Hael turns my head toward him and kisses me from over my shoulder, leaving me breathless and wanting, the way the boys always do. We’re insatiable, wild, little heathens with weekly bacchanalian affairs. Once we move into this house—and away from the sometimes too-watchful eye of Marie who’s been staying with us—they’ll probably be more like every other day affairs. Or maybe every day, at least for a while.

We kiss until the other boys join us, fanning out around the fire in the front yard of the old Gothic house, the one that Ruby cherished, the one that she left to her daughter because even when she knew that Ophelia was a snake, she couldn’t resist trying to take care of her one last time.

Aaron and Oscar take a seat on the old bench we dragged across the lawn while Cal crouches on a rock. Hael and I stay where we are while Victor presides over us like an alpha wolf regarding his pack.

“There’s a letter,” he says, showing us the envelope that his lawyer handed him during our meeting on Monday. He hasn’t touched it since, but it’s been sitting there on the table for days, brooding and silent and holding all its careful secrets inside of pressed floral paper. “I should probably read it.”

He stares at it like he’d rather just throw it in the fire and watch it burn, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he finally opens it up. The page unfolds in his hands and then Victor gets caught reading his Grandmother Ruby’s words.

“Victor,” he begins, as my skin ripples with chills and I think of Penelope’s last letter to me, the one that she left in her journal and that Sara Young gave to me even though she didn’t have to. I’ve read it so many times that even though it’s tear-stained now, I can still remember exactly what it said. Besides, I took about a hundred pictures of it with my phone and uploaded it to the cloud first, just in case. “We are not always given the things we want. Oftentimes we are not even given the things we need. Your mother was given everything she ever wanted, needed, craved, desired, coveted, or lusted after.

“I don’t know if that’s why she turned into a person I no longer recognized, one that seemed to forget how to feel or care or cherish. But that’s why I’m doing this, why I’m leaving everything to you.

“But only on these conditions.

“I want you to learn to persevere. I want you to learn—period. I want you to stay true. I want you to be honest. Mostly, I want you to learn to love. Because love is the most powerful force in the known universe. It defies logic, and it makes fools out of us all, but it also gives us a reason to keep going, even when everything is dark and the world feels like it’s caving in.

“I love you, Victor, and this is why I’m leaving you the world.”

Victor stops reading and then drops the letter by his side.

Hael releases me then, so I can go to Vic, and he takes me into his strong arms and holds me close, so tightly that I know he’s feeling every emotion in the book, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.

“The world …” he says after a long moment, breathing into my hair. Victor pushes me back slightly so that he can take my face between his big hands and kiss me until I forget that I’m human, until I become nothing but a spirit and a heart and a well of emotion that soars and tumbles. “She left me the world.” He looks into my face and then lifts his gaze up to study the boys—his boys, our boys—before turning his attention back to me. “And now I’m giving it to you.”

I know he means the money and the opportunities and control of the very city we all love to hate and hate to love.

But in his ebon eyes—yes, Mr. Darkwood lived, okay?—that’s where I really see it.

The world.

“I’m giving it to you,” he repeats, and then he kisses me, and I know without a doubt that he doesn’t just mean me. He means all of us. The six of us.

Havoc.

One year later …

The air is poisoned with white dust. It floats everywhere as we make our way through the main floor of the house.

Now, with Victor’s inheritance money in hand, we’re knee-deep in the middle of a renovation that’s just now nearing its zenith. To be fair, the place was a goddamn mess. There were holes in the ceiling, and pieces of the flooring missing, drywall covered in rot, and a fireplace with the stones tumbling out. The kitchen was nonexistent, the bathrooms were holes where toilets and sinks and showers used to be (which is a serious fucking shame because Oscar told us this place had all original fixtures until Ophelia sold off all the parts).

But now?

It seems almost impossible to remember that Eric and Todd Kushner were murdered here. Actually, I can only remember it when I’m stoned and the light falls in the upstairs bedroom just right and even then, it doesn’t matter because they were fucking pedos, so their death is nothing but a blessing for the world.

Mostly, I remember getting married here in an expensive-as-fuck black Lazaro gown that still hangs in the closet at Aaron’s place. Seeing as his mother still technically owns the house, and she’s nowhere to be found, we can’t sell it. We can, however, keep making the mortgage payments and letting Marie live there until we find her to buy it.

