"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 arrested 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.
"My dad has a guy ready to take you to Fairfax. There's a group home there you can stay in and you can start over. Find new friends. Do whatever you like," Fox said like this was nothing to him at all. Like I was nothing to him at all. I could see his father in him in that moment, the cold monster who ruled this town and had no mercy and nothing of the boy I loved.
"Please don't do this," I begged, looking between all of them.
JJ wouldn't meet my eye, glaring at the ground with his jaw set in determination and rain running through his black hair down over his cheeks.
Chase looked hard and stoic, but in his eyes I could have sworn he was breaking just like I was, though there wasn't a single thing in his posture that made me think he was faltering.
Fox was like a statue, cold and distant, his mind made up, the decision already dealt with.
Maverick was the only one of them who seemed like he might be on the edge of fighting for me.
I turned away from Fox to him, tears streaming down my face and mixing with the rainwater.
"Please, Rick, don't do this to me. It'll break me," I said, moving forward to grip his shirt in my fists and force him to face me.
"I'm sorry, beautiful," he murmured. "This is the only way."
I shook my head. "It's not. I could go now, let them take me to that stupid house and then...then you could come meet me and we could still run. I've got my phone, I can-"
Fox stepped up to us and caught my arm, running his other hand over the pockets of the sweatpants he'd given me to wear until he found my cell phone which he tugged out.