Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,108

the Rosewood Crypt, take our stash and run for the fucking hills. All of us together. But life was never that easy. I'd learned that the first day my sweet old Daddy had given me my first concussion. I should’ve known better.

"What happened that night?" Rogue demanded. "After Luther figured out we were planning to run, what the hell did he do to you all?"

My throat thickened at her words and I dropped her gaze for a second, sharing a glance with JJ who was working through his second Margarita already. Fox's sat untouched since his first sip and there was a darkness in his eyes which we all shared. Okay, so maybe telling her this stuff wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. Now I thought on it, it was starting to hurt like a bitch. I’d suppressed that shit for so long that I wasn’t remotely prepared for still feeling like this about it after all this time.

"After Luther spoke to Fox and Maverick, he summoned me and JJ to meet him at his house and took us all to the fucking woods in the back of a goddamn van," I started, a chill running through me at the memory. I would never forget it. In all my years, after all the bad shit I'd done since, that night still defined me in too many ways I wished it didn't.

"There were shovels in the back of it," JJ said, a hardness to his voice. "And when we got out in the pissing rain, he made us all bring one with us."

"For what?" Rogue whispered, but her eyes said she already knew. She'd seen the blood on us afterwards. She knew what we'd become.

"The kid from the group home you used to live with, Clive Anderson," I said. "He was on the ground, just waiting there like a lamb for slaughter in the rain."

Fox raised his chin as her eyes narrowed. We’d given her the bones of this story that night, but with everything else that had gone on, I wasn’t sure how fully she’d understood.

"And then?" she asked, a knowing look seeping into her expression but she clearly wanted to hear this.

"Like we told you back then, Clive saw you with Axel, saw him hurting you in his house. He stood there watching while that piece of shit attacked you, tried to rape you," Fox growled, disgust in his tone as his upper lip peeled back. "Then he gave you up to my dad's guys when Axel's body was found."

"Luther told us to kill him," JJ said, his jaw pulsing. I'd seen the hesitance in him that night. He hadn't wanted to become a killer. More than any of us, he'd resisted what we'd done. But in the end, Luther had said we either all did it, or he'd kill Rogue. And when it came down to it, she was always our priority.

"And you did," she said, her eyes shifting between us, her expression unreadable.

We all nodded and I took another drag on my smoke.

"It was you or him. Dad said he’d let you live if we proved ourselves," Fox said firmly, sitting up straighter in his chair. "It's not something I'd hesitate over now for a second, but Clive was our first. I guess that made it harder. It was still the right thing to do in hindsight."

"But you were just kids," Rogue growled, her eyes flaring protectively like she was angry at Luther for forcing that on us.

"Not after that we weren't," JJ said darkly before draining his drink. "We were Harlequins. Sworn in by blood."

"So then what? You were scared, so you told me to leave town?" Rogue guessed, her eyes watering and making my heart squeeze.

But I couldn't let her affect me like that anymore. I may have regretted the things that had happened between us, but whether it was right or wrong, her absence had fucked us all up so badly that her being here again was simply never going to be okay with me. The past was the past. And she needed to go back to it for all our sakes.

"Luther would have killed you if we'd gone after you. He threatened us, promised he would butcher you right in front of us if we ever dared search for you," JJ said, dipping his head as if he was ashamed. But fuck that. We hadn't had a choice.

"Fine, I get that. I'm not stupid, I know he threatened you, I knew it would