If we ever find her.

Not that it even matters.

“This looks so goddamn fucking amazing,” I say, standing in the middle of the nearly finished kitchen. There are cabinets and countertops, and holes where all of the appliances are supposed to fit. It looks … grown-up and strange and not like anything I’ve ever been a part of. “Who’s going to cook in here? Hael? Aaron?”

“Well, it definitely won’t be me,” Vic says, and I snort in agreement. We’re both shitty cooks. Nothing has changed since high school. Not a single goddamn thing. Alright, nothing in regard to cooking. Plenty of other things have changed.

First off, the fingers of Havoc’s influence have crawled into every single corner of this city, every dark space or shadow that seemed off-limits before. With our money, with our experiences, we hold this place in thrall. Fortunately, since dealing with the GMP, things have been much quieter.

I almost miss being chased around by Sara Young. Almost.

“I’m happy to cook in here,” Aaron says, lifting up a bit of tarp and revealing the cooktop, embedded in the counter and ready to go. The double ovens are still missing though, and the fridge, and the dishwasher. “Shit, this is fancy.”

“We’ll cook together,” Hael informs him, making a picture frame with his fingers and squinting. “I can see it now: me in an apron, naked. My beautiful blond husband, Callum, standing by to massage my feet after I’ve cooked a hot meal.”

Callum snorts and flicks Hael in the back of his ear, making him wince and swat at him as he climbs up onto the counter, just to test out the crouching abilities of this new kitchen. Looks very crouch-worthy to me.

“I’ll eat the hot meal, and I’m cool with you cooking naked in an apron, but a foot massage? I don’t know about that. You’d have to really earn it.”

Hael throws a loose screw in Cal’s direction as Oscar pauses at the back windows, peering out into the yard and the gray mist drifting across the grounds. I move up to stand beside him, and he takes me in one arm, dragging me close and pressing his lips against the side of my head.

He’s gotten so much better about touch lately. So, so, so much better. One night, he even got drunk with Aaron and me and told us how he used to crave the pain of a tattoo, the pain of a piercing, because it was the only way he could fight back the nightmares of his mother’s cool arms around his neck or the feel of his father’s hands at his throat.

Things are different now. For all of us. When we’re all in bed together, I don’t see him shying away from touch anymore. He even lets the girls hug him now which is something I never thought I’d live to see.

Once we’ve spent an ample amount of time tramping around inside the house, we head back outside to where the girls are playing in the sun. I’m pleased to see them exploring the yard and ignoring their phones for once.

Shit, you sound like a fucking boomer already, Bernie. “Back in my day …”

But I don’t say anything, just try as hard as I can to keep the smile that’s slowly sliding from my face. Heather asks me to take her to Pen’s grave a lot, and that’s okay, I’ll go. I don’t mind. Even if I believe that my older sister has been reincarnated in some far-away place, and that she can’t hear us, it feels good to talk to her.

After all those visits however, I started to dislike the austerity of her grave, the prepaid plot with a family stone. Penelope’s epitaph was etched on one side of an obelisk, just a simple scrawl of her full name and the two most significant dates of her brief existence—dates that Pamela Pence formerly Pamela Blackbird was responsible for.

So I did something about that.

I stayed up every night for a week, curled up in a chair, poring over a poem that I scrawled in the notebook Aaron gave me. Even after all that work, I’m still not sure that I’m happy with it, but that’s the true curse of an artist, right? A constant running critique and questioning of your own work.

Anyway, I wrote a poem.

I never knew that missing hurt this much

Until you.

I never knew that love was a double-edged sword.

It cuts.

But the best parts of me are my memories of us.

Forever your sister, forever your heart.

It isn’t long, but I was limited by the size of the gravestone I was able to add to Penelope’s plot. Obviously, money wasn’t an issue, but nobody wants to read some gigantic, hulking piece of literature etched into the side of somebody’s grave. It just needed to be short and sweet and honest, and so that’s what I tried to do.

“Alright, let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say, gesturing at the girls to climb into the Eldorado.

We drive to Our Lady of Mercy, the cemetery where Penelope is buried, and I try really, really hard not to think of the Thing chasing me through these very gravestones.