Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,107

about how this was gonna go. Not me though.

"So what do you want to know?" Fox asked Rogue and I immediately sat up straighter, shaking my head.

"No," I growled before Rogue could answer. "This conversation isn't on her terms. She needs to know what we went through."

"Oh yeah, how hard it must have been for you to cut me off and ignore me while settling into your new life as Harlequins," she said icily, her glare just as cold as her tone.

Fox cut me a shitty look and I stared right back, my temper starting to rise.

"Let's just lay out all of our cards," JJ said, trying to diffuse the tension in the air. "This doesn't need to be a who-got-butt-hurt-the-most contest."

I pressed my tongue into my cheek and Fox inclined his head.

"Fine," Fox said, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of his Margarita. "You’d better start then Chase, as you clearly have so much to say."

I fought the urge to bite back at his pissy tone, taking a long drag on my cigarette before pointing at Rogue with it. "You only see things one way. And I get why. I'm not an idiot. You think we cut you off and left you to rot in whatever new world you ended up in. But it wasn't like that."

"So what was it like?" she asked, not sounding annoyed at me for once just curious, her eyes narrowing as she pinned me in those baby blues.

"It was like...hell." I thought back on the events that had led to her leaving town, my heart bunching up into a fist at the thought of the secret I still held inside. What I'd seen, what I knew and no one else did. Because if I'd ever breathed a word of it, I would have broken my friends further. So instead, I'd just broken in silence, eventually realising that her leaving town was probably the best thing that ever could have happened to us. But that didn't change how I'd felt back then. How fucking cut up I’d been over everything that had happened.

A day before we kicked Rogue out of Sunset Cove, she’d been in serious trouble, attacked by some asshole called Axel who worked for Fox's dad and lived along the street from her group home. He'd dragged her into his house and tried to rape her, but our brave girl had hit him with a fire poker. One clean, hard fucking shot to the head and that had been it. She'd killed him. And we'd all gone running to help clean up the mess the moment she’d called.

I remembered the fear of that night, of peddling on my push bike all the way to that motherfucker's house, picturing the worst, that by the time she'd killed him, he'd already gotten his hands on her. But thankfully, it hadn't been like that. So me, JJ, Fox and Maverick helped get rid of the body, dumped it in the ocean, having no fucking clue what we were doing, but just trying our best to keep Rogue out of trouble. Because Luther Harlequin had an unwavering rule when it came to anyone who killed members of his gang; those responsible died in payment for it. And our Rogue was responsible. My little one, my fucking girl. Back then, we all would have done anything for each other, but for her we would have fought the devil himself and placed his head at her feet.

So we fed that rapey bastard to the sharks and hid her secret as best we could. But we were dumbass kids who'd dumped his body just as the tide was coming in, not weighing it down, not leaving chum for the damn sharks to find. Nothing. So the fucker came back to bite us in the dick when the corpse washed up in the cove the following morning and when Luther heard about it, he was out for blood.

Maybe we still would have been in the clear too, only a guy from Rogue's group home had seen her with Axel. Watched through the fucking window as he pushed her down beneath him, almost fucking destroyed her. He'd seen it all and done nothing to help. And when Luther's men went sniffing around for answers about Axel's death, he'd coughed them up without so much as a threat to his life.

When Fox and Maverick found out that their dad knew the truth, we all planned to run. To meet at