"I'll make sure we have proof. And Dad might be a royal asshole, but he keeps his promises," Fox swore.
"To you maybe," Maverick snipped.
"He'll keep his word to you too," Fox impressed.
"Bullshit," Maverick growled.
"Just stop fighting," Chase implored. "It's not going to help. And we need to be on the same team right now. Where the hell is your dad taking us?"
"He said something about responsibility," I muttered, knotting my fingers together. "I don't like the sound of it."
"Well whatever it is he wants us to do, we'll do it for Rogue," Maverick said firmly.
"Agreed," Fox replied. "Everyone say it."
"I'll do anything to protect her," Chase said, his voice full of emotion.
"So will I," I swore, but something in my soul told me I wasn't going to like whatever awaited us at the end of this journey.
The van soon bumped along an unmade road and I steeled my nerves as I fought away the cloying fear in my chest. Everything was going to change. I'd felt this time coming and I'd done fuck all. Why hadn't we run when we'd had the chance? Fox had never wanted this life even if he was born for it. Nothing had been stopping us.
But maybe, deep down, we liked it here. If it wasn't for the Harlequins, the town would have been paradise for us. We owned the streets, the beaches, the waves. The spirit of this place ran in our blood. We'd carved our names everywhere, placed our mark on this land, claimed it in some way that I hadn't really realised until now. We'd wanted to stay. I wanted to stay. Running fucking sucked. But now there was no choice in it. So long as we were together though, I had to hope there was a new life awaiting us beyond this place. Somewhere we could make our own. We just had to do what Luther wanted and eventually we'd figure out a way to get out of dodge and take Rogue somewhere safe.
The van pulled to a halt and we all drew in deep breaths as the driver's door sounded then male voices spoke beyond the vehicle, too low for me to hear.
The sliding door suddenly pulled open and Luther stood there with the rain dripping down on his blonde hair and shoulders.
"Grab a shovel and get out," he commanded and I looked to the pile of them at the end of the van with a lurch of discomfort.
We did as he said and I jumped out after Chase, the weight of the shovel in my hands making me tense up. We were in a dark wood, the canopy so thick that it was keeping out most of the storm, but the sound of it was everywhere.
As we followed Luther around the van, we came face to face with four large guys with guns. But that wasn't what stole my attention most. It was the dude on his knees in front of them, a gag in his mouth and his hands tied behind his back. He had blonde hair and was kinda lanky. He seemed vaguely familiar to me, but my brain couldn't make the connection in that moment. The look on Fox's face said he knew who he was though, and the blood was draining from his cheeks fast.
Luther strode up to the boy who was around our age, leaning down and yanking the gag out of his mouth and taking a knife from his hip to cut the binds holding his wrists together.
"Why's he here?" Chase hissed to us as the dude quaked, but no one answered.
"Please," the guy begged Luther. "I didn't do anything wrong."
"That's untrue," Luther said, crouching down beside him, taking hold of his chin and angling his head to face us. Then Luther looked directly at Fox with a hopeful expression. "Tell Clive what he did, son."
Clive? Fuck. Clive from Rogue's group home Clive?
We all looked to Fox whose lips opened and closed, but no words came out.
"What did he do?" I found myself asking.
"I didn't do anything!" Clive cried and Luther gripped his hair when he tried to jerk away from him, forcing him to keep his eyes on us.
"Tell him, Fox!" Luther barked, the sound making my heart rattle in my chest.
"He...he told you that Rogue killed Axel," Fox said, his chest rising and falling heavily.
"He ratted her out," Maverick growled in agreement.
"And what do Harlequins do to rats, Maverick?" Luther asked, his eyes a roiling sea of darkness.
"Don't," I hissed at Maverick, but he gave me this look that made my insides shrivel. It said it's too late. That no matter what he said or any of us did, our fates were already decided. And it was the most terrifying reality I had ever faced.
"They die," Maverick answered loudly and thunder boomed as if to enunciate those words.
