits through me. “But unlike my grandmother, you don’t have enough good memories to balance out the bad. You’ve just realized that Pamela Pence is as dead and gone as Penelope.”

I look down at my sneakered feet, pressed up close to Cal’s booted ones.

Pamela has to die for what she did. Fuck, I really and truly wish I’d buried her alive. Since it’s too late for that, I guess I’ll be seeking help from one of Stacey’s girls. Death by sheets is now a very real possibility.

“She didn’t give me any answers, Cal. None. Like, she couldn’t even be fucked explaining to me about my dad, or her relationship with her parents, or even how she … how …” I don’t want to finish that sentence, put to words my question about how, exactly, Pamela convinced Pen to take those pills or what Sara Young saw on that security camera that caused her to make an arrest. “And I wanted answers. I wanted all my troubles wrapped up in a bow. But that’s never going to happen. I have to just … exist with the not knowing and the wondering, and I fucking hate that.”

Callum cups my face between his hands and leans down to look at me, his mouth so close to mine that I swear I can taste his breath, and it’s the most delicious thing in the world. He tastes like pure, unfiltered obsession mixed with true love and doused in honesty.

“Sometimes, we don’t get everything that we want. Sometimes, there are unknowns and we just have to learn to live with them. Life is messy and weird and fucked-up, but even amongst all those thorns, there are roses.”

“Fuck, I want to kiss you so bad right now,” I murmur, covering his hands with mine and pressing them into my face. Callum smiles, but he doesn’t oblige me, not just yet.

“All I know about my grandmother is what I’ve pieced together from other people, and from those brief few moments a day where she forgets to be careful, where she forgets that she killed her own daughter because she so desperately wanted a son.” He traces my lower lip with his thumb, and I stand there mesmerized. Mesmerized and aching and needy. “She killed her own daughter because once, she’d had that same daughter help dispose of her husband’s body. And then, later, when that same daughter threatened to testify against her, she killed her, too, and stole her son and raised that son as her own.” Cal pauses, and I realize that as much as I needed to talk about my past and my fucked-up family, so did he. “So, I understand how you feel. Because I’ll never have all the answers. My grandmother is … she’s too far gone in her illness to give them to me. Even if she did, I doubt she’d ever give me the full truth. So I just tuck it away, behind more important things, and then it doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.”

“More important things like what?” I whisper, and Cal licks his lower lip.

“Like my love for you,” he breathes, and then he’s kissing me with the full power of that fairy-tale mouth. I swear, for the entirety of that kiss, I forget that he’s actually the villain in the story. For the entirety of that kiss, I’m convinced that I’m the princess he’s just rescued from the tower, the one that he’s going to spirit away into an eternity of bliss.

And then reality comes crashing down around me, and I remember that we’re filthy and wicked, wanton and ribald and lascivious, and I can do whatever the fuck I want to this man because he’s mine. He always has been. He always will be.