“What do we have here?” Cal muses, coming out of the woods with the pistol held up by his shoulder. He even itches the bright yellow blond of his hair with the grip, as if everything about this moment is calculated and casual and planned. Really, this is just Havoc in a nutshell. This is what we do.

Panting, I use the trunk of a tree to catch my breath while Cal gets close enough to Maxwell that the man actually tries to swing that knife of his. Callum just shoots him in the hand and the man screams. It’s fitting, a mimicry of what we did to his second-in-command. Only, I was the bait this time instead of Bernadette.

“You okay, Aaron?” Cal asks, and I nod, watching as Callum crouches down beside Maxwell. “You could’ve left things well-enough alone. You could’ve left our territory. You could’ve resisted the temptation to rape and pillage our school. And now, today, here, you could’ve resisted the urge to plunder that child. Everything you have done, Maxwell Barrasso, is what led you here today.”

Maxwell spits in Callum’s face, but it doesn’t faze him. Callum just swipes a hand over his cheek to wipe it off.

“Prescott trash,” Maxwell bites out, scowling and panting. He must know he’s going to die, but he doesn’t show fear or pain. Just hate and rage and frustration. Something about his expression, his demeanor, reminds me of Neil Pence. What was it that Cal said then? They always break, eventually. “If you kill me, my people will never stop hunting you. There won’t be a moment of peace in your lives. Not a single second of it.”

“Mm, I find that hard to believe,” Cal retorts, and then he stands up as Oscar steps out of the trees with a bit of rope in hand. He slips it around Maxwell’s neck, puts a foot between his shoulder blades, and then pulls.

The man scrambles to claw the rope from his neck, thrashing and fighting beneath the easy strength of Oscar’s grip.

“Ah, there it is again,” Cal remarks, just like he did when Neil finally began to scream inside the pretty coffin we picked out for him. “He just broke, too.”

I lean my back against the tree, panting and hurting, but relatively unharmed.

Oscar finishes his work and then lets Maxwell go, watching as the man slumps face-first into the leaves.

And that’s when our phones vibrate in unison and Oscar whips his out faster than Cal or I do. He answers the call with a sharp “what?” and then goes completely still.

That’s when we hear the howling, that’s when Callum starts to run and Oscar moves over to help me so that I can run, too.

“What was it?” I ask, glancing down and seeing that the call on his phone is still connected: it’s Hael.

“Mare’s nest,” Oscar breathes as panic surges through me, and I find myself facing the almost unthinkable reality of losing one of my girls for the second time that day.

Bernadette Blackbird

Ten minutes earlier … again.

Callum and Aaron hop over the front of the Camaro and take off, chasing the men that are now racing up the hill toward Oscar and the Eldorado. Likely, they’re going for the road in an attempt to escape. Either they don’t have a lot of ammo left or the distant sound of sirens has sparked their movements.

Regardless, Cal attacks one of the men from behind while Aaron peels off and heads into the woods after Maxwell. I’m about to go after him when Hael’s hand snaps out and grabs me by the wrist.

“No,” he says, giving me a sharp look. “Vic’s orders. You stay here.” He releases me and then takes aim up the hill, firing off several more shots and then cursing when he realizes the remaining GMP members are now out of range. Hael drops his gun to his side and steps back, unwilling to leave me here alone.

But, like, there’s no way I’m just going to sit around when my boys are in trouble. I’m backing up and considering the possibility of escaping Hael to go after Aaron when movement in the trees on the opposite side of the road draws my attention.

Time seems to slow down in such a way that I notice every little detail, like the striations in Hael’s beautiful eyes as he starts to turn toward the rustling sound. I see what’s happening first, as Martin Harbin stumbles out of the woods, his brown eyes bloodshot and his hair mussed. He is a man unhinged and broken in unfixable ways.

His wife, Marie, is clutched against his side, bleeding and bruised, with her husband’s hand clamped prohibitively over her mouth. Her eyes—such a sweet and gentle reminder of Hael’s—are wide with fear and terror.

I see the tattoo on Martin’s right arm, the red one that looks like the silhouetted face of a clown. It occurs to me then, in that split-second of time, that he’s been in prison for years. That, sometimes, when people go to prison, they join gangs.

Martin Harbin is white and awful; the Grand Murder Party is a white supremacist gang made up of awful, awful people.

It’s a match.

And we took his wife from him. We humiliated him. We walked away and left him all alone because it was the safest thing to do, the smartest thing to do.

