Page 93 of Freeing Hook

When Astor finally looks at me, there’s no plea in his eyes. No begging. Only resignation in his dry throat. “I’m afraid I’m not asking on your behalf.”

I blink, confused, but Astor holds my stare until realization washes over me.

“Oh. You don’t want me to watch you.”

Something flashes in his eyes—guilt’s splinter lingering underneath the flesh’s outermost layer, forgotten for a time until it’s pushed deeper and the pain resurfaces. It’s only there for a moment, gone so quickly I might have missed it if I’d blinked.

But I hadn’t blinked.

A moment later and it’s gone, replaced by a haughty smirk. “Would you protest if a painter asked you not to watch them from over their shoulder?”

I pause, not at all fooled by his arrogance. There was a time when I would have believed that swaggering veneer.

“No. No, I wouldn’t,” I say.

I don’t turn around until I glimpse the relief on Astor’s face. When I turn the corner, I stay close enough to hear the man’s muffled cries.

Astor doesn’t make a sound.

The corpsethat is left after Astor’s done is less gory than I expected. Like Astor knew just where to draw the lines to expedite agony without making a mess.

Blood coats the man’s shirt, ripped open at the chest, but there’s none on Astor’s hands. I’m not sure whether he wiped them before he called me to come out from behind the corner orif he really managed to do this sort of damage without spilling a drop of blood on himself.

The only sign that Astor just tortured a man to death is on his brow, where a thin sheen of sweat has collected. I imagine cutting a man open is an arduous business, but I expect there’s more to Astor’s bodily reaction than just that.

Slivers of red ink stain the man’s chest, his neck. Like he’s been marked for quartering.

I did that. Perhaps not with my own hands, my own blade, but it was my idea all the same.

I wonder if this man ever stood over the women chained to the beds in the brothel just around the corner. If the girls cried afterward. If he ever thought to himself, I did that.

I find I don’t really care.

“Well, Darling,” says the captain. “Do we have company?”

I bite my lip, scanning the shadows. We picked an alley heavy with them, backlit by the faerie dust lamps on the street. The shadows sneak from underneath garbage bins like stray cats in the night, some of them warbling with the flicker of the lamp light. But none of the movements resemble anything living.

“Nothing so far,” I say.

Astor raises a brow. “What exactly is the success rate of creating a wraith, Miss Darling?”

I swallow. “How am I supposed to know? I’ve only known I’m a shadow soother for a few months.”

“Excellent,” he says, staring at the brick wall on the other side of the alley.

I can’t help but glance down at his hand. It’s trembling, still clutching onto his dagger, blackened with sticky blood.

My heart stops. “Was that…was that your first time…?”

Astor’s eyes snap up to me. “If you’re asking if that’s the first time I’ve ever tortured another being, I’d think back to the fate of your parents, Darling.”

Anger and grief threaten to flare up within me, but I’m too focused on Astor’s shaking hand to notice. “Psychologically, it was torture. But you’ve never done this before—tortured someone physically.”

“Don’t try to play detective into my past, Darling. You’re much too good at making false assumptions to inform your decisions.”

Hurt coils in my belly. Both at his insult and my own stupidity. Of course he’s tortured before. He’d even stayed behind after I was kidnapped to punish the henchman who almost killed me. “I wasn’t trying to—”

Just then, a shadow curls up in a plume from the corpse’s chest, filling in the air with the shape of the man Astor just killed. He’s not shaking like the man was. He’s just a shadow, just a memory of pain brought to life. If pain is a being, can it feel itself?

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