Chapter 24
CHAPTER 24
WENDY
I can’t sleep in Astor’s arms.
There would have been a time when I’d have worried he’d close his hands around my throat and choke the breath out of my lungs with a laugh.
But the captain’s hatred of me is more sinister than that. He doesn’t want me dead. He wants me alive, an enduring reminder of his wife’s death, a punishment uniquely suited for him, forcing him to relive the agony of losing her every moment he spends in my presence.
The sad part is that I understand it—the desire to mask your pain with a different sort. What doesn’t make sense to me is why the captain is so insistent on getting rid of his Mating Mark, if he’s so intent on castigating himself for his wife’s death. One would think keeping the Mating Mark would be the masochist’s choice. Then again, a person can only suffer so long before it becomes too much to bear.
The captain’s pain might fuel him, but what of the moments he’s seemed weary, worn down? He might act as though he takes the pain like a beating he knows he deserves, but is that behavior driven by his broken Mark? Or is the rational part of Astor intact enough to free itself from his self-destructive bond?
Through the night, I feel him. Every exhale. Every roll of his head against the pillow. Every time his body, tense with grief, nudges against mine.
He doesn’t wrap his arms around me. He must figure there’s not enough visibility through the window to make a difference since we’re under the blankets, but his proximity is enough to suffocate me. Enough to drown me in the truth.
I shouldn’t exist.
I shouldn’t have existed for a long while now. Every breath I take is one that’s been stolen from the lungs of a more worthy woman. A woman more useful.
More loved.
And for a painstaking moment I’ll never admit to myself after this night, I envy Iaso. I imagine what it would be like to be loved that fiercely. For love to be the rudder of my husband’s every thought, every action, every instinct, over a decade after I’d taken my last breath. I let my imagination crawl to dark places, to the shadows of my deathbed. Except I’m the one with the healing magic, the one whose throat is valuable enough to slit. The one with the blood worth spilling.
In this dream of mine—someone else’s nightmare—I’m the one loved enough for two men to scour the shoreline for me, just to recover my swollen corpse.
I fall asleep like that, but when I wake to the moon peeping in through the glass paneling, I’m still just the girl who was bargained away. The girl no one ever loved enough to keep. Again and again and again.
I’m blinking tears away, abhorring myself for allowing my body the relief of tears at a loss that’s not mine to mourn, when a shadow flickers across the vast windowpane. At first, I’m convinced I’m imagining things, but then the shadows warp into wings that stretch across the eerily gaping moon.
Peter.
My breath catches, and I’m a child again. Too frightened to move. Convinced that if only I remain under the warm safety of the covers, they’ll protect me. But that’s a youthful notion. The only thing underneath these covers is the man who blames me for the death of his wife. The man who uses my visage as a stake to pin him closer to an ever fading memory, lest the pain begin to drift and leave him alone in his misery.
So I extricate myself from the side of Nolan Astor. My bare feet hit the cold wooden slats of the floor, my toes curling in anticipation.
He’s come for me. Peter’s come for me. The realization rushes into my lungs until I can’t breathe.
Regret twinges at my chest, and at first, I don’t understand it. Why I’m not soaring over Peter’s visit. But then I remember that I failed to learn how to rid Peter of his curse. That I failed to find a way to make him love me, truly love me. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from the captain, it’s that love and pain are inextricable.
Besides, as much as my heart goes out to Peter, like a moth drawn to the flame or a fish to the shadows, I’d rather the captain not know he was here. Rage simmers in the captain’s soul, and if the two fight, I’m not sure who will come out on top. Who will come out at all.
So I flick my neck to the side and tiptoe across the room before slipping out the door.
As I pad down the long hall, the shadows follow me from outside the windows, mimicking my every step. A way for Peter to tease me, I’m sure. But I’m not in the mood for games.
I just want to go home.
Not that I know where that is.
There’s a door at the end of the hallway that’s unlocked. When I enter, I click the door shut behind me. It’s a reading room of some sort. Not large enough to be a full-on library, but a quiet annex. The type you might offer to your more reclusive guests to enjoy when the party becomes too overwhelming. Orange coals glow in the hearth, leftover from whoever used this room last.