Luther nodded, rising to his feet while Clive screamed, scrambling away across the muddy ground, but Luther casually took his gun from its holster and swung it toward him. "Run and I'll shoot," he warned before turning back to us and Clive fell still with a whimper of fear.
Luther’s upper lip peeled back. “This kid saw your girl being dragged into Axel’s house, watched as he pushed her down beneath him, watched him hurt her, rip her panties-”
“Stop,” I growled, not wanting to hear it. Hate filled me as Clive sobbed louder, but that didn’t mean I could do what Luther was suggesting.
“I wasn’t thinking,” Clive begged.
“Don’t shy away from the truth, Johnny James,” Luther growled. “Look it in the eye and face it like a man.”
Shit. What do I do? What the hell are we gonna do?
"This little asshole squealed on your girl without my men so much as threatening him," Luther explained, looking between all of us with a challenge in his gaze. “He stood and watched through a window while Axel tried to rape her and didn’t do a damn thing to help. I’ll bet he had his cock in his hand too.”
"I didn't!" Clive begged. "It wasn't like that."
"He's the reason you're standing here," Luther growled. "He's the reason I know what she did. Because I have to say, you all did a damn good job of covering it up. I didn’t have anything else that would have led me to you. So prove your worth. Show him what happens to those who cross the Harlequins. Prove yourselves to my crew. Prove that you're men who can own their actions. Who can face the consequences of their decisions." Luther gestured for us to approach Clive, but none of us moved.
The weight of the shovel in my hand was suddenly too much and I dropped it as I realised its purpose, shaking from head to toe. I wasn't a killer. And I wasn't a Harlequin. I was just a kid who did stupid shit, who wanted to be free and live with his friends, his girl.
"We didn't ask for this," I said, my voice harder than I expected and Luther arched a brow at me.
"Life doesn't give you what you ask for, Johnny James. You have to take what you want from it. And what you want, is for the girl to live. So here's your opportunity. Are you really going to waste it?"
My heart froze to a solid lump of ice in my chest as I shook my head in refusal of what was happening and suddenly Maverick, Fox and Chase were all walking away from me, throwing their shovels down and closing in on Clive, surrounding him in a circle. Maverick kicked him in the ribs and made him wail in pain. He looked to the others and they both fell on him too, beating him, kicking him, using fists and boots to maim and hurt.
"Please, I didn't mean it!" Clive screamed, tears streaming down his cheeks as he looked to Luther for mercy while trying to shield his head from the blows. But he was never going to get it. Luther was never going to call my friends off and they were really going to do this for Rogue.
"If it's not all of you, there's no deal," Luther's voice rang through the air and his eyes fixed on me. Clive was curled into a ball and blood was starting to pour.
Fox looked to me with a desperate apology in his eyes, but a plea in them too. He needed me to go over there. He needed me to do it for Rogue. And I'd promised her I'd do anything to save her. I'd just never considered it would be this.
Clive started crawling away between them and Maverick grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, throwing him back into the middle of the circle. Blood coloured his knuckles that the rain wouldn't wash away and suddenly they were all looking at me, all begging me with their eyes and I knew I couldn't run. There was no other option but
this. For them. For her.
I picked up my shovel, my hands shaking, my body numb from the cold and my pulse thumping in my ears. I just needed it to be over. I needed the screams to stop. And as I stepped beside my brothers while they kicked and punched and beat Clive, I swung the shovel over my shoulder and it came down hard on the back of his head, silencing his screams.
I wanted that to be it, but fate wasn't that kind.
He jerked between us, still moving and bile rose in my throat as Chase and Fox started kicking him once more.
Maverick snatched the shovel from me, wielding it in a furious blow that spattered him and the rest of us in blood and it was finally done.
I fell on my ass in the mud, unable to move as I stared at my friends who'd been turned into killers. Who were painted in the blood of a kid who'd wronged us, but who hadn't deserved to die.
