was trying to play this game with me right now. The familiarity of it was too enticing to ignore though and it wasn’t like I couldn’t watch the road at the same time.
“Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly?”
“Invisible,” he said instantly. “Then I could walk into Harlequin House and kill you all in your sleep. Bang, bang, bang,” he mimed firing his gun and my heart sank as I stared at the road with a scowl, fully reminded that we were enemies and this little ceasefire we had right now was entirely to do with Rogue. Without her, he’d be turning that gun on me and making sure my brains decorated the trees.
“Don’t pout about it, J,” Maverick growled. “That’s what this’ll all come to in the end.”
“I’m not sure what I ever did to you to make you wanna kill me, Maverick.”
He remained quiet for a few beats before he answered. “You didn’t fight for Rogue while I was gone. You may have continued writing to me in prison and I’m sure you cried to Luther about trying to get me out, but that all pales to nothing when I think about you abandoning her.”
“You don’t know anything,” I bit at him. “I tried every chance I got to find her, we all did. But Luther was…” I trailed off, unsure what the point even was of trying to explain this to him. He didn’t care, he wasn’t going to hear it. He’d made his mind up about me and my boys a long time ago.
“What?” he grunted.
“It doesn’t matter,” I murmured. “It won’t change anything.”
“How do you know unless you say it, Johnny James?” he pushed and I rolled my eyes.
“After we initiated, Luther had eyes on us constantly,” I said. “He expected us to go looking for her, so he had his men surrounding us. He got Chase and I to move into Harlequin House with Fox and we couldn’t even take a shit without Luther knowing about it. By the time he let us breathe a little, Rogue was already gone. She ran away from Fox’s aunt’s house and buried herself so we’d never find her. We spent the last ten years hunting for her, Fox even put out photos online with paid goddamn advertising to try and find her. But she didn’t want to be found, Maverick, she hated us. I think a part of her will always hate us.”
Maverick thought on those words for a long moment. “I would have found her,” he said assuredly.
“Keep telling yourself that,” I gritted out. “You don’t know shit. You think we didn’t try everything? You think you really could have done anything more than we already did?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said stubbornly and I just shook my head at him.
“Look I’m sorry for whatever happened to you in prison, I’m sorry if you feel like we abandoned you, but I’m not sorry for not trying harder to find Rogue. Because there isn’t a single thing more we could have done, and eventually we had to accept that she didn’t want to be found or else she would have come home. And while you were suffering in prison, we were suffering out here in our own version of it.”
“You were a free man,” he said icily.
“Since when?” I scoffed. “I’m a Harlequin, Rick, I’m not free. But that’s life. You pick your chains and in the end, those are the ones I chose. Because I may have to do things that tarnish my soul sometimes, but I also have a home, I have Fox and Ch-” I cut myself off, grief tearing down the centre of me as I missed my brother so fiercely that it cut me to shreds.
I turned away from Maverick, not wanting him to see any of the pain in my eyes. I slid my finger onto the trigger of my gun, wishing Shawn would show his face so I could start shattering bones. That motherfucker was responsible for Chase’s death, so it was going to take everything I had not to kill him on sight. Rogue deserved that kill and I wanted to watch as she planted a bullet between his eyes, but there was no rule that said I couldn’t rip off a few of his limbs first.
Maverick remained quiet but his arm pressed to mine and for a moment it felt like we were sharing in the agony of our lost brother, but I wasn’t sure that