The Never Queen (Vicious Lost Boys #5)

Chapter 1

WINNIE

I am currently tied up in the library of the treehouse in what Bash has told me is a Hunter’s Knot.

This is a new game we play. He ties me up, I try to get out.

Sometimes he’ll instruct me on how to undo the knots.

Because as he says, “Every knot has a solution,” which felt way more philosophical than it should have while he was ramming his dick into me.

Most days we play this game of knots and with fucking, but today I’m mad and the boys know that when I’m mad, I walk a very fine line between needing a release through pleasure or a release through fists and blood.

Possessing half of the Neverland Dark Shadow, aka the Shadow of Death, can make a girl feel a little…wild.

“It won’t be a problem,” Kas is saying as he sketches a new flower he discovered in his sketchbook. He says this with such confidence, I want to scream.

“It will be a problem, Kas.” I wiggle against the ropes binding my wrists. “Because they will make it a problem.”

They are the small but powerful group of Neverland fae that are against me officially joining the twins in ceremony in a fortnight (their word, not mine).

It’s not marriage, exactly. The fae call it a binding ceremony, so it’s the closest thing to marriage.

And with the twins now the Co-Ruling Fae Kings, that means, technically speaking, I would be Queen of the Fae.

And the fae are trying to stop it.

“This tail here,” Bash says, nodding at the length of rope hanging from the underside of my wrists. His dark, oil-slick wings are tucked against his back, but I notice a little jitter in the forewing as I gnash the rope between my teeth and yank.

The knot just gets tighter.

I spit out rope fibers. “You did that on purpose.”

He laughs. “Yes.”

I am this close to using the power of the shadow to make the whole damn rope disappear, but then I will lose the game and I hate losing.

“I don’t need to be the queen,” I say, trying not to get too distracted by my frustration with both the fae and the knot. “Can’t you just be crowned kings and leave it at that?”

Kas puts his pencil down and looks up. It’s nearing dusk, the sun approaching the rim of the sea, but Kas is a fae king now and the sun adores him.

One last splash of light finds him through the wavy glass of the treehouse windows, skimming his long, black hair, the slant of his nose, the tawny bronze of his jaw.

There is an edge of authority to his expression, one born to him by birthright but stolen from him by tragedy.

But as the days stack up, that authority seems to return as if he is finally stepping into himself.

“No,” he tells me. And when I huff out a breath he adds, “It’s within our right to have a queen. And not crowning you, will strip you of the dignity you deserve.”

My face heats up, not because of the lingering frustration.

But because of Kas’s firm conviction. He thinks I deserve to be queen?

I grew up in decaying houses and borrowed motel rooms. I regularly stole cans of chicken noodle soup from the dollar store because I was so hungry I was convinced an ancient mythological creature was trying to gnaw its’ way out of my stomach.

I accumulated karmic debt before I even knew the concept and barely passed high school due to “poor attitude,” “poor attendance,” and “lack of motivation.”

In the 11th grade, they started calling me Winnie the Whore, and at first I hated it, but then I came to embrace it. Better to accept the stain on my name rather than delude myself into believing it could be scrubbed clean.

I wasn’t born to royalty or even the suburbs.

I was born on the edge of a mother’s madness, cursed from first breath.

Even my biological father, whoever he is, had the good sense to turn away.

I consider myself lucky to be here on Neverland with Pan and the Lost Boys. I am happy. I am fed. There is an ocean right outside my bedroom window.

But I would be a liar if I said that I am content.

Or maybe that’s not it, exactly.

Maybe what I’m really afraid of is that the many months I’ve been on Neverland with Pan and the boys, feasting on sweet tarts and lying in the sun, blissfully happy, are just the eye of the storm of my life and eventually the storm will kick up the dust and the debris, and I will be reminded once again of my place.

A wellspring of anxiety fills my chest just thinking about it.

If I were a responsible girl, I would seek out therapy to help me navigate these feelings, the old traumas, the fear of the future, but how would I ever explain Peter Pan, the star god?

Vane, the jabberwocky from Wonderland? Kas and Bash, the winged fae kings who, with their magic, can make a feast appear before you and then quickly steal it away?

I would be admitted. And if I were a woman of the last century, they’d lobotomize me.

Further amplifying my apprehension is the very simple fact that I’m stepping into the role the twins’ sister only recently abdicated from.

Tilly left a gaping hole in the fae court that I could never dream of filling.

Maybe, subconsciously, for better or worse, I’m almost relieved the fae are pushing back on me becoming queen.

Because if they deny me the crown, then I don’t have to discover that I am not actually up for the job.

Or worse, that if I can’t take on the roles Pan, Vane, and the twins want me to take on, then maybe I don’t belong on Neverland after all. And I refuse to go back home.

I thought I was past all this.

I thought I had turned over a new leaf about my own self-worth.

I thought I believed I belonged on Neverland.

I thought I believed that Winnie the Whore could be at the top.

But the fae opposition has my doubts creeping in again.

I fiddle with the knot once more, testing the bindings. Bash is watching me intently, hunched over, balancing on the edge of the table, me in the chair wedged between his legs.

“We’ll speak to Doren,” Kas says and picks up his pencil again, the lead swishing across the paper as he shades the petals he’s drawn. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

Bash snorts.

I look up at him. “You don’t think he’ll reason with you?”

Bash takes pity on me and loosens one of the bindings.

“I think he is a reasonable man, sure. But he’s also within the inheritance line, a distant cousin of our father’s.

He is extremely powerful—here,” he says and points at an axis in the bindings.

I get it between my teeth and pull and the entire elaborate knotwork comes undone. “Bravo!” He claps for me.

The sun loves him too and caresses his cheek with a faint glow.

I frown at him. “You solved that. Not me.”

“You were patient and put in the effort.”

My frown deepens. I toss the rope aside and slouch in my chair. “Just how powerful is Doren?”

“His illusions are better than ours,” Kas says.

Bash takes affront to that and crosses his arms over his chest. “Barely.”

“He could fool us.” Kas makes a few short pencil strokes. “It may not hold long. But he would only need a handful of seconds to best us.”

My anxiety rises. “Maybe we just leave the potential hornet’s nest of being queen and fighting Doren alone for now?”

I am very aware that I am turning tail and running.

“Absolutely not,” they say in unison.

I sigh, my stomach aching, my head pounding.

I’ve already swam the ocean for a bit of exercise.

I had breakfast (an English muffin covered in jam, though they don’t call them that on Neverland and so I’ve started referring to them as Never muffins).

Kas made coffee early for me, so I’ve had plenty of caffeine.

I just feel…ill. Restless. Unmoored.

Maybe I need to drink more water.

A door slams shut distantly in the treehouse and a few seconds later, Vane appears in the arched frame of the doorway of the library.

That unmoored feeling returns, like I am tossed around by the sea.

His black hair is wet and raked back. A few droplets of water cling to his skin like needy little sprites.

The Neverland Dark Shadow, the primordial entity Vane and I share, stirs like a cat stretching long and low in a patch of sunlight.

Vane’s attention is the daily bread I can never get enough of.

Stuff me full of carbs.

He looks at me. Looks down at the rope. Screws up his mouth. He once told me, in a very stern voice, “Darling, never let the twins tie you up.”

But I am nothing if not a glutton for all of the things I’ve ever been told not to do.

Which begs the fucking question, why am I shrinking away from the challenge Doren and his fae allies have put before me?

Because in this, I am a coward.

“I’m waking Pan,” Vane says and then disappears from sight, his boots thudding down to Peter Pan’s tomb.