Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,2

the easiest path to take.

I stumbled downhill, my feet catching on roots as my tired limbs ached and the pain in my body threatened to overwhelm me. But I needed to keep moving. Had to get away from here and find somewhere safe so that I could figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do now.

The sound of the waves reached me and the light ahead brightened before I stepped out onto a white sandy beach, a sigh of relief escaping me at the sight of the ocean. Fuck, I missed it sometimes more than my own mother. I mean, my mother was a total bitch who I barely even remembered, so I missed my period more than her whenever I wasn’t on it, but still, the ocean held a special place in my heart unlike any other. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been swimming in it though, let alone surfing.

I drew in a deep breath of the crisp, ocean breeze and looked out at the horizon for a long moment as I tried to process what had happened last night. But all that came back to me was that one, all important thing. I was a dead girl walking. And Shawn could never find out about that unless I wanted to live to see that fate brought to reality. Of course, if I managed to get to him before he got to me…

I shook my head before I got carried away and started thinking about anything crazy like revenge. I certainly wasn’t in any shape to be carrying out hits on gangster assholes right now anyway. And the leader of The Dead Dogs would be a damn difficult target to get close to. First things first, I needed water, food, clothes…money.

I dipped my fingers into my back pocket where I knew I’d had a twenty stashed and closed my eyes for a brief moment with a smile tugging at my lips as I found it right where I’d left it. That was something. Admittedly, not a whole lot. But it was a start.

Any normal girl would have been afraid right now, but every moment since the Harlequin boys had betrayed me, I’d been growing tougher like a rose growing thorns. I knew how to take things in my stride, even my own death. I was either one lucky bitch or the Grim Reaper had been preoccupied tonight and he’d come looking to claim what he was owed soon enough. I was banking on the former.

As I opened my eyes again, I turned first to my right and then to my left, looking out along the horizon for any sign of anything which might tell me where the fuck I was.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled loud enough to startle a couple of seagulls who had been fighting in the sand...oh wait, they were fucking actually and looking rather scandalised at the interruption, but that wasn’t the point.

The point, was that beyond the cerulean sea and the long stretch of white sand, far off in the distance lit up by the first rays of the rising sun, I could see a goddamn pier with a goddamn Ferris wheel parked up at the far end of it. Not just any pier and Ferris wheel either, oh no - that right there was what me and my former boys liked to call Sinners’ Playground. It used to be my favourite place in the entire world once upon a time. But the thought of coming back here now had me wishing Shawn had done a better job of choking me to death. My gut tightened and a lump of dread rose in my throat.

This place had been my home once. The only one I’d ever known. Where I ran the streets with the Harlequin boys at my side and the world seemed full of endless blue skies and a thousand possibilities. And look how quickly that had gone to shit...

Fucking Shawn in his final act of fuck you had driven me out here to bury my still warm corpse in a shallow grave in the one place in this world that I hated above all others.

If I hadn’t already wanted to kill him for putting his fucking hands on me, then I sure as hell did now. I was going to go ahead and slap a nice, big post-it note at the forefront of my mind holding a life goals to-do list, and right at the top of it would be