He’s lifting up a weapon and pointing it at Hael like his son is the only thing left in the known universe, and then his finger is tensing on the trigger, and even though I know Victor would tell me to stand down, I don’t.

I’m already moving before I can even consider the consequences. Because there is no consequence greater than losing one of my boys, of seeing them hurt and bleeding and dying. That’s something that my soul can’t bear. So, regardless of what my actions mean, I take them because there’s no alternative for me.

I’m sprinting forward now, running so fast that the air seems to stream past me like water, flowing across my cheeks and tangling in my hair. If there was more time, I could probably shoot Martin while still being careful not to hit Marie, attached to his side and wrapped in his arm as she is. But that’s not how life works.

You can plan and estimate and figure and calculate all you want, but sometimes random events occur that can change the trajectory of the entire world. This is one of those things.

Martin is Hael’s father, so he was able to get a pass to come on campus today. Also, he’s in the GMP, so he knows about Havoc and all the things we do and the vendetta with his boss. He’s angry and he’s desperate and he’s violent, and so when he pulls the trigger to shoot his son, I’m right there in the path of that bullet like I was born to stand in that one place, to fall into line even as Hael lets out a roar of rage, even as he tries with valiant effort to fire his own gun at his father in a preemptive strike.

The thing is, it’s too late.

The sound of Martin’s gun going off is like a car backfiring, but the pain … the pain is indescribable. It’s like being impaled by a hot iron, one that sears and cooks the flesh as it goes in. I’m still standing, adrenaline flooding me and keeping me on my feet for a moment as Hael’s muscled body explodes into violent action.

There’s another gunshot and another and another. It feels like those shots, this pain, are occurring over hours, like time is passing slow and sticky like molasses. In reality, I’m pretty sure Martin’s shots are continuous and near instantaneous, so quick that Hael unloads his own gun into his father before charging the man’s sagging form and managing to tackle him before he even hits the ground.

In a fit of dark rage and tumultuous despair, Hael whips out the hunting knife from his ankle sheath—similar to the one Maxwell Barrasso is wearing, though I don’t know that at the time. All I know is that everything comes full circle, everything recycles, everything repeats and patterns and mimics. And even though I can’t see it, I think of that scar on Hael’s arm, the one that stretches from shoulder to fingertip.

The one that his father gave him.

So it seems appropriate that Hael would take that knife and that he would plunge it straight down into his father’s chest. There’s so much blood; it looks like Hael is being bathed in it. He stabs his dad again. Again. Again. As many times as Martin shot me, that’s how many times Hael stabs him.

Oh, he finally got him, I think, and that’s when I realize that something is really and truly wrong. That’s when I look down and I see all the blood, and I think briefly about that blood running down my thighs. I think of it running when I was on my period and Oscar fucked me. I think about it running when I had the miscarriage and the boys crowded around me in the bathroom. I think about the blood at the high school and the crown on my head and the time when Kali stabbed me. Every significant moment in my life is slathered in blood. Drenched. Soaked. Consumed by it.

I’m supposed to be running now, but I’m not. I’ve stopped moving even though I’m still telling my body to run, and it’s frustrating as fuck because I can’t get close to Hael to throw my arms around him, to bring him close and hold him tight.

There’s a lot of blood when I fall, when my knees hit the floor and it’s so red and everything is wet … My breath comes in strange, gasping chokes as I fall forward, palms hitting the ground. But my elbows won’t hold me up, and I end up collapsing, face-first. I have just enough energy to turn my face to the side, so that I can see Hael. Mine. Always mine. My Havoc Boys.

His mother is crawling over to me now, weeping and shaking and murmuring in French. She continues to whisper to me as she turns me onto my back, drawing my head into her lap.

“It’s okay,” she chokes out, her voice heavily accented. She soon slips back into French, saying beautiful things that I can’t understand as she swipes my hair back from my forehead. I’m coughing now and everything is spinning.

This is how it was supposed to happen. Havoc was always for me. But I was always for Havoc.

“C’mere, Blackbird, c’mere,” Hael is murmuring as he takes me from his mother, his voice breaking as he digs his phone from his pocket with hands dressed in blood. He presses dial and then lifts the phone up to his face. “Come on, come on, answer, damn it …” Hael trails off with a curse, his voice breaking on a rough sob as he murmurs, “mare’s nest” into the phone and then tosses it aside.