Page 145 of Losing Wendy

“So you could kill the boys if it came down to that.”

Peter’s gaze goes glassy, and he stares off into the distance. We’re going to have to discuss this at some point. As much as I care for Peter, the way he acted toward me in the tunnels chills my bones.Knowing that darkness dwells inside him…it doesn’t change the way I feel about him, but I’d be a fool not to be wary.

Still, he’s lost one of his own tonight, and I’m too empty to confront him about it at the moment. Instead, I venture a different direction. “That’s why you came for me? Because you need my help?”

“I came because I need you. You asked me before why I didn’t tell you about the Mating Mark.” He runs his hand through my hair, tucking it behind my ear. “Remember what it was like the first time you flew in my arms? That terror, that exhilaration that seeps down your legs, making them so weak you feel as if they’ll no longer function once you’re back on the ground? I could get drunk on that feeling, Wendy Darling. But I’m not like you. I don’t like to fall. Ever since your hand brushed mine in that clock tower, I’ve known you were going to be the highest high I’d ever reach. That once I got a taste of you…” He trails off, peering down the cliffs into the raging sea below. “Well. We always have to come back down eventually, don’t we? I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to acknowledge it myself. Didn’t want anyone else to have that kind of power over me. But I can’t ignore it anymore. I’m afraid I don’t possess that sort of self-control.”

His gaze dips, lingering on my mouth. “Legend has it that when the Fates weave Mates,” Peter says, trailing his finger down the mark on my face, feeling its every ripple and fold, “they wind the two from the same thread, splitting it down the middle. That neither are whole until they find one another.”

“But they don’t always find each other,” I say. “I thought it was rare.”

Peter’s eyes glint with mischief. “That, Wendy Darling, is where your history books told you wrong. Mates always find one another.” My heart races underneath his touch as he cups my chin with his knuckle. “They can’t help themselves,” he whispers. “The draw is too intense. They belong to each other the same way a heart belongs to the ribcage, a root belongs to the tree. One cannot function without the other.”

“If we can’t help ourselves, you’d think you wouldn’t have been able to keep it in that we’re Mates,” I say, that single doubt robbing me from the thrill of sinking into the moment with him.

“I already told you; I didn’t want to frighten you.”

My heart is hammering. “Why did you think that would frighten me?”

A mischievous smile curves on Peter’s lips. “Because, Wendy Darling, you don’t think it would have terrified you to know that you belong to me?”

“And if I still want to leave?” I ask. “If I don’t want to keep my brothers somewhere they’ll always be in danger?”

Peter lets out a breath. “Then I guess I’ll just have to pretend the part of my soul you take with you never existed.”

I swallow. “But you’d let me go.”

“Only if you wanted me to.”

I trace my memories back to Victor’s father, the man whose name I don’t even know, can’t even honor. “I killed an innocent man because of this.” Absentmindedly, I trace my fingers over my Mating Mark. “Because of us.”

Peter lets out a slow breath. “Thomas and Victor’s father was imprisoned—debtor’s prison, if you can believe it. Sentenced to ten years after he couldn’t repay the debt he’d taken out to keep his family fed. When the doctors came to take Thomas and Victor away, he was the only one to protest, but he had no rights to them considering his sentence.” Guilt pierces my gut, then snaps the hilt, leaving the blade in my flesh for good measure. This poor man’s family had been ripped away from him, and I’d sentenced him to death without trial for trying to reunite them.

Peter continues, “Thomas used to send his father drawings. I think he was the only person in the world other than Victor that Thomas truly forgave.”

“Before Neverland,” I say. “Before he forgot.”

Peter nods. “I didn’t realize who he was until I saw Thomas’s old drawing in your hand. Even then, I couldn’t see what good it would do to tell you. Seemed the type of thing best left to ignorance.”

Tears well up in my eyes, a question lingering there. How can I stay with Peter, knowing what my love for him does to me? What it does to others. But then my mind calls back to the night at the clock tower. “You said yourself in the clock tower I’ve always belonged to you. I think I’ve always known that.”

And how can I be afraid of something that’s always been true, something I’ve carried around with me in the pockets of my soul, knitted up inside me? We humans, we only fear the unknown. It’s not in us to fear the present.

“The only thing I ever truly feared was not finding the broken piece of my soul,” I say, blinking the tears away. “I don’t ever want you to let me go.”

In answer, he presses a claiming kiss to my lips. “Then I won’t. I want you, Wendy Darling. More than I want to take my next breath.”

His words send a shudder of delight through my bones, bringing tears to my eyes.

“If you’ll stay with them for a while, I need to tend to Simon,” says Peter softly as he pulls away.

“What are you going to do to him?” I ask, regretting the question as soon as I ask it.

Peter takes my cheek into his palm and presses a kiss on my forehead. “I’m going to fight for him.”

CHAPTER 51

It’s half past the full moon the next evening when I’m finally able to slip out of bed and sneak to the cave by the shoreline. My limbs feel beaten down by the events of the night—the empty, weighted feeling of having watched both of my brothers fall into harm’s way.

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