Ashley ends up crawling onto the couch and laying her head in Oscar’s lap.

He goes completely still for a moment, like he might bolt, like he might throw his coffee cup at the wall and take off running and never look back. Instead, he forces himself to calm down and rests his palm on the top of her head.

Aaron actually stumbles when he passes by the couch and sees what’s going on. Oscar lifts his eyes up to his friend’s and then holds out his coffee cup.

“If you wouldn’t mind pouring me another,” he says mildly, but there’s a certain quality to his voice that promises this scene isn’t as easy as it appears. Still, he plays the part admirably, remaining still until Ashley finally gets bored and sits up, leaving room for Kara to take the end spot on the same sofa.

Victor is the next one awake, pausing in the kitchen for a little brandy-laced coffee before stopping in front of the wall of windows and staring out at the campus the way he likes to do sometimes, usually when he thinks we’re all asleep. More than once, I’ve caught him doing that, gazing contemplatively at a distant sky. Sometimes, I leave him alone to his thoughts, but other times, I come up and slide my arms around his waist. Occasionally, we even fuck against the glass.

“Anything new to report?” Vic asks after Hael and Callum drag their asses from the bedroom to join us.

“Nothing on my end,” Hael yawns as he digs through the fridge looking for a snack. There’s a formal breakfast in the cafeteria this morning with, like, student awards and speeches and shit, but none of us cares to attend that. Pomp and circumstance just isn’t our thing. “Eggs okay?” he asks, and there’s a scattered chorus of affirmative grunts.

“The VGTF are mobilizing vehicles. Our crew says the city is absolutely crawling with cops. It’s happening today. They’ve even got the helicopters on standby.” Oscar exchanges his coffee for his iPad as Ashley and Kara squabble over some online game they’re playing together. They hardly pay attention to us when we talk business.

“Good,” Vic grunts, but I can tell he’s still conflicted about it. About his mother possibly getting away with jailtime when what she really deserves is an early grave. Still, he’s a good sport about it, heading back into the bedroom to get dressed while Cal does stretches in the sunshine streaming in through the windows.

One odd perk of Callum attending school here is that ‘gym’ at Oak Valley Prep can mean many things. They aren’t limited to volleyball over a sagging net while wearing threadbare Prescott tanks. Instead, he’s been able to dance while he’s here and even if it hasn’t been as rewarding as teaching Prescott kids in that warehouse studio with the unreliable electricity, at least it’s something.

Once Heather gets out of the shower, I have her sit in front of me so I can work her hair into a fishtail braid. As I’m arranging it, I can’t help but think of Pam and how she called these types of braids fish-mouth braids.

My hands still for long enough that Heather huffs an annoyed sigh and turns to glare at me over her shoulder.

“Bernie,” she whines, and I sigh, resuming my task. The thing is, I haven’t told her that Pamela is dead. I don’t want to tell her. I don’t know how to tell her. The day after it happened, after we’d spent the night in the old house, and I saw Heather for the first time, my tongue knotted and my throat closed up and I felt like I might pass out if I had to shatter her perfect smile.

So, for now, she knows nothing about Pamela. If she ever thinks to Google her though, it could be bad news for both of us. I’m going to have to tell her the truth eventually, about Pam and Penelope, but today is not that day.

Today is my high school graduation.

It’s momentous, considering all the things I had to go through to get here.

So, when the day comes to tell her, I’ll know it. We’ll sit together somewhere quiet, and I’ll try my very best to explain away the unexplainable, and then we’ll see how things go from there.

“Go get your uniform on,” I tell her, because every student is expected to attend today’s ceremony in uniform. Every grade is required to put on a performance of some sort, so Heather and Kara will be working on a play together while Ashley’s class simultaneously sings and also signs—as in sign language—a song they’ve been practicing for the last few weeks.

Aaron tackles Ashley’s hair while I do Kara’s and I’m surprised to see that he isn’t half-bad at it. She ends up with a nice, sleek high pony with little chestnut ringlets curled around her small ears. He even makes sure the girls are dressed properly, their shoes shined, while I get into my own uniform and yank my graduation gown over the top. It’s a heather gray color, like our uniform jackets, with a sky-blue tassel on the cap.

It looks fucking ridiculous on me.

It looks even more ridiculous on Cal.

“What do you think?” he asks, and since he cringes as soon as he walks into the room to showcase his look, I can already tell how he feels about the hideous thing.

