Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham

I ’m not dead.

I gasped as those three words resounded through my skull and the memory of Shawn’s hands locked tight around my throat threatened to drown me in terror.

I’d seen my death in his eyes, watched as the bright blue colour of them seemed to flare with energy and excitement as he pinned me to the wall and choked the fucking life out of me. “Sorry about this, sweetcheeks. I’m really gonna miss that ass of yours, but I can’t have witnesses. You understand.” Those were his last words to me as I fought for my motherfucking life, thrashing and scratching and gouging at his arms as his grip never faltered. The last words I ever should have heard as he squeezed and squeezed until my ears were ringing and darkness closed over my vision and I fell into the deepest depths of oblivion. I’d thought I was dead. Hell, maybe I was.

But then why did my throat hurt so fucking much? My head was pounding and there was a heaviness to my body unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

I groaned as I opened my eyes but all that escaped my lips was a hoarse croak which felt like fire burning up my throat. Even with my eyes open, the darkness didn’t let up. It was pitch black and the air I sucked into my lungs was stale and left the scent of damp earth coating my tongue.

“Shawn?” I rasped, but it barely even sounded like his name and he was the last fucking person I wanted to see anyway. But my mind was a fog of confused, disjointed thoughts and memories and he was the only person my malfunctioning brain could latch onto right now.

I tried to lift my arm to push my hair away from my face, but I found it trapped against my chest.

As I sucked in another breath, some rough, scratchy fabric was drawn against my lips and my heart leapt in fear as I realised the heaviness I felt wasn’t in my body – it was on my body.

There was a weight pressing down on me, pinning my arms to my sides and trapping me in the dark. That damp earth smell surrounded me, drowning me in it and a croak of fear escaped my lips as a terrifying thought occurred to me.

I wasn’t dead. But I was buried.

With a cry of alarm which sent more pain through my tender throat, I yanked hard on my arms and I almost sobbed with relief as I managed to drag them up my body until I was shoving hair away from my face and pressing shaking fingertips to the rough material I’d been wrapped in. It felt like some kind of heavy duty sack or sheeting.

Panic dug its claws into me at the thought of being underground and a shiver of fear passed through my skin as I wondered how much air I even had left down here. Every breath I sucked in seemed thin, full of that damp earth scent which made me want to heave. But puking right now seriously wasn’t going to improve my situation and I really needed to improve my fucking situation, or I was pretty sure this dead girl was about to get a whole lot deader.

I pressed my palms against the sack in front of my face and tried to exert pressure against the weight above it as I began to wriggle my legs.

As the heaviness above me shifted, the weight on my chest suddenly increased and a hoarse shriek of terror escaped me as I started thrashing and kicking with more vigour. I cursed and kicked and clawed at the rough material which was wrapped around me until my fingernails managed to tear through it.

Cold, damp soil poured through the hole the moment it was created and I screamed a broken, shattered sound of pure terror as the dirt spilled over my face.

I kicked harder, clawing huge clods of dirt into my hands and somehow managed to shove myself into a vague sitting position as I tried to hold my breath, and dirt cascaded over me in a never ending torrent.

I scrunched my eyes up tight and fought with everything I had as I dug and crawled and battled my way towards the surface.

My lungs ached with a desperate, urgent kind of need and the fear pressed in on me almost as tightly as the dirt I’d been buried in. But just as my body felt ready to give