Chapter 5
WINNIE
The twins come in from the balcony in a flurry of wind and chiming bells.
The coffee pot is spitting out rich brown liquid.
I do find it slightly alarming that my new ritual is consuming enough coffee to turn a kitten into a panther, all while the day descends into night.
When we decided to shift our sleep schedules to match Pan’s, I didn’t consider all of the other things I would be shifting.
I try to have at least one cup in the sunlight before it disappears.
“What are you talking about?” I ask the twins and pull myself up onto the island counter, bare legs swinging.
Another chime, this one from Kas, muttered over his shoulder, before he turns to me and smiles, wedging himself between my legs. “I was just giving Bash a hard time for losing the race.”
“Lies!” Bash says and then plucks a tart from the glass tray beside me. He shoves the entire thing in his mouth and talks around the food. “I beat him to the Rock and back to the house.”
I arch a brow at Kas. “Is that true?”
“We’ll never know.”
“We will!” Bash swallows. “We know because I am saying it.”
I hunch forward, draping my arms around Kas’s neck, kissing him as I hook my legs around him, drawing him in.
“We should have a party,” Bash is saying, and then another string of chimes.
I disentangle myself from Kas. “Why are you talking in fae? What are you hiding?”
The dark cut of Kas’s brow sinks. Another chime. Then he turns his attention back to me and smiles. “We were discussing what we’ll do to you tonight.”
He’s distracting me now. I don’t blame him. It’s a tactic I also like to use.
“I’d like to fuck you in the stars in the grotto,” Bash says, hooking his hand into my hair, pulling me sideways so he can kiss me.
Kas’s warm hands are splayed over my thighs, and the warmth is jarring against the slight chill in the air, causing me to shiver.
Bash pulls back, letting me go. “It’s better on a new moon. We should wait a few weeks.”
“Wait, what grotto?”
The twins share a knowing look before Kas answers. “It’s beneath Marooner’s Rock. You have to swim down into the lagoon and through a tunnel in the rock. On new moons, the minnows in the grotto glow phosphorescent making it look like you’re swimming in the stars.”
“How long have you known about this place and why haven’t you told me until now?”
“Because they’re selfish shits.” Pan enters the kitchen with Vane just behind him. Pan pours himself a cup of coffee and adds a splash of bourbon. “You want one?” he asks Vane.
Vane takes the bottle of bourbon, forgoing the coffee.
“Let’s have a party,” Bash repeats.
Vane glances at Pan over the curved arch of the bourbon bottle as he takes a long swig.
“Why?” Pan asks.
“To celebrate our friends,” Kas says.
It’s a simple answer, not at all out of the ordinary, but the way he says it, the way he looks at Pan as he says it, tells me that there is nothing simple about it.
All four men go quiet, all of their attention on one another as if they are having some silent conversation that is either very much about me or so much not about me that I can’t be a part of it.
“What is happening?” I say.
“Fine,” Pan answers.
“Yes,” Bash says and shakes his fist victoriously.
“Hello?”
Bash kisses me on the mouth roughly and with the impatience of a kid running out to play, and then disappears back outside. “I’ll get the bonfire started!”
Kas kisses me on the cheek and then heads to the cellar. “I’ll tell the other Lost Boys and grab the fairy wine.”
I turn on the island countertop and eye Pan and Vane. “What is going on?”
Vane brings the bourbon to his mouth again and takes a healthy pull, following Bash outside without saying a word. Most days, on good days, I can sense what he’s thinking and feeling through the Shadow’s connection, but he, or the Shadow, or maybe both, have shut me out.
It’s just me and Pan now. I can hear Kas through the many twisting halls of the treehouse shouting at the other Lost Boys to get ready for a bonfire.
“What did I miss?”
Pan sets his coffee down and comes around the island, nudging my knees open, then grabbing my ass so he can scoot me to the very edge of the counter. “Make me a promise, Darling.”
I narrow my eyes at him.
Every day that has passed since he discovered he is a primordial star god has only rendered him more and more handsome. At this rate, in a year or two, he will be so hot, it will be impossible to look at him.
“Say you will.” He nudges at my neck, brushing his lips against me. I shiver.
“How can I say I will when I don’t know what the promise is? What if it’s that you want me to dye my hair blue? Or stop drinking? Or stop eating bread on Tuesdays?”
His laugh is a soft huff against my neck. “Here’s my promise: I will never take bread from you.”
“Well good. Because I would riot. I would escape into the Neverland woods and recruit the woodland creatures to wage a war against you and your house.”
He chuckles again and plants a kiss on my collarbone, then another on my shoulder, another on the curve of my neck. “Just promise me you will have fun tonight, hmm?”
I’m immediately suspicious. “Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“That’s too easy.”
“Then the promise should be easy as well.”
“Remember when you first came to me? Remember when you said, ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way.’”
“Mmm. Yes.”
“There is no such thing as easy with you.”
He straightens and the hanging lantern above us, glowing in the descending night, limns him in gold and turns his bright blue eyes almost white.
Outside, the crickets are waking and the peepers are chirping and the ocean breeze is whooshing through the palms.
I love it here. I love Neverland, and I love these men, and I desperately want to stay here forever.
But I can’t shake the feeling that the wolves are circling.
Pan says nothing. Instead, he kisses me hungrily, his tongue tasting me. And then he’s pulling me off the counter. I yelp, tie my legs around his hips, and laugh as he carries me outside.
He is distracting me. And I let him.
“Okay,” I say and hook my arms around him. “I promise.”
“Good girl.”
I glow beneath his praise.