Page 9 of Stalking Wendy Darling

I was breathing hard, the stillness wearing off, by the time rough arms snapped around my middle and dragged me away from the corpse I was determined to hack into bits. I kicked, thrashing, hissing, but the bastard didn’t let me go. I twisted my head, snarling into Ramone’s face, noticing a scar on the bald man’s cheek in the shape of a heart. Cute. I’d still kill him, though.

“Enough, lad, he’s dead,” Ramone said, harsher than I’d heard him speak all night. His eyes were hard behind his glasses, too. Clearly he was more friendly when he thought he was winning all my worldly possessions.

“Do you want to be next?” I asked sweetly, a grin hooking one side of my mouth. “I know he wasn’t the only one cheating.”

“Enough!”a deep voice boomed, resonant and crackling like electricity in the air before a storm. “Anton, who’s the new kid?”

“Kid? I’m twenty-five, asshole,” I spat, elbowing Ramone in his impressive gut. He grunted and let me go, rubbing the point of impact and giving me a sour look. I noticed his buddy Rolando kept his distance, his arms crossed over his lanky chest, Sterling beside him watching me with new consideration.

Yeah, don’t underestimate me, asswipes.

My stomach tangled strangely when I saw the captain’s dark eyes on me as he strode across the deck, cutting an intimidating figure in his long brown coat, his jaunty hat nowhere to be seen. Instead, black hair fell around his forehead, tossed in the wind, and that windswept hair ought to have made him less intimidating, but it didn’t. It really, really didn’t. Captain Hookhad a presence I didn’t like, and it turned my stomach into a mess of knots and nerves.

Eyes as black as obsidian fixed on me with a level of wrath I usually only saw in the mirror. I took my nervousness as a challenge and straightened my back, holding his gaze with my chin high, a little smirk on my mouth I’d learned could make anyone lose their temper.

“This is Wendell,” Anton, the quartermaster who gave me my position, rushed to say, falling into step with Hook. He looked harried and stressed, and he speared me with a cutting glare that told me I was the source of everything that had ever gone wrong in his life. “We picked him up at Swordfish. Dalton failed to show, probably started a fight he couldn’t win.”

Well, that was true.

Hook never looked away from me, his wrath palpable. I half expected him to draw the broadsword I saw running down his back, the hilt poking above his shoulder, but he only speared me with his unsettling black stare.

I assessed him quickly. He was taller than me, a surprise since I towered over most men I met, but I’d learned how to fight Mama and she was three inches taller than me. I reckoned I could take the captain. The way he moved told me he was well used to fighting, though, and not just firing shots with a pistol like some of the pirates aboard the Banshee. It would be a close fight, difficult. And I’d be vastly outnumbered because he had a whole crew at his back.

Best not to start shit with a captain.

I flourished my hand and dropped into a bow. “Delighted to meet your acquaintance, your captainness.”

“Is he of sound mind?” he asked Anton.

“Probably not,” I answered before the quartermaster could, and had the pleasure of watching Anton’s face darken, a musclepounding in his forehead. “But do I have to be sane to crew a ship?”

“You do to not murder every last one of my crew,” Hook rumbled, talking to me for the first time. A little frisson of warning went down my spine at the gravel of his voice, the flash of warning in his eyes as he stopped three feet away from me. His jaw didn’t clench, hands didn’t curl into fists—oh,handsingular; the other arm ended at his wrist, just visible beneath his sleeve—and he didn’t snap or shout. It was the absence of those signs of temper that turned my nerves to cold, icy fear. It was a novel feeling. I hadn’t felt it in years. I got icy butterflies.

“I won’t murderallof them,” I said reasonably. There were probably a few of them that felt bad about the kidnapping; I could leave those ones alive.

When Hook’s expression darkened, his face all angles and warnings, I gave him a winning smile, bouncing on my heels. There werea lotof angles on his face, from the sharp lines of his brows to the slash of his cheekbones, his chiselled jaw, and even the knife-sharp cupid’s brow at his mouth. I could cut myself on him. I’d enjoy it.

No, god no. You came here to kill him, not fuck him, Wendy.

No matter how scary-delicious he was. Or how composed. I couldn’t help it; I wanted to break that calm of his, wanted to see what it took to make him snap.

“You won’t murderanyof them,” Hook said calmly, his voice an order no matter how soft it was.

“Not even if they cheat at Imperial Ruin?”

“No.”

“Or if they steal my coat?” I glanced down at it. “It’s a very nice coat, look at the buttons.”

“No.”

“No, to murder or no to looking at the buttons?” I asked, tilting my head.

Hook just looked at me for a long moment, the deck silent enough to hear a pin drop. “Anton, how long did you give him before we throw him overboard?”

Anton stepped forward, his mouth pinched. “Two weeks, sir.”

“Make it one,” Hook said, holding my stare. “What’s your name, psycho?”

---