Devil's Pass (The Harlequin Crew #.5) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,46

stand there and say this to me?" I demanded, pinning each of them in my gaze one after another. "After everything we've been through, everything we are to one another. I don't understand."

"Everyone has to grow up at some point," JJ muttered, looking away from me.

"We chose to make something of ourselves rather than throw away everything we have here for you," Chase said with a shrug, but as my gaze met his, I could see the pain those words were causing him.

"Has Luther threatened you?" I asked. "Or me? Is that why-"

"He'll kill you if you ever come back here, beautiful," Maverick confirmed. "You can't ever come back."

"And we don't want you to," Fox added firmly. "So there wouldn't be anything for you to come back for anyway."

"What?" I asked but my voice was so small that I wasn’t sure it even came out. These boys were my entire world, they were all I had, without them I was nothing, without them I didn’t even know who I was. I could survive anything this fucked up world had to throw at me aside from losing them. If they really did this to me, it would break me in a way I'd never recover from.

"My dad has a guy ready to take you to Fairfax. There's a group home there you can stay in and you can start over. Find new friends. Do whatever you like," Fox said like this was nothing to him at all. Like I was nothing to him at all. I could see his father in him in that moment, the cold monster who ruled this town and had no mercy and nothing of the boy I loved.

"Please don't do this," I begged, looking between all of them.

JJ wouldn't meet my eye, glaring at the ground with his jaw set in determination and rain running through his black hair down over his cheeks.

Chase looked hard and stoic, but in his eyes I could have sworn he was breaking just like I was, though there wasn't a single thing in his posture that made me think he was faltering.

Fox was like a statue, cold and distant, his mind made up, the decision already dealt with.

Maverick was the only one of them who seemed like he might be on the edge of fighting for me.

I turned away from Fox to him, tears streaming down my face and mixing with the rainwater.

"Please, Rick, don't do this to me. It'll break me," I said, moving forward to grip his shirt in my fists and force him to face me.

"I'm sorry, beautiful," he murmured. "This is the only way."

I shook my head. "It's not. I could go now, let them take me to that stupid house and then...then you could come meet me and we could still run. I've got my phone, I can-"

Fox stepped up to us and caught my arm, running his other hand over the pockets of the sweatpants he'd given me to wear until he found my cell phone which he tugged out.

"No phone calls," he growled, looking me in the eye as he took the shitty thing between his hands and began to exert pressure. "No texts, emails or anything."

"Wait-" I lunged for the phone, but it shattered before I could grab it from him and he threw it in a muddy puddle without so much as a flicker of regret in his eyes.

For a moment I just stared at it with my mouth hanging open. I had no money, no way to replace that thing. Hell, I only had it in the first place because he'd been given a new one a few Christmases ago and had given me his old one. Without it how was I supposed to contact any of them? I didn't know their numbers by heart and it wasn't like I was going to be allowed to visit. How would I know when they were coming for me? Because this had to be an act, right? Because Luther was watching and it had to look real. But then why didn't they just say that? It wasn't like he could hear us out here in the storm while he sat in his van.

"You have to go," Maverick said, his eyes shining with regret but not a hint of weakness. He wasn't changing his mind, but he was the only one of them who at least seemed unhappy about it.

I threw my arms around him and hung on tight, sobbing uncontrollably now as