Chapter 25
CHAPTER 25
WENDY
I flinch under Lord Carlisle’s creeping gaze, which isn’t quite so reserved as Captain Astor’s. Even though it’s my secret he’s after, not my flesh, it makes my skin crawl. Like he has his hands all over me.
“You didn’t think my wife would make the connection when you inquired regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of Captain Astor’s wife?” Lord Carlisle asks.
The captain flinches. I can’t bear to look at him.
“We deal in secrets and shame, Miss Darling,” says Lord Carlisle. “You really thought we wouldn’t know about your Mark? We knew who you were as soon as you entered the room. But as for who you were Mated to if not Captain Astor here—now that was a mystery. One that became clear enough when you told my wife of the realm of the Shadow Keeper, of the illness that wreaks havoc in the minds of the murderers he shelters.”
My stomach twists. I’d been so desperate to discover what happened to Iaso, I’d given Lady Carlisle the first secret to come to mind. As I hadn’t told her how to get to Neverland, I assumed the secret would do Peter and the Lost Boys no harm.
“To get the Shadow Keeper himself in our debt, now that was a prize,” Carlisle says. “Thankfully, we have a contact that keeps up with him when he runs his little errands for the Sister. He was all too eager to learn where you were when we informed him you were playing someone else’s wife. Though I’m surprised he didn’t steal you back for himself. What was it he so desperately wanted, Miss Darling?” He poses the question as if my tattered dress doesn’t betray the answer.
Red blotches crop all over my body, which is all the more mortifying given how much skin is exposed. My reaction seems to only encourage Lord Carlisle’s taunts. “I have to say, even my wife didn’t see that coming—your Mate’s, shall we say, insistence? It seems you put up a fight. Tell me, have your allegiances shifted so quickly?”
“Speaking of your lovely wife,” says Captain Astor in a tone that suggests otherwise, “why isn’t she here gloating? The opportunity seems like something she wouldn’t pass up without good reason.”
Carlisle flashes his teeth, the lantern light streaking across his golden, slicked back hair. “My wife is occupied with…” He rolls his tongue like he’s tasting for the right word, searching for a specific note in a fine wine. “Entertaining, at the moment.”
A reedy old man with wandering eyes. Lady Carlisle’s fingers trailing a tad too long on his arm.
I swallow, and I can’t decide whether the bile in my stomach directed toward Lady Carlisle is disgust or pity.
“Well, I’d hate to remain here and distract you from that lovely mental image,” says Astor through his teeth. He strides to the couch and grabs my hand, pulling me to my feet. “Wendy and I will be off now.”
Carlisle offers us a feline smile, then steps into the doorway. “Oh, you know better than that, Captain Astor. With a bounty of six thousand silvers on your head?” He clucks his tongue as he cranes his neck to the side. “You, of all people, can’t blame me for snagging a fly that’s already wandered its way into my web.”
Astor stares the lord down and slides his dagger from its sheath. “You have to the count of three to get out of my way, Carlisle. Before I cut that clever tongue of yours from your mouth.”
“You’ll be doing no such thing.” Carlisle whistles, and the bookcases in the reading room swivel open. Out march a band of guards, six of them. Human, from the looks of their rounded ears, but even with Astor’s fae agility and strength…
“There’s too many of them,” I whisper.
I expect anger from the captain, a biting retort, but he just turns to me, flashes me a conspiratorial grin, and says, “Do try not to challenge me like that, Darling. Unless, that is, you intend to close your eyes.”
The closest guard launches himself at Astor’s back. At first, I think he’ll land his blow, but Astor’s ready for him and snatches his wrist, careening him over his back and slamming him into the coffee table in front of me.
There’s a crack, though I can’t tell if it’s the wood splintering or the man’s skull.
The others aren’t stupid enough to come at Astor one by one. Instead, they congregate around him. Unfortunately for the guards, Astor managed to swipe the sword from the first man’s sheath and is now parrying the attacks of the five men who surround him.
One slashes forward, but Astor is ready. He shoves his sword into his opponent’s weapon before the man lands his step, using the man’s shift in balance to cast him backward into two more guards. The three of them go barreling to the ground in a tangle of flailing limbs.
The next man to take a step toward Astor loses his head.
I’m too slow to look away, and the head lands with a squelch at my bare feet, spattering blood onto my toes as the man’s loose hair tangles around my ankles. Shock sutures me in place, my stomach turning over, but a firm grip lands on my shoulder, leading me out of the room.
I’m still staring at the lifeless head. The brunette man.
I recognize him as the servant who offered me my soup. A guard in disguise or a servant trained in combat, it makes no difference.
He’s just as dead, either way.
