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“So… that’s good, right?” I asked, hardly breathing, hardly daring to let myself hope. It was only hitting me now just how stressful this past week had been. It had felt like trying to go about my regular life with a massive snake wrapped around my body, slowly squeezing the breath out of me.
“We think so,” Misael said, finding my gaze when I turned around to peer into the back seat. “And the promotion is good for us. We just need to make sure Nathaniel never finds out. Flint was a bastard, and everybody knows it—but bastard or not, he was one of Nathaniel’s, and nobody kills one of his men without paying for it.”
A cold surge of fear flooded me, and I gripped the car door tightly.
Right.
Flint’s death had been justified, as far as I was concerned. But for Nathaniel, any attack on one of his people would be considered an attack on him, and he couldn’t let that stand, regardless of the reason for it.
At the moment, he wasn’t sure Flint was dead, and he had no reason to suspect the Lost Boys of killing him.
But I could never let myself forget the danger we were all in.
We balanced on a knife’s edge, and there was no safety on either side.
Five
Despite the knowledge that we weren’t out of the woods yet, a strange sort of calm permeated the rest of the week, and bled into the next. Knowing that Nathaniel wasn’t suspicious that the boys had anything to do with Flint’s disappearance eased a little of my worry—but it didn’t stop my nightly, terrifying dreams in which Flint’s body turned up, setting Nathaniel against my boys, or in which Flint himself returned from the dead and came after all of us with vengeance in his eyes.
In my waking hours, I tried not to think about it too much. If I let my mind focus on it, then I would start to think far too much about the fact that the tide could, at any point, wash up a body with a bullet in its head and rouse Nathaniel’s interest over who in the world might want to remove one of his people from existence. It set off my anxiety when I let it settle in my mind too much, so I threw myself into school with as much energy as I could muster, spending hours studying to distract myself.
I had plenty of time to do it, because the promotion Nathaniel had given the Lost Boys kept them incredibly busy. We had less time to hang out together after school or on the weekends, and aside from just missing them, I worried like hell every time they were called away to do something, usually spending most if not all of the evening gone—or in the case of the weekends, the entire day.
They were happy about being given more responsibilities for Nathaniel, but I knew they missed me too. When we did manage to see each other, we were all over each other, hands and mouths and teeth devouring me in an almost violent clash. Even at school, they were with me as often as they possibly could be, and they found little ways to constantly touch me or be near me.
It was sweet, and it fed something primal inside me—a need to be close to these boys. To claim them over and over as my own, and to give myself to them as theirs.
There was an element of raw fear that infused every kiss and touch, but I tried not to think about that either. I tried to ignore the fact that every time they kissed me or fucked me, part of me wondered if it would be the last.
I considered begging them to stop working for Nathaniel, but it wouldn’t do any good. This was the life they had chosen, and they were in too deep to walk away now. It might only make Nathaniel more suspicious, honestly. And besides, if he did find out what’d happened to Flint, it wouldn’t matter if the Lost Boys worked for him or not—his wrath would fall on them just the same.
So I just held my breath every time they went to see the crime lord, and clung to them even more tightly every time they returned.
And, for better or for worse, there was one other thing that helped distract me from my worries about Flint, Nathaniel, and the boys.
Mom.
The situation with her was completely confusing. Ever since I’d come across her going through her closet and then witnessed her strange cleaning binge, she was never at home anymore. The car Dad’s lawyer, Isaac, had gotten for us to replace the one that’d been destroyed by the Slateview students during my first week of school was gone. That car had been sensible and obviously used, although it’d been in decent enough shape for our purposes.
But the new car I’d seen in the driveway the night Flint died was not only brand new, but an expensive model. I’d asked a few more times, but Mom still wouldn’t tell me how she’d gotten it, other than to say that it was “taken care of.”
She’d spent most of our first two months here refusing to leave the house, barely even making it out of bed some days, but now, it was like she’d done a complete one-eighty. She never seemed to want to be at home. She would dress nicely, do her hair and makeup, put on jewelry that I could’ve sworn she said she’d sold, and wouldn’t come back until late in the evenings, when my homework was long done and I’d put away the leftovers from dinner.
When I asked her about where she was going, what she was doing—and even once asked if we could spend a day together—she brushed me off entirely.
“Oh, it’s nowhere you would be interested in going, Cora. Why don’t you spend time with your little friends?”
The fact that she was encouraging me to hang out with the Lost Boys, after the way she’d treated Bishop when she’d first met him, raised more red flags than I could count, but it also wasn’t like I could really do much about it either. She was the adult, and she could do whatever she wanted. And she had been in a better mood lately, so between her extended absences and her cheerful demeanor when she was home, at least the pall of sadness no longer hung over the place.
At this point, I would take any scraps of good news I could get.
Later in the second week following the boys’ promotion, another new thing cropped up, this time in the form of a new student by the name of Eli Parks.
Slateview High didn’t get a lot of new students—because what kind of transfers were happening in an inner city school? His arrival was greeted with whispers and rumors, and half the female population of the school eyeing him like he was a juicy steak. I caught sight of him in the hall on his first day, and I had to admit, he was attractive. Tall and well-built, dark eyes and light hair, and a tan that said that he did more than just stand around and look pretty for school girls.
He was put into Mr. Tyson’s sixth period US History class, and he strode in just before the bell, casting his gaze around the room before settling into the free seat beside mine.
Mr. Tyso
