“They are coming to the ceremony then,” I murmur, teasing the ring pierced through the nail on my left pointer finger. “What if something they see tips them off while they’re here? I mean, what if the VGTF moves in and Maxwell decides to bolt? He could whisk Ophelia off in his helicopter and we’d never see them in person again.”

“Yet, they’d still be up our asses,” Hael repeats with a sigh, circling us back to the same argument we’ve had many times before. “So what do we do?”

“How much personal security are parents allowed to bring on campus?” Cal queries, and I try my very hardest not to roll my eyes. Personal security. For a high school graduation? Jesus H. Christ, but I hate rich people. It didn’t even occur to me that any of the parents would be bringing their own security crews. I guess when you’re a rich hotelier or a senator, a record producer or even a rock star, you need that sort of shit. And those are exactly the types of people who have children that attend this school.

“Two guards per guest and one personal driver that must remain with the car. Guns are not technically allowed, but there won’t be much enforcement of that. Really, it’ll just stop Maxwell’s security from open carrying.” Oscar leans back in his seat as Vic rubs at his chin.

“That means if Maxwell and Ophelia both show up, they’ll have four guards protecting them at most?” Aaron clarifies and Oscar nods. “Sounds like the perfect opportunity to grab them both.”

“It would be, without the VGTF,” Victor agrees, shaking his head. “But that means we need to find them either before they get into the auditorium or after they leave, in a place that isn’t filled with people. Oh, and only if we can get them in a dark zone or Oscar can figure his way into the Oak Park security system.”

“I’ve hacked in,” Oscar snaps back, like he’s offended that Vic would even question his ability to do so. “But it isn’t easy. I’d need time to cover my tracks after deleting any footage.”

“If I can get Maxwell alone for just a second …” Callum breathes, shaking his head. “I could be careful; I could hide the body.”

“Even from the VGTF?” Victor sighs and scrubs both hands over his face. He’s not thinking about Maxwell though; he’s thinking about Ophelia. “I suppose, in the right circumstances, we could pull it off.”

“It’s about orchestrating those circumstances that’s a problem.” Oscar sits up as Aaron strokes his fingers across my belly, making me shiver with pleasure at the soft touch. “Manufacturing a scenario where we can get Maxwell and Ophelia away from the crowd and into a more private location, that’s the problem.”

We sit there in silence for a moment, and I swear, I can hear cogs and gears turning in Victor’s and Oscar’s heads. My own eyes scan the map as Hael sits up with a groan.

“We all know I ain’t the brains of these operations, so, let me do what I do best and pour us some drinks.”

“Scotch,” Victor and Oscar both say, almost in unison. That makes me smile, but I’m the only one. Everyone else is still frowning, still planning and plotting.

“What if we used Trinity?” I ask with a loose shrug of my shoulders. “Surely, we could convince her that it was in her best interest to get Maxwell and Ophelia alone?” I’m feeling pretty proud of myself until Oscar shakes his head once, slow and sharp.

“No,” he says, but in a contemplative way like he’s truly trying to see if my idea won’t work. His silver eyes shift over to mine. “If we tell her what we want and she in any way lets that slip to either party, we’re in trouble. Whatever fragile peace we’ve had for the last few months is guaranteed to break. That means, even if the VGTF round the pair up, they’ll be gunning for us from prison. Frankly, it’s better to just keep on playing the fake fiancée game.”

“She can’t feel very fondly toward Ophelia?” I retort, giving Hael’s knuckles a kiss as he hands me a glass of scotch before offering up drinks to anyone else. Our gazes catch just before he turns away with a smile. I look back over at Vic and Oscar while Aaron scoots close against my left side, peering at the map. “I mean, don’t you think she’d want her gone, considering the blackmail and all?”

“We don’t know her feelings about her father.” Oscar’s mouth twitches at one corner, like he might actually be considering smiling about something. “If those feelings are anything like the ones she had for her brother, well …” I snort, but I don’t think he’s actually implying that Trinity and Maxwell have an incestuous relationship. What he is saying, however, is that if Maxwell is coming to this school to watch a shitty graduation ceremony, then it’s possible he cares about his daughter. Maybe she cares about him, too. “It isn’t worth the risk. Besides,” and here his voice gets wry and thick with disdain, “I don’t exactly trust that conniving little cunt.”

“She looks at Vic like she wants to ride his dick,” Aaron adds, and I feel myself bristle with jealousy. For his part, my husband just quirks the corner of his lip in amusement.

“There’s always the possibility of a bathroom break,” Oscar muses, tilting his head briefly from side to side to stretch his neck, eyes closing for a moment. “Unlikely but possible.”

