Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,208

his turn to pay up with that little piece of metal in his fist.

He’d made a song and dance about putting on a pair of grey sweatpants before leading me out of his room and back downstairs to a huge office that had once been intended for the resort manager, but Maverick had claimed for his criminal dealings. I wondered what deals he'd struck in here, sitting behind the big, oak desk and making arrangements with all kinds of unsavoury characters. The thought of him sitting there at all seemed too refined for this wild man before me. I couldn’t imagine him holding meetings or discussing business dealings in a calm and civilised way. So maybe he didn’t. Maybe all of his deals were sealed in blood and paid for with stolen things and illegal acts.

He fell still at my words, the key I’d come here for locked in his fist as he looked into the safe and let me see the stacks of cash and several guns inside.

"Ever since they told me that, I can't help but wonder how different our lives might have been if-"

"Luther might as well have shot me that day," he growled, turning back to me with shadows dancing in the depths of his dark eyes.

He left the safe open and moved towards me, his gaze running over me, drinking in my tattoos again like they fascinated him more than any other change in me.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because the boy I was died that night. I lost everyone I'd ever loved,” he ground out. “Every single one of them chose to abandon me and show me my true worth."

"Not me," I breathed, his words sounding so familiar to my broken heart that they could have been my own. "None of it was my choice."

Maverick moved into my personal space again, reaching out to brush a lock of pastel coloured hair behind my ear before fisting a handful of it and forcing me to tip my head back. Pain dug into my scalp and I gasped at the sudden change in him.

"Rick," I snarled, grabbing his wrist and digging my nails in as I tried to tug him off of me.

"It doesn’t matter," he growled. "What you were, what I was. Those kids died a long time ago, didn't they? And from where I'm standing, it looks like those years corrupted you almost as deeply as they did me. You're just a fucked up little lost girl, back here in hell searching for boys you remember loving and finding demons in their places. How much does it hurt to come back and see how thoroughly destroyed all of it is? I know that when I got out of prison and came back here it felt like a veil had been lifted. And once I could see all the dirt that coated this place, I forgot about any beauty it might have ever held."

"We were happy once," I breathed, giving up on fighting him off and reaching up to cup his stubble coated cheek in my hand.

Maverick fell deadly still at the contact, still gripping my hair tightly, still leaning over me and yet something bigger than this fucking power play passed between us that made my heart squeeze with the force of it.

"Nah. We were just dumb. Living in a lie about a dream, waiting for reality to come and fuck us up good and proper like every other motherfucker in this place. Tell me, Rogue, when it fucked you did you cry? And how long before you stopped crying and just learned to lie back and take it?" His words were dark and harsh and dug deep into the cracks in my heart, but there was a bleak and hopeless kind of truth to them that I couldn't deny.

"I still would have been happy," I protested weakly. "If I'd had you. All of you."

"If you'd had the boys you thought we were you mean. Because the men we are now aren't the same people. The things we've done to each other, to you, to countless miserable fuckers and innocent assholes alike can't just be scrubbed clean. The night you killed Axel was the night our dreams died too.” His words were harsh and meant to cut, but it was a double edged sword which I was certain was making him bleed too.

"You're blaming me for killing the man who tried to rape me?" I snarled.

"No." Maverick released me suddenly and stepped back. "He was