This just has to be Mason Miller.

I aim for his head. Even if I were to die here today—I won’t—then killing Mason might just make it all worth it. He’s one of Maxwell’s secret weapons. To remove the threat of the GMP from Springfield, we’ll need both Maxwell and Mason.

Just as my finger tenses on the trigger, Mason’s eyes flick to me. I can’t really see his face. Shit, it’s bathed in shadow and obscured by dust motes that dance through the early morning air the way I used to, effortless, weightless …

He drops down just before I pull the trigger, so I don’t bother taking the shot. I need this bullet. It’s my very last.

Mason rises to his feet in a movement so fluid that I wonder if he, too, was ever a dancer. He moves across the dirty ground, littered with used condoms and needles, and kicks the door in. Bits of wood splinter and dig into my skin, but I barely notice the pain, blue-painted fingers curling around the edges of the opening as I drag myself out and throw my body into Mason.

Maintaining close contact with any one of the men will help reduce my chances of being shot. But grappling with Mason is not the same as grappling with Russ. He manages to get a hand free, hitting up against the bottom of my chin and causing me to bite my tongue. Fresh, hot blood fills my mouth as he throws a punch that likely would’ve burst my eyeball if it’d made contact. Instead, I manage to avoid it and his fist flies into the wall.

Four against one. Odds that normally wouldn’t scare me. But Mason is different. Russ is dangerous. The other two men are just add-ons at this point, but even they’re a step-up from the Charter Crew’s best and brightest.

An elbow hits me in the chest before I register that Mason’s changed his tactics. He’s trying to drive me toward a broken window this time, likely in the direction of additional GMP members. I turn and grapple the edge of the staircase, hauling my body up through a break in the spindles and finding my feet even as Russ fires several times in my direction.

Drywall dust fills the air, clouding the few lit spots in the unending darkness of the building. There are so many like this in Prescott. Havoc knows them all. Even before I trip over the first body, I know we lost a few members of our crew in here today.

There’s nothing I can do to help the dead, so I don’t stop. Instead I continue up the stairs until I hit the metal door that leads to the roof, shoving through it with both palms and surveying the space around me.

About ten years ago, the city started changing its zoning laws to allow buildings to be built closer and closer together. The apartment next door is practically within touching distance. Neither of them is particularly tall—about five stories—but a fall from here would kill me.

I tilt my head to one side, trying to calculate the odds.

The sound of pursuit behind me makes the decision relatively easy. I’d rather risk falling to my death than end up in Mason’s grasp. I’d be lucky to simply die at his hands. Chances are, if he can, he’ll take me alive and try to torture Havoc’s secrets out of me.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I pull in a deep breath, remembering that day in the studio when I danced for Bernadette like a beast performing some sort of primal mating ritual. I open my eyes again, lips twisting up in a smile. That’s what I did, didn’t I? Danced. Begged. Pleaded for her to let me touch her the way I’ve always dreamed of.

That’s what drives me when I take a few steps back, brace myself for the jump, and take off for the edge of the roof. Even though it kills my knees and makes me wish I were hopped up on painkillers, I flex my muscles and leap, landing on the gravel surface of the neighboring roof.

Agony screams through me, rippling from the carefully rebuilt knobs of my knees, but I ignore it. I’m used to pain. So used to it, in fact, that when I see it in others—Bernadette’s face, for example—I find it beautiful.

Breathtaking, really.

I don’t bother rising to my feet, crawling over to a nearby hole and lowering myself into the ruined space until I’m standing on a nest of pine needles and wet drywall. It smells like must and piss in here—typical Prescott—but there’s something else, a strange clove and smoke smell that gives me just enough warning to avoid getting my head blown off.

Ducking into an open door, I put myself behind a brick wall, my mind assessing what I just saw.

Mason was there in the dark, in the opposite building. There’s a broken window on both my side and his. Likely, right now, he’s climbing between the two spaces. That’s what I’d be doing, after all. If he’s anticipated my movements to a T, then we clearly calculate our next moves in a similar matter.

I heft the handgun from my hoodie pocket, eyes traveling the length of the room, sweeping across the ceiling. I won’t be caught unawares from above, not the way I surprised those men in the hallway. I reach up and adjust the skeleton mask on my face. Like everything else with Havoc, we create our own traditions. Skeleton faces and wolf howls and a girl that’s too wild for one boy to possess on his own.

Crawling across the floor, I allow myself to peek around the corner.

I don’t see Mason anywhere.

Taking my phone from my pocket, I try to send a text but pause when I hear movement from the next room. Russ appears on the staircase and, from somewhere deeper in the building, I hear the movements of several people. Maybe even a dozen.

I grind my teeth and decide to finish my text.

Mare’s nest.

A perfect complement to Bernie’s text from earlier. The rest of our group chat is filled with things like where are you? and two men in the gym, stay safe. I manage to send that off, but that’s it. Mason comes up out of a trapdoor about two feet from me. That’s when I realize that we’re in what amounts to an attic; he’s used the access point to surprise me.

My booted foot kicks out and hits him square in the face, but it doesn’t faze the man at all. Instead, he grabs onto my ankle, yanks, and uses his bodyweight to let us both fall. We crash into the old wood floors, and then through them, to the next level.

I’m choking and struggling for air, fingers grasping at my side as I feel this rush of white-hot heat and pain. Shit, shit, shit. Something stabbed me when I fell. Not Mason’s knife, but a piece of wood that’s speared me through the shoulder in a way that one might stake a fucking vampire.

“There we go, so you’re human after all,” Mason murmurs, kicking my gun from my hand. I’m not sure where my phone is anymore. Doesn’t matter. I just need to get up and move. I need to run. That’s not easy for me to admit, that I’m in over my head. I should not have chased Russ the way I did. Too cocky, Cal. Don’t get too cocky.

“I was once human,” I agree, and then I’m tearing the piece of wood from the wound and plunging it into Mason’s thigh. He barely lets out a hiss of pain before he’s hitting me across the face and knocking me on my back. I land in a pool of wet blood that splatters across the nearby walls like just another wave of graffiti. HAVOC is scrawled in black paint just above it. Marking our territory. Staking our claim.

“Still human, kid,” Mason tells me, and then he reaches inside his jacket for a pistol. The sound of another explosion outside buys me about a tenth of a second. But it’s enough for me to turn and retrieve my own gun, rolling onto my back and firing, not at Mason, but at Russ as he rounds the corner with an assault rifle at the ready.