Page 61 of Freeing Hook

So I flick my neck to the side and tiptoe across the room before slipping out the door.

As I paddown the long hall, the shadows follow me from outside the windows, mimicking my every step. A way for Peter to tease me, I’m sure. But I’m not in the mood for games.

I just want to go home.

Not that I know where that is.

There’s a door at the end of the hallway that’s unlocked. When I enter, I click the door shut behind me. It’s a reading room of some sort. Not large enough to be a full-on library, but a quiet annex. The type you might offer to your more reclusive guests to enjoy when the party becomes too overwhelming. Orange coals glow in the hearth, leftover from whoever used this room last.

Outside the window, the shadows swell, expanding until massive wings drape from corner to corner of the windows.

There’s a latch hidden carefully above one of the panes. I find it when I run my hand over the golden-leafed ribs. A jittering click, and the window cracks. Shadows leak through the small slit and coagulate on the floor, producing a tower of smoke that soon takes the shape of a man.

“Peter,” I say, his name wistful on my tongue. He reaches for me, still in his shadowed form, his mouth hungrily finding mine as he wraps me in the dark swell of his embrace.

Underneath my roaming hands, shadows knit into flesh, into sinew and bone, until the lips exploring mine are no longer cold and ethereal but warm. Warm and here with me.

“Wendy Darling,” he says, my name in the tone of his drunken voice setting sparks across my skin.

“It’s been so long since you last came. I thought…I thought you had lost me.” Relief washes over me with every graze of his touch. It feels so nice to be touched. For him to want to touch me. Especially spending the evening with the captain’s body taut with disgust at each point of contact with my skin.

“You’re mine, Wendy Darling,” Peter whispers between kisses. “There’s nowhere in the realms you could go that I wouldn’t find you.”

My mind is dizzy with desire, but reason taps its skeletal fingers against my skin. “You have to go. Before they wake up.”

Peter trails his mouth to the bone behind my right ear. “Not yet.”

His words spark a tingle down my spine, but I can’t let it get the best of me. “Peter, visiting me on the captain’s ship is one thing, but the Carlisles have reach, the dangerous sort. If they discover I’m a fraud, there’s no telling what they’ll do to me.” And Astor, I don’t add.

“I thought…” Peter pulls away, eyes still dark as coals. In a flash, I’m reminded of the danger of Peter in his shadow form. The silken voice who told the Sister he’d have taken my body ages ago, if his gentler self hadn’t made him wait.

I’m wondering now which has the reins.

But then Peter grabs me by the waist and shoves me onto the couch, his fingers grasping at the laces on the back of my gown, which I’d been too embarrassed to take off in the presence of the captain, and I have my answer.

“Peter, stop,” I say, fear lancing through me as the gown comes undone at my back. My skin grazes the velvet of the couch, and the muscles around my spine seize up.

“Where did he touch you?” he whispers, undeterred by my protests. I push against his chest, but there’s no getting him off of me.

“Nowhere. Nowhere, I swear,” I say.

“You wouldn’t let me touch you, but you’d let him.” Peter’s arms and hands shift into shadows again, splitting into several limbs, all the more to snake up my skirts and twist around my undergarments.

“Nothing happened,” I insist, but to no avail. “Peter, Peter this isn’t you. Please, I know this isn’t you. You have to get control of him. Please, for me.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, as if not watching it happen will make it go away. That little corner of my mind is still prepared like a readied guest room, its iron walls ready to keep me safeand hidden until it’s over. My limbs go limp as I escape into that place.

My little room has always been empty. A safe place, just for me.

It’s not empty any longer.

There’s a voice that’s infiltrated its walls, crept in unnoticed. A monster under the bed that’s taken up residence.

Fight back, it commands.

I’m not strong enough, I cry.

This time, it’s not the captain’s voice, but Charlie’s.The men’ll say that’s cheating, but they don’t seem to consider being naturally stronger cheating, so I wouldn’t let it dissuade you.

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