“And that means, what, exactly?” Cal asks, shoving up to his feet and taking a position beside Oscar. I steady my hands, considering if I’m actually going to take the shot or not. We’ve already blown out the tires on the cars—and our enemies have retaliated in kind.

“Either we run out of ammunition or else the VGTF shows up,” Oscar muses, and I can tell that even if waiting for the feds would be the easiest option for us, it’s not the one he wants. He wants to make someone bleed.

“You mean … either they run out of ammunition,” Cal corrects, and I can taste it in his words, too. He also craves the violence. Not me. I’d so much rather just take the girls home and bundle them in blankets, hold them close, and only kill if needed to keep them safe.

Standing where I’m standing, with Hael and Bernadette all the way on the other side of the Camaro, I feel like killing is exactly what I have to do. When one of Maxwell’s men leans out, aiming in the opposite direction and likely—and falsely—assuming that he’s protected by the second car, I aim for the wide breadth of his back.

Deep breath.

Tense on the trigger.

A shot rips through the man’s body and he slumps forward and then sideways, bleeding out into the grass. This is going to be an interesting scene to explain to the feds, but it is what it is at this point. They gave us no choice; they took our child.

Not just once either.

They stole Heather … they beat the baby out of my Bernadette.

I scoot out from behind the car, even as Oscar makes a sound of protest, and the movement draws another one of Maxwell’s men out to take down what he assumes is an easy target. Oscar is able to shoot him through the forehead before anything happens to me, and I duck back behind the Eldorado’s tire.

“A little warning next time, Fadler,” he murmurs, but there’s a dark smile on his lips that wasn’t there before.

“Watch my back?” Cal asks, and then before either of us can answer, he takes off across the green. Gunshots ring out in his wake, but he’s able to disappear into the woods without being hit. That’s the thing, right? Fighting Havoc means fighting shadows. We’re not usually about big-ass firefights.

“That fucker.” Oscar’s grumbling under his breath, waiting for his next opportunity to take a shot. From the opposite end of the road, Hael and Bernie are doing the same. I both hate and love that, seeing her in the trenches with us. It’s where she was always meant to be, but also … I’d rather she were safe. Nantucket, Nantucket, Nantucket.

What is Nantucket anyway? Some snooty seaside town with good scallops? A bunch of cute buildings and rich assholes and whaling and fishing and lighthouses? That would never have suited Bernadette. This does. I put away my overprotective streak so that I can concentrate.

Callum reemerges from the trees, once again drawing fire from Maxwell’s men, and ending up on Bernie and Hael’s side instead of ours. Smart.

“Go,” Oscar tells me, his silver eyes sliding my way. “Join them.”

I wet my lips briefly, and then I take off in the opposite direction. While the men are more focused on Callum, I clear most of the ground between me and the trees before they start shooting at me.

Panting for breath and carrying my gun in both hands, I move through the woods down the incline, waiting for Oscar to open fire on one of the black sedans. As soon as he does, I run as fast as I can until I’m sliding in the dirt behind the Camaro.

“Oh, a party up in here,” Hael says with a big grin, firing his weapon several times before ducking back down behind his poor motherfucking car. I already wrecked it once which I had to apologize like a thousand times for, but now this? Both the Eldorado and the Camaro are going to need a ton of work. Again. Poor Hael.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Bernie tells me, and I can’t fight the smile that rises unbidden to my lips. Taking my place beside her, I get ready to unload on Maxwell and his men, if only to give Oscar time to join us. It’s better when we’re together. Always better.

Only, it seems that Maxwell has a different idea in mind. He and his men take off, even with the threat of our bullets at their backs, and they charge the Eldorado where Oscar is now stationed by himself.

Cal and I are hopping over the Camaro at the same time, in a move that probably looks choreographed. It’s not that—even as much as Bernie might tease us about it sometimes—it’s just that we’ve known each other for years, grew in pain and poverty together, and now we’re just … this. Dogs of war, crying Havoc, and gnashing teeth.

We move so quickly up the hill that Callum opts to grab onto one of the men rather than shoot him, knocking him down to the ground with Cal on his back. In a ruthless move, Cal whips his pistol out and fires once into the back of the downed man’s head before scrambling up after the others.

There are only three men left now. With Cal and Oscar together, that’s basically nothing. They could take down a dozen men. Two dozen, maybe.

Maxwell veers off from the group, and I take off after him, chasing him into the trees in the same direction as Ophelia and Heather. I don’t see them—Vic either—but I’m focused on one thing and one only: Maxwell Barrasso.