“Um, not my favorite outfit that’s for sure,” I say as he pauses beside me so we can both stare at ourselves in the mirror behind the bedroom door.

“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” he asks, his voice thick with the same sort of wonder that seems to permeate the air of the apartment. Everything seems so normal. Shit, everything is so normal, but there’s an undercurrent to it of something else, a song that sounds an awful lot like finality, like change, like the sound of a doorway creaking open to reveal a new and strange world beyond its borders. “We made it.”

“We made it,” I agree, and then I curve my fingers through Cal’s, and we get ready to head down to the amphitheater. On our way out the door, Oscar slips a length of silky red rope into my pocket with a look in his eyes that promises we’ll be using it today.

“Your reward,” he murmurs, gazing into my eyes with an almost terrifying level of obsession. Well, it might be terrifying for someone else, but it’s nourishing to me. A shadow feeding shadows. “For surviving today.”

I bet he had no idea how frighteningly literal that statement was going to become.

Even though the raid is happening today, and the school will soon be swarmed with agents from the Violent Gang Task Force, I don’t care. Whether I get my diploma in hand and walk across that stage or not, it doesn’t matter. I still did it, managed to pass enough of my classes with a C-minus to find my way here today.

Besides, I’d always expected to graduate from Prescott High and let’s be honest: what’s more Prescott, more southside, than a raid by FBI agents?

This brings everything together for us.

It might not be ending the way we’d wanted it to—with some brilliant coup against Maxwell and Ophelia—but it’s ending. It’s a reprieve of sorts. Five months left until we get Victor’s money. Just five months. We can do that, can’t we? Even if we have to flee the area temporarily—not an ideal situation but a possibility—we can last that long.

We can do this.

The boys check the hallway before ushering the girls into the elevator, and then we wait behind in the lobby while they file outside. We don’t need anyone to see us together, not today. It might be the day of the raid, but it’s also a day when Maxwell and Ophelia will be on campus and within striking distance.

After they leave, we wait an appropriate amount of time before following them at a distance, just to make sure they connect with their teachers and disappear into the hordes of identically-dressed children being shepherded down the hill toward the massive outdoor amphitheater where the graduation is taking place.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bother going to the ceremony at all if it weren’t for the raid. You don’t have to attend to get your diploma, you know. But we show up as we’re supposed to and I spot Trinity Jade glaring at me from the grassy area behind the stage, the way she always does.

Just as an extra fuck-you to her, I curl my arms around Victor’s neck and press our robed bodies together, taking his mouth the way a queen should always take her king’s. Possessively and without mercy. After a moment, I have to stop and pry myself away because I can feel the thick length of his erection digging at me when our bodies rub together.

“Oh, come on, your majesty,” he teases, taking my hand and giving my wedding ring a lick. “We can sneak off for a quickie, can’t we?” Only he knows that we can’t because we have no idea when the raid is going to happen exactly or how things might go beforehand. The situation today is too edgy, too up in the air.

So, instead of sneaking off to screw like rabbits the way I wish we could, we allow our teachers to guide us out from behind the stage to the sound of polite clapping, and take our seats in wooden folding chairs decorated with bows and ribbons and fresh flowers.

“It looks like a wedding, not a graduation,” Aaron murmurs, but he takes his seat beside me anyway, and we settle in for what’s likely going to be a boring and uneventful series of performances … until it just isn’t anymore.

No part of me thinks Sara Young will come with guns a’blazing into a school, so I’m guessing the raid is going to play out like one of the children’s onstage performances. Agents will come in, targets will be located, people will be arrested. Nobody expects a shootout—not even the boys. But we do, of course, have guns hidden in our cars, just in case.

Hot early summer sunshine falls across my face and I lift up a hand to shield my eyes as I glance back at the ascending seats behind us. They’re filled with women in designer gowns—I wish there were men in designer gowns, too, but Oak Valley is too stuffy and patriarchally repressed for anything as forward-thinking as that—and men in suits. It’s so … banal, so expected, reeking of untamed wealth and profane sophistication. Just looking at those people bothers me so much that I turn back around.

Since Oak River begins with preschool, we’re forced to sit here and suffer through several earnest but heartless performances from the youngest children. Ashley is a joy to watch, if only because she has big floppy chestnut curls that make me think about Aaron. After her song is over, she files down to the grass in front of us to sit on blankets with the other kids her age.