Page 53 of Stalking Wendy Darling

We all jumped when cannon fire shattered the silence that hung over the ship after Joanna’s words. Shit.

“Go tell Sterling to hold his fire,” I ground out, flashing a glare at the closest person—Maceo. He scurried away, disappearing belowdecks. Wendy raised her eyebrows from his rapid retreat to me, scanning my face, a knot forming between her brows.

“I’m alive,” she said with a little flourish of her hand, the other gripping a bag thrown over her shoulder. “Surprise!”

So many emotions assaulted me at once. My body froze, torn between a dozen different reactions. Joanna lunged closer and carried out one of those actions, driving her fist into Wendy’s shoulder.

“We thought you weredead,bitch.”

All the colour drained from Wendy’s face and she lurched to the side. Her hand shot up to the place her sister had punched her.

“Shit,” Joanna breathed. “Are you hurt?”

“Move,” I ordered softly, my head full of screaming, my body so still that it felt unnatural to take a step. Joanna sighed and retreated a step, then two, but no more.

“Who hurt you?” I asked in that quiet voice, my heart drumming so loudly it drowned out the ocean, drowned out the mutterings of the crew.

Wendy straightened, masking the pain we’d all seen as she stood tall, giving me a smile that made her eyes glitter. A stake drove right through my heart. She was dead. She was here. She was smiling at me. I couldn’tbreathe.

“I brought you a gift,” she said, holding my stare, searching my eyes as her own tilted up, her lips echoing the movement in a smile. She slung the bag off her shoulder and reached into it, drawing out a lump of greyed flesh. I only realised it was a head when I saw her gripping the dark hair, and then my heart skipped.

Do you even love someone if you don’t give them the decapitated heads of the people they hate?

The muttering among the crew grew louder. Whose head was it? I heard the question repeated over and over.Whose? Whose head?

Wendy took a very careful step closer, and my calm exploded when I realised she wasn’t being careful of my temper. She was being careful of her own injuries. Someone had hurt my Wendy. I sucked in a sharp breath through my nose.

“Who hurt you, Wendalyn?”

“No one who’s left alive.” She held up the severed head and gave it a little wave. “Do you like my gift?”

It was at that moment I recognised the fold of skin above the corpse’s eyes, then the sagging cheeks, the lips now blue but once smirking and cruel, amused at my pain, laughing when I screamed for it to stop.

I staggered back a step, another stake driven through my heart. “You… How…?”

She shrugged and immediately bit the inside of her lip, the reminder of her pain like a red rag to my bull. “Used some of Sterling’s grenades to blast my way out of the monster, then washed up on this asshole’s island.” She shook his head again, her disrespect of the dead making me almost smile.

“Wendy,” I breathed, locking down my body as it threatened to shake. Too many feelings all at once, too many memories, good and bad and everything in between. It overloaded me. Overwhelmed me. My knees weakened, barely holding me upright.

She didn’t look away from me, edging closer. “I thought you could spike it on the front of the ship as a warning. Or we could burn it like I burned his fortress.”

That truth kicked me in the gut. My eyes stung. “You burned it?”

“Of course I did. Me and my new friends killed everyone there and burned the place down. There’s nothing left.”

“You—” My throat closed up. I could not,would not,fucking, cry. Not in front of the crew.

“They hurt my captain,” Wendy said quietly, bridging the space between us until only a step remained. Her eyes were as bright as an electrical storm, shining with something that looked a lot like happiness even though she was in pain. “No one’s allowed to hurt my captain and live.”

My knees finally buckled and I allowed it to happen, kneeling at her feet, my brow pressed to her thighs.

“Alright, show’s over,” Vea yelled. “Don’t you bastards have jobs to do?”

I laughed, but the sound caught in my throat, dangerously close to a sob. “I want to burn the head,” I said, my throat full of shards of glass, cutting my voice to shreds. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” A broken laugh escaped me at the way she shoved Eldrick’s head back into the bag and dumped it on the deck next to the mast. “Why? You got plans for me tonight?”

My laugh was twisted, ruined like every other part of me. “So many plans, Wendy Darling.”

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