Page 17 of Freeing Hook

My chest throbs as I consider all the choices I could have made that would have prevented me from being separated from my brothers. I should have told Peter that I’d found Astor washed up on the shore. Should have trusted him with my secret. In the moment, I’d worried he would act impulsively and end Astor, carried away by a drive to keep the Lost Boys and me safe. As I’d hoped to discover the reason behind my parents’ deaths at Astor’s hand, I couldn’t afford that.

Maybe that’s why Peter left me. He’d come to the beach to save his Mate, but he’d found a version of me he didn’t know. I try to consider how I would have reacted if I’d discovered that Peter had been hiding another woman from me, going to meet her at night.

No. I shake my head like it will somehow clear the lies out of my mind. Peter doesn’t know I’d been hiding the captain from him. When he let Astor take me, it had nothing to do with my betrayal.

I twist the emerald ring around my finger. It’s even looser than it was the day Peter proposed, likely from how little I ate while the faerie dust was working its way out of my system, how much water I lost as I sweated it out. Still, I cling to it like the topmost rung of the ladder in my parents’ clock tower. The proof that Peter is real, not some conjured figment of my imagination. That my Mate’s love for me is real.

It’s just inaccessible at the moment. Locked underneath the calloused exterior the Sister crafted for him so that he can accomplish her will without too much resistance. You can’t love without pain. Not really.

That’s why he’d left me on the beach. Bargained me away. It had been both a logical and impulsive decision, a combination irresistible to Peter. He can’t feel the agony of wondering what the captain might be doing to me while he has me trapped away in the hull of his ship. He can’t feel my absence like a phantom limb, like I feel his.

And Ifeelhis.

Now that I’m sober, it’s worse than before, clawing its way into my chest and plucking out my ribs one by one. I close my eyes and cling to the cool metal band on my finger.

Peter can’t feel pain, but he knew to protect the Lost Boys. Even without the pain to urge him on, he knew he needed to save them, protect them from the pirates. Which means he also knew he needed to protect me.

I spend the next hour obsessing over that last conversation between Peter and Astor, trying to extrapolate meaning from every insignificant detail. When Peter had struck his deal with Astor, what had he been careful to leave out? How exactly had he worded it?

What’s in it for me?

Six months with Wendy.

You’ll grow tired of her before then. Trust me, six is a mercy.

I search his words for clever games, clues left behind by a boy in love with adventure, but I’m either too weary or too dull to crack it.

But I know this much.

Peter is nothing if not calculating. And if he left me in Captain Astor’s clutches, he had a reason.

I just need to figure out what that reason is.

Warm salt aircoats me like a blanket when I reach the deck. The wind is rambunctious tonight, tossing ocean spray my way. I wrap my shawl around my face to protect myself from a portion of the sting, but it feels nice to be outside of the wretched cabin. To breathe fresh air for the first time.

I’m not sure what I’m doing up here, just that I couldn’t stay in the captain’s cabin any longer and I didn’t know where else to go.

My head still hurts. I wonder if it’ll ever stop aching until I get a taste of faerie dust again. Mercifully, breathing in the ocean air helps some. Hearing the waves lap against the side of the ship—it’s grounding, strangely enough.

The captain must have told the crew not to bother me, because though a few of them look up from their duties as I cross the deck, no one approaches me or asks what business I have up here. I meander about for a while, trying to find a place I can curl up with my thoughts. I feel trapped, crowded on this vessel. Charlie’s been with me most of the past few days, and when she’s been gone, Astor has been there to pester me.

My soul craves a moment alone, so I search the deck until I find a pile of crates I can perch on near the edge of the ship and watch the moon’s rays dance across the waves, situating myself between the crates and the railing so no one can see me. I stare up at the sky and search until I find a pair of twin stars, offset by the night, watching over me. They wink, taunting me. Reminding me that I have no way of getting back to the man I love. No way of getting back to my brothers.

After a few moments, though, my aloneness feels less satisfying than I imagined it would. There’s an aching in my bones, a longing to be held by no one other than Peter. But Peter isn’t here.

Peter left me.

“What were you expecting?” asks a female voice. The unexpectedness of being snuck up on makes me jolt, but it’s the way the voice is so eerily familiar that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. “No one has ever wanted you.”

I glance around, hands fisted at my sides like that’s going to help anything, but I can’t see the origin of the voice in the dark.

“Oh sure, they wanted you for a while. For a moment. For a few stolen touches and a host of wicked things.” Someone steps out from behind the crates. A woman, my height, of slender build. I can’t make out anything else about her in the dark, but there’s something so familiar about her, her voice crawls up my arms like spiders. Like I should know that voice intimately, but don’t. “Maybe they wanted the excitement of something forbidden. Or maybe it was the thrill of touching a girl with a Mating Mark—how many of them will ever get that chance again? How many of them have already divulged every detail of what you let them do? Tell me, do you ever wonder how many of your suitors came to meet you just because they’d heard from a friend how easy you were? Have you ever wondered how many of them have sat around a table, drunkenly sharing their stories of conquering you? Just how far you let them go?”

My skin goes cold, clammy. The humid air turning to ice against my gooseflesh. “How do you know about that?” I ask. For a moment, I wonder if Astor told the entire crew about what happened in the parlor. If he took what I foolishly told him in confidence and laughed at me with his crew over drinks as soon as we arrived.

“It doesn’t take much to figure it out. It’s written all over your face. It’s in the way you tremble around anyone who intimidates you. It’s in the way you can’t seem to manage a clever response, how you freeze under the slightest commanding touch. Really, I can’t tell what makes you more dull-witted—that you never have anything clever to say or that you thought you of all people couldkeep Peter’s attention. You couldn’t even keep the attention of those dull human men for more than a night. None of them even came back for seconds. And yet, you thought Peter, a fae, a perfect specimen longed for by even the Fates, would not tire of you.”

“Peter’s my Mate,” I say, stepping backward until the base of my heel hits the crate behind me.

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