Outside the window, the shadows swell, expanding until massive wings drape from corner to corner of the windows.
There’s a latch hidden carefully above one of the panes. I find it when I run my hand over the golden-leafed ribs. A jittering click, and the window cracks. Shadows leak through the small slit and coagulate on the floor, producing a tower of smoke that soon takes the shape of a man.
“Peter,” I say, his name wistful on my tongue. He reaches for me, still in his shadowed form, his mouth hungrily finding mine as he wraps me in the dark swell of his embrace.
Underneath my roaming hands, shadows knit into flesh, into sinew and bone, until the lips exploring mine are no longer cold and ethereal but warm. Warm and here with me.
“Wendy Darling,” he says, my name in the tone of his drunken voice setting sparks across my skin.
“It’s been so long since you last came. I thought…I thought you had lost me.” Relief washes over me with every graze of his touch. It feels so nice to be touched. For him to want to touch me. Especially spending the evening with the captain’s body taut with disgust at each point of contact with my skin.
“You’re mine, Wendy Darling,” Peter whispers between kisses. “There’s nowhere in the realms you could go that I wouldn’t find you.”
My mind is dizzy with desire, but reason taps its skeletal fingers against my skin. “You have to go. Before they wake up.”
Peter trails his mouth to the bone behind my right ear. “Not yet.”
His words spark a tingle down my spine, but I can’t let it get the best of me. “Peter, visiting me on the captain’s ship is one thing, but the Carlisles have reach, the dangerous sort. If they discover I’m a fraud, there’s no telling what they’ll do to me.” And Astor, I don’t add.
“I thought…” Peter pulls away, eyes still dark as coals. In a flash, I’m reminded of the danger of Peter in his shadow form. The silken voice who told the Sister he’d have taken my body ages ago, if his gentler self hadn’t made him wait.
I’m wondering now which has the reins.
But then Peter grabs me by the waist and shoves me onto the couch, his fingers grasping at the laces on the back of my gown, which I’d been too embarrassed to take off in the presence of the captain, and I have my answer.
“Peter, stop,” I say, fear lancing through me as the gown comes undone at my back. My skin grazes the velvet of the couch, and the muscles around my spine seize up.
“Where did he touch you?” he whispers, undeterred by my protests. I push against his chest, but there’s no getting him off of me.
“Nowhere. Nowhere, I swear,” I say.
“You wouldn’t let me touch you, but you’d let him.” Peter’s arms and hands shift into shadows again, splitting into several limbs, all the more to snake up my skirts and twist around my undergarments.
“Nothing happened,” I insist, but to no avail. “Peter, Peter this isn’t you. Please, I know this isn’t you. You have to get control of him. Please, for me.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, as if not watching it happen will make it go away. That little corner of my mind is still prepared like a readied guest room, its iron walls ready to keep me safe and hidden until it’s over. My limbs go limp as I escape into that place.
My little room has always been empty. A safe place, just for me.
It’s not empty any longer.
There’s a voice that’s infiltrated its walls, crept in unnoticed. A monster under the bed that’s taken up residence.
Fight back , it commands.
I’m not strong enough , I cry.
This time, it’s not the captain’s voice, but Charlie’s. The men’ll say that’s cheating, but they don’t seem to consider being naturally stronger cheating, so I wouldn’t let it dissuade you.
It’s no use. He can’t even feel pain , I whisper back.
The captain’s voice again. Your mother taught you that if you screamed, no one would come. She taught you not to fight back .
I scream.
It’s shrill and sounds like a cat dying, like someone’s picking my fingernails off one by one. It’s a noise that’s never come from my mouth, one I wasn’t aware I was capable of making.
I scream, and he comes for me.
Astor barrels through the door, green eyes glowing with panic, black hair disheveled across his forehead. His gaze dips to the scene in front of him, and I witness it unfolding through his eyes. Peter above me, pinning me to the couch, my legs and undergarments exposed from where he’s tossed my skirts aside, the tops of my breasts on display from where Peter—not Peter, his shadow self—became frustrated and ripped my bodice.