I sigh and rub at my temples a bit, determined to come up with a plan the way I did for Mason Miller. Because all I really want is to prove myself to Havoc, prove to my boys that I deserve to wear that crown and that I belong. If only I can see something they don’t …

Hael passes out more scotch, and then we all drink until the sky is fully dark and our blood is warm and thick with alcohol. After nearly six hours of discussing strategy and studying the map, discussing risks and listening to Victor and Oscar bounce ideas off of each other, we give up and retire to the bedroom.

What we do in there, it’s not quite as magical and mysterious as what we did surrounded by candlelight. But there’s a lot of touching and fucking and it comes pretty goddamn close.

Havoc—All of Them

Ten years earlier …

The little girl with the ashy blond hair is dropped off at the curb by a woman in a salmon colored raincoat, her expensive shoes clacking across the debris strewn pavement as she digs her fingernails into the child’s arm.

For her part, the girl looks unaffected by this subtle violence, her emerald eyes so bright that little Callum Park’s pink mouth parts in surprise. His own eyes, a blue so perfect that sometimes the adults in his life get caught up in imagining that he could be a famous child actor or model or something, sparkle as the girl is dragged past him and up the front steps of a dilapidated building with asbestos issues and too much mold in the gym.

Callum turns back to his friends and finds that he isn’t the only one in their little group to have noticed the new girl. His friends, Aaron Fadler and Hael Harbin, are both gaping after her. They turn to each other with excited smiles because it isn’t often that a girl in such fancy clothes with such a wild looking frown shows up to torment them.

Cal is smiling and happy and excited because he wants to show this new girl how to dance. He loves teaching people that you can make art with your body, that when you dance, your very sad but sweet mother might just smile a little more than she frowns. He doesn’t know that the woman is actually his grandmother, a woman who killed her husband and forced her daughter to help dispose of the body. Cal doesn’t know that, right after he was born, his real mom tried to tell her story to the police and then his grandmother killed her, too. He doesn’t know how much she desperately wanted a son because she’s only ever had seven daughters, so she’ll lie to him and pretend like he is hers. One day, Callum will look at Aaron looking at Bernadette and Bernadette looking at Aaron and decide there’s no hope for him, so he may as well experiment with his dance partner. All the while, he’ll be thinking of Bernadette anyway.

Skinny and quiet and small, Oscar Montauk also notices the new kid, but even though the sight of her excites his curiosity, he also knows that nobody dressed that fancy would ever go to this school for very long. He reaches up to touch his freshly dyed hair, as black as the night, as black as his friend Victor Channing’s hair.

Oscar is also not used to this strange and wild place in south Prescott; he attended a prestigious boarding school until recently, one that he already misses because it means being away from the dark and hateful eyes of his father. For now, the family fortune is locked away from Oscar’s father by the hands of his own parent. His father will get it back, eventually, but it won’t last. Then, half a decade after this moment, that same father will strangle his wife and kids, but he will fail to fully finish off the last child. Whether that’s by accident or design, nobody will ever know, but the boy who he mistakenly thought was of his own seed will end up with his mother’s dead arms wrapped around his neck. He will be pushed into a shallow hole, but luckily, he will not end up buried as he comes to, feeling sick and dizzy and disoriented.

He will see his father put a gun to his own head, too drunk and distraught to finish burying his murdered family, and he will watch as the man pulls the trigger. Oscar Montauk will grow up hating touch and hating people and scowling at everything, but he will also fall in love with the girl who comes striding out the front doors of the school like she owns the place.

Her green eyes scan the crowd, briefly pausing on their little group. Can she tell with that intense stare of hers that the five boys have found each other because they all sense something in each other that’s rare in others: honesty. It draws them together like a moth to flames. Because even though later, almost ten years on, they will be bound by pain and by their intense love of the ashy-haired girl, that is not what binds them now.

Aaron lives at home with both parents, and even if his dad is a gambler and the occasional party-drug user, he doesn’t dislike his life. They’re poor and even though they live on the border of Fuller and Prescott, they know their son won’t fit in at the bourgeois middle-class school, so they send him here. Still, for now, he’s happy, and he will be even after he gets a little older and has to share his house with a baby sister. Even when his two-year-old cousin comes to live with him after her parents die in a car accident. He’ll be happy until his dad dies and his mom leaves, and he has to let go of the ashy-haired girl’s hand. Not forever, of course, but he will have to learn that when he takes it next, he’s sharing her with the other four people in his life that he loves so deeply and perfectly that he would jump in front of a bullet for any one of them.