My heart was racing a mile a minute as panic welled up in me and I tried to scrub the splattered blood from my hands while shaking my head in refusal of what we’d all just done, trying to will it not to be real.
"You're Harlequins now. Blood in, blood out," Luther announced and those words seemed to echo right down into some eternal space inside me. "And if your girl ever comes back to Sunset Cove, this is what she'll get. If you try to hunt her down, I'll kill her worse than this. Worse than you can imagine. And I'll make sure you're all there to watch. Now start digging a hole."
Fox crouched down in front of me, cupping my cheek and smearing my face with blood as he frowned at me.
"Get up," he ordered me. "Get up, JJ."
Chase grabbed my arm and the two of them hauled me upright. Maverick nodded to me, his eyes filled with a chaotic darkness that made fear lick up and down my spine. Who even were we right now?
We moved beyond Clive's broken body and someone planted the shovel in my hand once more. Soon we were digging into the wet dirt, carving a hole into the mud that felt as deep as the wound in my chest. And all I could smell was blood and the rain and my dreams washing away with it all.
All because of one girl. A girl who needed to leave this town, and never, ever return.
I t felt like I'd been waiting for days, weeks, months.
My shitty old cell phone had died hours ago after I kept using it to light up the dark shack I'd been left to wait in and I was so cold that it felt like my bones were shaking.
The storm howled and raged outside, building up in intensity until I was certain it was a damn hurricane come to rip this place apart.
The roof did leak after all. Fat, cold drips of water splashing down from random places so that every time I moved to avoid them another one found me and rolled down the neck of my shirt, causing me to shiver even harder.
When I finally heard the sound of an engine outside, I didn't fully believe I wasn't just imagining things. Devil's Pass was blocked at both the top and bottom, so there shouldn't have been any way for a car to make it to this place.
"Rogue?" Fox's voice broke through my doubts and I scrambled upright on numb feet, fumbling with the door and wrenching it open at last to find all four of them standing there in the rain, waiting for me.
My boys.
A smile bit into my cheeks and I darted towards them with a surge of relief spilling through my limbs.
Maverick was the closest to me and I threw my arms around his neck, practically sobbing with the relief of seeing him. All of them.
"You came," I gasped, not that I'd ever really thought they wouldn't, but I’d been waiting so long that I’d been thinking up countless terrifying situations and freaking myself out over them. "What happened? What took so long? How come you-"
Rick peeled my arms off of him and pushed me back a step with a deep frown carving into his brow. "Rogue," he said roughly, none of the usual softness in his tone that he reserved just for me. "We need to talk."
Had those four words ever been followed by anything good in the entire history of the universe? I was pretty sure they hadn't, and my heart started hammering in my chest as I looked at the stern expression on his face then glanced to his left at Fox, Chase and even JJ who were all looking at me like...like...
"What's going on?" I breathed, the storm stealing my words and whipping them away on the wind as I ignored the way the rain was drenching me through, and my body was wracked with shivers.
My gaze fixed on JJ as he gritted his jaw, his fist clenching and unclenching at his side and making me notice the blood on his hands. As I looked between all of them, I noticed more and more of it. The rain was doing a good job of disguising it, but on the pale blue colour of Fox's shirt, the white leather of Chase's sneakers and speckled on all of them in various other places, I could see the deep red colour which could only be blood.
"J?" I asked, stepping towards him because he was always the one who wore his heart on his sleeve. He'd tell me what this was, he wouldn't be able to hide the truth, even if he wanted to.
JJ gave me a look filled with so much pain that it felt like it was cutting me open, his gaze flicking over my shoulder before dropping to the saturated grass at my feet like he couldn't bear to face me.
I turned to see what he'd been looking at behind me and spotted Fox's dad's black van beside a black BMW with blacked out windows and no way for me to tell who was sitting inside it. They’d carved a path here right across the grassy bluff where they must have cut off of the new road somewhere back beyond the trees.
