Devil's Pass (The Harlequin Crew #.5) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,44

words seemed to echo right down into some eternal space inside me. "And if your girl ever comes back to Sunset Cove, this is what she'll get. If you try to hunt her down, I'll kill her worse than this. Worse than you can imagine. And I'll make sure you're all there to watch. Now start digging a hole."

Fox crouched down in front of me, cupping my cheek and smearing my face with blood as he frowned at me.

"Get up," he ordered me. "Get up, JJ."

Chase grabbed my arm and the two of them hauled me upright. Maverick nodded to me, his eyes filled with a chaotic darkness that made fear lick up and down my spine. Who even were we right now?

We moved beyond Clive's broken body and someone planted the shovel in my hand once more. Soon we were digging into the wet dirt, carving a hole into the mud that felt as deep as the wound in my chest. And all I could smell was blood and the rain and my dreams washing away with it all.

All because of one girl. A girl who needed to leave this town, and never, ever return.

I t felt like I'd been waiting for days, weeks, months.

My shitty old cell phone had died hours ago after I kept using it to light up the dark shack I'd been left to wait in and I was so cold that it felt like my bones were shaking.

The storm howled and raged outside, building up in intensity until I was certain it was a damn hurricane come to rip this place apart.

The roof did leak after all. Fat, cold drips of water splashing down from random places so that every time I moved to avoid them another one found me and rolled down the neck of my shirt, causing me to shiver even harder.

When I finally heard the sound of an engine outside, I didn't fully believe I wasn't just imagining things. Devil's Pass was blocked at both the top and bottom, so there shouldn't have been any way for a car to make it to this place.

"Rogue?" Fox's voice broke through my doubts and I scrambled upright on numb feet, fumbling with the door and wrenching it open at last to find all four of them standing there in the rain, waiting for me.

My boys.

A smile bit into my cheeks and I darted towards them with a surge of relief spilling through my limbs.

Maverick was the closest to me and I threw my arms around his neck, practically sobbing with the relief of seeing him. All of them.

"You came," I gasped, not that I'd ever really thought they wouldn't, but I’d been waiting so long that I’d been thinking up countless terrifying situations and freaking myself out over them. "What happened? What took so long? How come you-"

Rick peeled my arms off of him and pushed me back a step with a deep frown carving into his brow. "Rogue," he said roughly, none of the usual softness in his tone that he reserved just for me. "We need to talk."

Had those four words ever been followed by anything good in the entire history of the universe? I was pretty sure they hadn't, and my heart started hammering in my chest as I looked at the stern expression on his face then glanced to his left at Fox, Chase and even JJ who were all looking at me like...like...

"What's going on?" I breathed, the storm stealing my words and whipping them away on the wind as I ignored the way the rain was drenching me through, and my body was wracked with shivers.

My gaze fixed on JJ as he gritted his jaw, his fist clenching and unclenching at his side and making me notice the blood on his hands. As I looked between all of them, I noticed more and more of it. The rain was doing a good job of disguising it, but on the pale blue colour of Fox's shirt, the white leather of Chase's sneakers and speckled on all of them in various other places, I could see the deep red colour which could only be blood.

"J?" I asked, stepping towards him because he was always the one who wore his heart on his sleeve. He'd tell me what this was, he wouldn't be able to hide the truth, even if he wanted to.

JJ gave me a look filled with so much pain that it felt like it was cutting me