Page 60 of Freeing Hook

Slowly, I hear the captain’s weight shift. The subtle scuff of boots against the floorboards as he approaches me.

When he leans over the desk, placing his palms flat over the wood, I make myself examine his rotting Mating Mark. The ghostly tendrils that snake to hide underneath his sleeve. His wedding ring glints underneath the lantern light. The sight of it makes me nauseous. Tonight I’ve been playing the part of his wife, the ring she placed on his finger assisting me in getting what I want.

When he finds me staring at it, he grimaces. As if he too senses the betrayal of how we’ve used that ring tonight, he pulls it off his finger and tucks it into his pocket with the solemnity of an apology.

“Would you really like to know?” he whispers, taking his finger and knotting it underneath my chin, craning my head up to look at him.

His expression is gentler than it should be. His eyes softened, his posture tender, almost adoring. It takes me a moment to realize he’s putting on for whoever’s watching us from outside the window.

The realization doesn’t serve to blunt the sharp barbs of his words. “When I look at you, do you know what I picture?” he asks, trailing a finger across the furrows and bends of my Mating Mark. I hate the way my chest fills with flames, despite my begging it not to. “I picture you sinking your teeth into my wife’s bleeding throat.” He dips his thumb to my lip, exposing my canine and running his fingerprint over its tip. “When I hear your voice, I make myself imagine what it sounded like when she cried out and I wasn’t there to save her. When we touch, I feel her cold skin against my flesh the night Maddox and I found her body washed up on the shore of Jolpa. If you move, if you breathe, if you laugh in my presence, I mark it as a reminder ofhow still, how lifeless her body was when we took her back home to bury her. Every moment with you I use to commemorate all the ways I failed her when I let her leave the ship that night. That, if you must know, Darling, is how I stand it.”

When he withdraws, I let out a pained gasp, but he’s already turned back to the bed, so I can’t measure his reaction. He only dims the lantern light beside the bed and turns down the sheets.

Then he gestures with an open palm and says, as if we’ve been discussing the quality of tonight’s soup, “You first, Darling.”

CHAPTER 24

WENDY

Ican’t sleep in Astor’s arms.

There would have been a time when I’d have worried he’d close his hands around my throat and choke the breath out of my lungs with a laugh.

But the captain’s hatred of me is more sinister than that. He doesn’t want me dead. He wants me alive, an enduring reminder of his wife’s death, a punishment uniquely suited for him, forcing him to relive the agony of losing her every moment he spends in my presence.

The sad part is that I understand it—the desire to mask your pain with a different sort. What doesn’t make sense to me is why the captain is so insistent on getting rid of his Mating Mark, if he’s so intent on castigating himself for his wife’s death. One would think keeping the Mating Mark would be the masochist’s choice. Then again, a person can only suffer so long before it becomes too much to bear.

The captain’s pain might fuel him, but what of the moments he’s seemed weary, worn down? He might act as though he takes the pain like a beating he knows he deserves, but is that behavior driven by his broken Mark? Or is the rational part of Astor intact enough to free itself from his self-destructive bond?

Through the night, I feel him. Every exhale. Every roll of his head against the pillow. Every time his body, tense with grief, nudges against mine.

He doesn’t wrap his arms around me. He must figure there’s not enough visibility through the window to make a difference since we’re under the blankets, but his proximity is enough to suffocate me. Enough to drown me in the truth.

I shouldn’t exist.

I shouldn’t have existed for a long while now. Every breath I take is one that’s been stolen from the lungs of a more worthy woman. A woman more useful.

More loved.

And for a painstaking moment I’ll never admit to myself after this night, I envy Iaso. I imagine what it would be like to be loved that fiercely. For love to be the rudder of my husband’s every thought, every action, every instinct, over a decade after I’d taken my last breath. I let my imagination crawl to dark places, to the shadows of my deathbed. Except I’m the one with the healing magic, the one whose throat is valuable enough to slit. The one with the blood worth spilling.

In this dream of mine—someone else’s nightmare—I’m the one loved enough for two men to scour the shoreline for me, just to recover my swollen corpse.

I fall asleep like that, but when I wake to the moon peeping in through the glass paneling, I’m still just the girl who was bargained away. The girl no one ever loved enough to keep. Again and again and again.

I’m blinking tears away, abhorring myself for allowing my body the relief of tears at a loss that’s not mine to mourn, when a shadow flickers across the vast windowpane. At first, I’m convinced I’m imagining things, but then the shadows warp into wings that stretch across the eerily gaping moon.

Peter.

My breath catches, and I’m a child again. Too frightened to move. Convinced that if only I remain under the warm safety of the covers, they’ll protect me. But that’s a youthful notion. The only thing underneath these covers is the man who blames me for the death of his wife. The man who uses my visage as a stake to pin him closer to an ever fading memory, lest the pain begin to drift and leave him alone in his misery.

So I extricate myself from the side of Nolan Astor. My bare feet hit the cold wooden slats of the floor, my toes curling in anticipation.

He’s come for me. Peter’s come for me. The realization rushes into my lungs until I can’t breathe.

Regret twinges at my chest, and at first, I don’t understand it. Why I’m not soaring over Peter’s visit. But then I remember that I failed to learn how to rid Peter of his curse. That I failed to find a way to make him love me, truly love me. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from the captain, it’s that love and pain are inextricable.

Besides, as much as my heart goes out to Peter, like a moth drawn to the flame or a fish to the shadows, I’d rather the captain not know he was here. Rage simmers in the captain’s soul, and if the two fight, I’m not sure who will come out on top. Who will come out at all.

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