"You're gonna have to leave town, Rogue," Chase said loudly, making me whip back around to face my boys and I nodded dumbly because I already knew that. I was leaving. We were all leaving. Together. Like they'd promised.
"Okay. Let's go," I said, my eyes darting between all of them as they remained rooted to the spot.
"Not us," Fox growled, his green eyes seeming almost black in the shadows cast by the storm. "You."
"But I... You said, all of you said-"
"It doesn't matter what we said. Those were the words of four boys caught up in a dumb fantasy about the men we wanted to become. But my feet were on this path before I was even born, there was never any turning away from it." Fox cut a look at the others which seemed to be commanding them to agree with him.
"This is what we were always destined to become," Chase added coldly and my frown deepened at the callous way he tossed those words at me.
"What is?" I asked. "What are you?"
"Harlequins," JJ muttered bitterly. "We're all sworn in."
"No," I said, shaking my head even harder. "That's not possible. The only way in is by paying with blood. I'm the only one of us who ever killed anyone. There's no way-"
"There is now," Maverick said darkly, flexing his fingers and drawing my attention to his split knuckles.
"How?" I breathed in horror. "Who?"
"That kid from the group home who was always following you about," Fox said with absolutely no emotion to his voice like killing someone was nothing to him. "The one who saw Axel drag you into his house and stood at the window watching him beat you and force you down and try to-"
"No," I denied harshly. "If Clive had seen me, he would have tried to help me. Surely he wouldn't have just watched-"
"He did," Chase interrupted. "He watched everything. Saw you kill that motherfucker. And then when the Harlequins came asking questions, he sold you out without even needing to be threatened."
"So we had to kill him," Rick growled. "To make sure he never squealed again."
"Because of you," JJ added bitterly and the look he shot me was like a stab to the freaking heart. Like he was blaming me for making him into a killer. Like he seriously thought I would have asked him to do that for me.
"I never asked any of you to-"
"You didn't have to," Fox said, stepping forward and looking down his nose at me, using every inch of his height to intimidate me. "That's the problem. You make us weak."
"I make you..."
"We risked everything for you," Chase added. "We put you before ourselves and could have been arrest
ed for it. Or worse."
"I didn't want that," I breathed as their words finally started to sink in and I began to realise they weren't all about to crack a smile or tell me this was some big joke. They were being deadly serious. Whatever Luther had done to them had made them feel like this towards me. He'd turned them against me. The only people I'd ever had. The only ones I'd ever loved. "Please," I begged, not even caring if they saw how much this was hurting me. "You promised me you wouldn't leave me alone. Fox-" I reached out and caught his hand and for the briefest moment I thought I saw something soften in his gaze before it hardened to granite again.
"We're Harlequins now," he growled firmly. "And you're not. There isn't a place for you amongst us. You were just…a way for us to pass the time. A girl we could all try and win, but the game got old. We don’t need you anymore. We don’t want you."
"Fox," I gasped, my whole world caving in around me as my brain refused to accept those words.
"I got my dad to agree to let you live because of what we used to be to each other. But that’s it," he said.
"I...how can you all just stand there and say this to me?" I demanded, pinning each of them in my gaze one after another. "After everything we've been through, everything we are to one another. I don't understand."
"Everyone has to grow up at some point," JJ muttered, looking away from me.
"We chose to make something of ourselves rather than throw away everything we have here for you," Chase said with a shrug, but as my gaze met his, I could see the pain those words were causing him.
"Has Luther threatened you?" I asked. "Or me? Is that why-"
"He'll kill you if you ever come back here, beautiful," Maverick confirmed. "You can't ever come back."
"And we don't want you to," Fox added firmly. "So there wouldn't be anything for you to come back for anyway."
"What?" I asked but my voice was so small that I wasn’t sure it even came out. These boys were my entire world, they were all I had, without them I was nothing, without them I didn’t even know who I was. I could survive anything this fucked up world had to throw at me aside from losing them. If they really did this to me, it would break me in a way I'd never recover from.
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