Page 84 of Freeing Hook

Charlie’s gaze flicks across my cheek. “It’s the Reaper’s sickle, right?”

“How’d you know?”

“I’m a pirate, Wendy. I know my constellations.”

I let out a resigned laugh. “You know, it’s sort of embarrassing when you make it sound like it’s so obvious.”

Charlie grins at me. “It is kind of obvious.” She stares at my Mark more intently. “Does Peter have the rest of it, then?”

I nod. “He has the oak on his back.”

Charlie bites her lip.

“What?”

“It’s just—isn’t it kind of a tragic story? Doesn’t the Reaper kill his lover so that he can be with her in the spirit world? But then he ends up trapping her soul inside of a tree or something?”

“I thought you said you knew your constellations.”

“I do,” she says. “I was just making sure you knew them.”

“It’s just a story,” I say, bristling.

Charlie frowns. “Do you trust him—Peter?”

“Of course,” I say, but then the memory of his hands ripping apart my bodice assaults me, making my faith stumble. “Well, I trust that underneath his curse, there’s a Peter I can trust waiting for me. I trust that the good part of him is still there.”

“That you can save him,” she says.

“That I will save him,” I correct.

She nods, looking back down at her workstation. “Does he tell you everything?”

“Neverland is timeless. We have forever to get to all that,” I say.

“Is that your idea or his?” Charlie asks.

I frown, thinking back to the conversation I had with Peter in the vegetable garden after Joel died. I’d told Peter how much it bothered me that we were betrothed, yet I hardly knew him. He’d asked me to be patient with him.

“We both have things we need time before we share. We understand that about each other.”

Charlie glances up at me. “Things you’ve never told anyone else?”

My face flushes hot at the memory of telling Astor about what happened to me in my parents’ parlor. How he’d told me afterward that he didn’t regret killing them after what they’d made me do. “Things that have never gone well when I’ve told anyone else,” I say.

“Mm.”

“I should have trusted Peter,” I say, staring at the wall. “Had I told him that I had Astor on the island, trapped in that cave, none of this”—it occurs to me that I don’t know what I’m referring to, but I won’t admit that—“would have ever happened.I don’t know why I’m like that. Why I have to solve everything myself.”

Charlie’s brow knits together. “I think you’re being too critical of yourself.”

“You’re saying it didn’t land me in trouble not telling Peter about Astor?”

“I’m saying that maybe you’re not giving your gut enough credit,” is all she says. “Have you ever considered that there was a reason your instincts told you not to trust him completely?”

My stomach chills, Peter’s hands on me in the Carlisles’ library annex making my skin go clammy. “Maybe there was part of me that, even then, knew he was cursed.”

“And what if you can’t break the curse?”

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