By the time I regain my wits and realize it’s Carlisle shoving me into the hallway, Astor is out of sight, still grappling with the last two guards.
I dig my heels into the ground, but Carlisle is surprisingly strong for his lean frame. And I’m so tired. It’s not the same tired as when I struggled against Astor when he kidnapped me from Neverland, when I wilted in his arms, so fatigued of struggling and failing.
I’m tired of being pushed around. Taken places I don’t want to go. Tired of hands where I don’t want them. Tired of my feet moving without me telling them to.
I’ve no weapon to fight back with, but according to Charlie, I’m less in need of a weapon than I am a weakness.
“Wait!” I scream, rounding in Carlisle’s arms to face him, clinging to his coat in desperation. “You don’t know what he’s planning. Please. Please, you have to help me.”
Of course, Carlisle has no intention of the sort. But I’m a kidnapped girl—one Carlisle probably assumes has been forced under threat of knifepoint to go along with Astor’s plans. I’m convincing enough for his ears to perk at the idea of some master scheme.
Encouraged by Carlisle’s slowed pace, I grope at his coat like I’m grasping for purchase at the side of a cliff. Muttering incoherently helps, because although Carlisle growls at me, “Spit it out, girl,” he’s focused on my warbling lips, which he’s convinced are the only obstacles between him and tradable information.
I’m clinging to him with such force it keeps him from noticing my fingers easing into his inner coat pocket. That is, until I attempt to hide the folded piece of parchment I lifted in the pocket of my torn gown. Carlisle glimpses it, his face flashing with anger as he plucks it from my hand, then grabs my wrists and squeezes.
The press of his fingers against my wrists aches, but for the first time, I know what to do.
I throw all my weight into bearing down on his thumbs and rolling my wrists out of his grasp. At the same time, I bring my knee to his groin.
The lord keels over, gasping for breath. His grip abandons both my wrists and the parchment, granting me sufficient time to pluck the parchment from the ground and race down the hallway. I shove it into my dress pocket, praying it’s what I think it is.
I barely make it halfway down the hall before Carlisle catches up to me. He digs his fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck and yanks me to the ground. The back of my head slams against the floorboards, sending my vision swimming.
Carlisle steps over me, straddling me with his legs. There’s a sick longing in his gaze, a high he gets from anticipating violence. My stomach turns over as he speaks. “You shouldn’t have touched me there if you didn’t want me to show you what—”
Carlisle doesn’t get to finish his sentence.
This time, I close my eyes just in time to miss witnessing the carnage. Something wet and sticky spatters across my face. Coppery blood and gore twinge at my throat, and something heavy falls on my chest.
“Don’t look,” says a voice as familiar as the sunrise. “Unless you want to, of course.”
I don’t, so I keep my eyes sutured shut as Astor grabs the mass that’s toppled onto my chest and flings it off of me. Then he grasps me by the shoulder and lifts me with one hand to my feet, leading me away.
“You can open your eyes now.”
I do, and it’s to Astor’s face close to mine, his hands on either side of my jawline. I go to turn my head, but his grip won’t let me. “Don’t look that way,” he says. “Just look at me.”
I nod, swallowing back sobs as he turns, then takes my hand and leads me through the dark halls. Footsteps sound around the corner, and faster than I can react, Astor wraps one hand around my mouth, the other around my waist, and pulls me into an alcove.
The press of his hand against my mouth feels like having a cloth soaked in Carlisle’s blood shoved into my throat. I gag, which makes Astor draw me even closer. “You’re okay,” he whispers, “but you won’t be for much longer if you don’t stay quiet. Do you understand?”
When I don’t answer, he breathes into my ear, “Wendy, I need you to confirm that you understand.”
I nod frantically, and feel his reaction—the easing of his chest against my back.
Just then, a host of guards rush by, as well as men dressed in uniforms of crimson and black—the colors of Laraeth. Lady Carlisle must have sent a messenger to the authorities. I count thirty of them and suddenly understand the importance of remaining quiet. Astor might have been able to take six of them at once, but even he couldn’t fend off that many.
It hits me then, that I could make a noise. Call out to the authorities. Astor might snap my neck if I did that, but there’s a part of me that bets he wouldn’t. He needs me alive if he wants a shadow soother to help him remove his Mark. Besides, he likes having me around so he can keep punishing himself for his wife’s death.
I could cry out, and the guards would save me.
But then what? It’s not as if I have a home, a family for the authorities to return me to. All I have are my brothers and Peter, and I’ll never be more equipped with resources to seek out a cure for Peter’s curse than I am with Astor.
So I keep quiet until the guards’ footsteps fade into the night.
And into the shadows, Astor and I fade away.