“Jesus fucking Christ,” Hael murmurs, dropping into a crouch and touching two fingers through the blood. Just the sight of it makes me sick. “This is cold, but it’s still wet.” He points out the dried edges around the pool. “Half a day in and it turns black, crusts over.” Hael stands back up and meets my gaze across the ruby red stain, brown eyes dark with concern. “This can’t be more than … mm, six hours old?”

Vic hops in the window next with Oscar following, iPad clutched under his arm as he drops down into a dignified crouch and rises up like a demon from a summoning circle. I turn back to the blood as Victor steps up beside it, analyzing it with crow-black eyes and nodding once.

“I bet this was Cal,” he says, pointing at the dried edges. “He came here not long after the shooting and he stayed until recently.” Victor looks up again, gaze sweeping the basement. “But he isn’t here now …”

“Let’s check the house,” I say, and I swear, it takes a supreme physical effort to pull my attention away from the blood so I can locate the steps to the first floor. Deep down in my heart, I want to cry. That little girl who sat sobbing over her dead daddy, the one that Callum reached out a hand for and invited to dance, she weeps for me. The rest of me remains a dark monarch.

I make my way carefully up the steps, avoiding rot and pest damage, and shoving my shoulder into the door. It doesn’t budge. When I step back and look at it, I can see that there’s no blood on it. Not on the stairs either.

“If Cal was here, he didn’t leave this way,” I say, turning back and finding all three boys at the bottom of the steps. My teeth grind in frustration, but I manage to keep it together, sweeping the basement with them as we look for clues.

So far as I can tell, there are none.

“He doesn’t want anyone to know where he’s going,” Victor says, exhaling sharply and putting his hands on his hips. “That’s a good sign. Despite … this.” He gestures at the blood again. “He still has his head.”

“Or he was taken by the GMP,” Hael inserts, and I flick my gaze to him. He holds up his palms in an apologetic gesture. “But likely not. I mean, they wouldn’t have tried to hide the fact that they were here, right? And I don’t see much disturbance in the debris.” He points down at the floor where our footsteps have kicked up years of dust and leaves and pine needles.

“He could be on his way back to the house,” I suggest as Oscar pulls up a map on his iPad and turns the screen so that we can all see it.

“Here are our closest rendezvous points. Let’s check these first.” He flips the cover closed and then pauses for a brief moment, his eyes on mine. I know that he and Cal have a bromance sort of thing going on. He does his best to hide it most days, but it’s there now, reflected back in a tentative sort of tenderness that he shares with me in a single sweeping glance.

As soon as he looks away, back toward Vic, it’s gone.

“Agreed,” Victor says, and then his eyes stray over to mine, and I know he can sense that I’m not feeling so good right now. Luckily for him, he says nothing, and I make sure that when I crawl out of the broken window, that I show no weakness.

But something is wrong. I can fucking feel it. I just don’t know what, exactly, that is yet.

Whatever it is though, it can wait until I find my man.

Havoc puts me first. I put them first.

Blood in, blood out.

It’s early morning by the time we get home—we’ve wasted an entire day on nothing. Cal is not at any of the rendezvous points and none of our crew has seen him. I slam the front door into the wall as I walk in, finding Aaron taking a cold slice of pizza from one of the boxes.

He’s got dark circles under his eyes, and he looks fucking exhausted.

My heart flutters in that fairy-tale way it does when I see my childhood sweetheart safe and sound. He encapsulates my dreams of something better in the way he smiles at me; he holds the very last shred of my innocence in the warmth of his arms around me.

“You’re back,” I whisper, sauntering forward and acting like I don’t have blood all down my thighs. I’ve stopped in four bathrooms to empty my cup and put new pads in. Still, I bleed.

“Just got here,” he says, setting the pizza aside and then holding his arms out for me. Without hesitation, I step into them, letting his sandalwood and rose scent wash away some of the agonizing frustration I feel. I haven’t even really had time to process that we survived a school shooting. Or that I killed the son of a notorious gangster. All I’ve been able to do is focus on Callum, the way I did on Aaron when he was missing. “One of the boys told me about Cal.”

Aaron pauses there and waits, but when nobody says anything, a deep frown appears on his face.

“What took so fucking long?” Vic asks, moving up behind me and stealing Aaron’s pizza slice. We’re all starving; we have to take a break to eat. Really, I could use a shower and a nap, too, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to relax enough to do any of those things.

“When they wouldn’t tell me if Bernadette was safe, I spit in Constantine’s coffee.” Aaron strokes his fingers through my hair and smiles down at me. “He left me in the interrogation room for six hours by myself.”

I almost laugh, but the sound hurts too much trying to come out, so I don’t bother. Instead, I curl my arms around Aaron’s neck and lean up on my tiptoes, watching his long lashes flutter as our lips brush and then ignite with that usual sense of desperation and need. We were separated for too long; we can’t get enough. Even as we kiss, and I dig my fingers into his wavy chestnut hair, I know that I could fall forever into him and I would never hit the ground. It would be an endless sensation of floating, of falling, of dizzying heights rushing past at the speed of light.

The home phone rings, and I startle so bad that I end up nicking Aaron’s lip with my teeth.

“Cal …” I breathe, glancing back.

“Go,” Aaron says, pressing an aggressively affectionate kiss to my forehead and giving me a small push with his hand. I notice that his cast is missing which annoys me since it’s about two weeks early for it to come off. But I’ll chastise him later.

This could be Callum, calling to let us know he’s okay.

It has to be Callum, right?

Because as much as he jokes around about being the first of us to die, I won’t allow it. I won’t allow any of them to sacrifice themselves or be snuffed out in a stupid fucking gang war. Prescott—and the city of Springfield—belong to us. We deserve to rule first; we deserve to be happy first.

“I feel like I’m in a fucking nineties movie,” I grumble, because dark humor is Cal’s thing, and it makes me feel closer to him when I use it. “Hello?”

I swear to fuck, if this is someone asking me if I like scary movies, I’m going to kill them and bury their body under an endangered plant so that nobody can legally dig it up.

“Bernadette, it’s Sara,” the detective begins, and I sigh. It’s a sound so heavy and ominous that it causes police girl to hesitate. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I don’t want to hear from Sara motherfucking Young.

That is … unless she has news about Callum.