Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,4

letting myself get tangled up with him and my eyes had been wide open for every moment of it. Last night wasn't the first time I'd heard or seen something I shouldn't. It was just the first time he'd caught me. And the last. Or so he thought.

I swam away from the shore with confident strokes and a feeling of euphoria which I'd only ever been gifted by the ocean. There was just something so pure about the saltwater which felt like it was washing away my sins, though in all fairness I'd need to scrub a lot harder if I expected to remove those from my flesh.

It might have been ages since I'd been beneath the waves, but my body remembered and as I swam, a lightness filled my soul which I grasped onto with both hands like a lifeline. This was what I needed. Just me and the water. Nothing and no one else. Because people were problems that I didn't want. I'd been alone for a long damn time, even though I'd been surrounded by people. But they were strangers charting their own course to hell. I didn't need any passengers on my ferry. Dead weight just dragged you down anyway.

I kicked up to the surface and gasped as I drew in a deep breath to satisfy my aching lungs. The sun was rising higher now, gilding the tips of the waves as I rolled onto my back and floated there, looking up at the pale sky.

I knew the price of heading back to Sunset Cove would be high. Probably the highest I'd ever paid for anything, even counting my death. If I did this, all traces of the girl I’d once been would be lost. But maybe they already were. I was just clinging onto the idea of them because it made all the fucked up shit I’d suffered through tolerable. But if I wanted out of this life. All the way out like I'd been dreaming of for years, then I needed to go back. I needed to take what I was owed then set my eyes on the horizon and run for my life. Not this sorry excuse for an existence I'd been festering in for years, but for the life I'd always wished for in the darkest corners of the night. The one I'd never really believed I could claim. But it was now or never. I was a dead girl walking and I needed to decide my own fate.

I turned and swam back towards the shore, dipping beneath the waves again and sighing in a stream of bubbles as the water slowly lit with the blue of the sky all around me and I felt like I was home at last.

Once my feet could reach the bottom again, I stopped and started scrubbing at my hair, my face, my body. I needed to get the grave dirt off of my flesh and I refused to flinch away from the sting of my wounds.

The cuts burned in the saltwater, but at least it was cleaning them. I needed it to clean them, to wash away all evidence of what Shawn had tried to do, of the feeling of his hands on my flesh, of his tight grip on my throat.

My heart raced as I remembered that look in his eyes as he'd squeezed the life out of me. That cold, callous acceptance and more than a little excitement too. I knew he'd killed people before me and I’d never even imagined he might love me, but I'd been his girl for almost two years and I thought that I might have meant...something to him. But I guessed not. Even after all of these years, I was still just the girl everyone liked to throw away.

I strode back out of the water, glancing down at the full sleeve of tattoos on my left arm as they glistened wetly, the patterns clear without the grave dirt hiding them, a mixture of ocean creatures and violent things which probably made no sense to anyone but me. But those images were my soul in ink. From the painted skulls dressed in flowers to the stingrays circling my bicep, the pair of angel wings on my back and the other creatures and images which marked my flesh, each of them meant something to me far beyond the obvious.

I wrung the water from my long hair, cringing at the pain in my neck as I tilted my head to