I’m not sure what I’m expecting. For Astor to slam into Peter’s side, perhaps. But he stands there, hands flexing at his sides for a moment, mouth agape in horror as he takes in what’s happening.
Something snaps the captain back to reality, and his eyes focus in on mine. It’s the briefest glimpse, but it’s drenched in sorrow.
I think it’s the first time he sees me and doesn’t imagine his wife’s blood staining my lips.
When the captain speaks, his voice is hard. Eerily calm. “Touch her again, and mark my words, I’ll pick apart those wings of yours and use the bones as toothpicks.”
Shadows swathe Peter’s face again, so when he smiles, his teeth are blindingly white.
My stomach turns over. Not him, it’s not him.
“Peter, please don’t do this. I know you’re in there,” I whisper. “This isn’t you.”
When I reach up to touch Peter’s cheek, the captain flinches, but so does Peter. When he turns back to face me, the shadows melt away. The ink drains from the whites of his eyes, until it’s Peter—just Peter, staring down at me.
He blinks, then flexes his hands, like he can’t remember how they got tangled up in my skirts. His eyes go wide at the sight of the tops of my breasts, and he gapes for a moment before swallowing and turning his gaze away. In a blink, he’s off of me, then throwing the nearest blanket over my body to cover me.
“Wendy Darling, I’m so—”
“Don’t speak her name,” says Astor, his voice as sharp as the dagger glinting in his hand.
Peter opens his mouth, but the captain cuts him off again. “You will not look at her again. You will not address her again. You will not think of her again. Not unless she asks you to, and only then after our six months are up. Which,” he says with a cruel grin, “I don’t believe is anytime soon.”
I bite my lip, wanting to reach out to Peter, to tell him I forgive him. That I know it wasn’t him. That I know there’s a curse eating away at his soul, stealing away his control. But the captain’s face is painted with murder, like he’s eager for an excuse.
Which he now has.
“Peter, run ,” I yell, just as a dagger comes flying. A dagger Astor is allowed to throw according to the terms of their bargain, since Peter has left Neverland.
My warning is just timely enough, because Peter dodges, but the knife grazes the leather of his wing all the same. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t cry out, but of course he doesn’t.
Still, he shifts into shadows, and in the blink of an eye, he’s gone. Out the window, swirling in a shapeless mass as he disappears into the stars.
“Leave it to you to warn the man who was about to rape you,” says Astor, crossing the room and grabbing his dagger from where it lodged itself between the wooden slats of a side table.
The words sting, sharp as the glinting dagger he wipes off on his pants and sheathes.
“Get up,” he says. “We’re leaving.”
“But we haven’t learned what the Carlisles know about removing Marks yet,” I say, hugging the knit blanket around me.
Astor keeps his eyes averted, probably because the blanket is knit with a loose stitch that doesn’t completely cover me. “And whose fault is that?”
I jerk my chin back as I sit up. “Now I’m really curious how you intend to pin this on me.”
Astor grits his cheek. “Last I checked, I wasn’t the one doing the pinning.”
My cheeks drain of blood, and Astor bites the inside of his cheek. When he speaks again, he’s emptied his voice of malice. “How did Peter know you were here?”
“How am I to know?”
“You gave it away somehow, didn’t you? During your conversation with Lady Carlisle at dinner?”
My cheeks flush at the same moment my blood drains. “Oh.”
From the hall, someone claps. Lord Carlisle steps from the shadows, a smug grin on his face. “I have to say, I’m a tad offended you assumed my wife to be so dull. But people have a tendency to make such assumptions, don’t they? All they see is a petty gossip with a pretty face. But, then again, that’s always served its purpose. My wife has made me rich, you see. Can one really put a value on others underestimating your intelligence?” He cuts his gaze to me. “Though I seem to have overestimated yours, Wendy Darling. That is your name, isn’t it?”