This is our chance.

If Vic can take Ophelia down—he will—and I can deal with Maxwell, then that’s it. Game over. Obviously, explaining what happened to the VGTF will be interesting but really, how can we be charged for any of this? Attacked on schoolgrounds by a notorious gang yet again and all with the plausible idea that it’s only about Victor’s inheritance and nothing else.

Adrenaline surges through me as I catch up with Maxwell and grab onto the back of his jacket, knocking him to his knees in the leaves. He’s good though, much better than that man I killed on the hill after I escaped the cabin. A man that, I know now, was probably a member of the GMP.

Maxwell spins so quickly that he’s able to kick the gun from my hand before I can stop him. His own weapon is long gone, and I wonder if he wasn’t running out of ammo back there in the first place.

Without a gun, this is going to be more difficult, but not impossible.

I throw my body onto Maxwell’s, utilizing both gravity and weight as I wrestle him into the leaves. He throws a punch that manages to connect with my face, and stars flicker in my vision. Doesn’t matter though. The well-dressed asshole beneath me hasn’t been in the trenches recently. I’m not afraid of him.

Only, Maxwell is good.

Much better than I expected.

Like, he’s Mason Miller good.

Fuck.

I know as soon as he manages to roll us over, somehow taking the advantage of gravity away from me. My fist manages to break between his arms as he struggles to hold me down, and my knuckles connect with his face. In retaliation, Maxwell backhands me so hard that blood fills my mouth.

“You took my son from me,” he says, in such a smooth and even tone that I really start to worry here. “Do you really think I’m going to let a high school student wrestle me in the woods?”

His hands grip my wrists and shove them into the ground as he uses his knee to hit me in the groin so hard that the breath is knocked out of me. Blackness sweeps at the edges of my vision, but I take advantage of that single second when he’s balancing on one knee atop me, and I roll.

Maxwell is knocked off as I scrabble for the gun. My fingers wrap around the grip, but my opponent is right there, putting a knee on my back and hitting my wrist so hard that the weapon drops back to the ground. He reaches for it, and that simple movement puts him off-balance yet again.

I shove up to my feet, throwing Maxwell aside. It doesn’t last; he’s up on his own feet and lunging for the gun in less time than it takes me to steady myself.

We’re standing on the edge of a sharp incline, where the woods sweep down toward the perimeter wall that surrounds the grounds of Oak Valley Prep. I just let myself fall backwards, even though it’s a risky move.

With a grunt, I hit the ground and then I just start rolling. But my movements are quick enough and erratic enough that even when Maxwell takes a few shots at me, he doesn’t find his target. Once I stop rolling, I’m so dizzy and breathless that I lose several precious seconds trying to suck in air. My entire body hurts now, throbbing and screaming as I shove back up to a standing position.

Maxwell is already sliding down the incline toward me, the gun still in his hands. He aims for me and pulls the trigger; if the gun were still loaded, he might’ve actually hit me. Unfortunately for him, he’s run out of ammo, so he simply chucks the weapon aside and comes at me anyway.

This time, as he’s moving through the trees and I’m stumbling back looking for a branch or rock or anything that I can use as a weapon, Maxwell pulls a knife from an ankle sheath hidden beneath the finely pressed lines of his slacks.

Licking my lips, I think about Bernadette, about how beautiful her mouth is when she smiles at me, how kind her eyes are even when she tries to be a hard-ass. I think about how good it felt to take her at the same time as Victor, how tight and warm and perfect everything was. And I imagine living in that house with her, with them, with the girls. We could have it all. If only one of us doesn’t die here today.

Because if somebody does, Bernadette will never be the same again. She will never recover. I know that because I lost her once, and even though it was a temporary state, something that could be rectified later on, I was devastated, broken, bitter. No, if one of us dies we might as well take her with us.

Maxwell’s brown eyes are dark with violence as he moves toward me like a man who’s used to wielding knives, used to drawing blood and hurting people.

See, if he’d had his whole army behind him, we would’ve lost.

If it were just me and him in these woods, then I might die. It’s becoming quite clear that as good as I am, Maxwell Barrasso is better. Plus, we killed his son. He has a very personal vendetta against us that demands bloodshed to be satisfied.

But, as we explained to Mason Miller, wolves have packs.

A gunshot goes off and Maxwell lets out a violent shout of pain, collapsing to his knees in the leaves as blood blooms on his thigh, staining his navy slacks an even darker color and turning the faint pinstripes red.