Page 19 of Caging Darling (The Lost Girl #3)

CHAPTER 19

“ I know.”

Peter pauses. We’re in bed, and he’s kissing me like he needs me to breathe. Thus far, I’ve managed to keep him away from the buttons on my clothes.

Tomorrow, I likely won’t have the strength. Coming back to him, as soon as I entered his presence, my anger began to fade. Excuses for his atrocities caressed my mind, reminding me of all the reasons I should forgive him for what he did to Iaso.

What he did to Astor.

What he did to me.

It’s only because he wants me. It’s only because of his Mating Mark. Not really him. Just like it wasn’t really him in the Carlisle Manor. Just like it wasn’t really me who sliced off Astor’s hand or Renslow’s hand.

Just like it wasn’t really me who slept with Peter.

I can spot the fallacies in this line of thinking, but it doesn’t keep my heart from believing them. Believing them is so much easier than confronting them.

“Know what?” says Peter, pulling back from me. His face is soft, if not curious. He’s beautiful, and I want him to know what I know. That way, he can explain himself.

That way I can go back to being weak. To enjoying his touch without Iaso’s death plaguing me.

“I know what you did to…” I can hardly even bring myself to say it, but by the way he stiffens, I get the feeling he anticipates what I’ll say next.

Still, he cocks his head as if he’s oblivious. “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain, Wendy Darling.”

His smile is so trusting, I want so badly to believe he’ll have an explanation. Perhaps the Sister was lying to Tink to taunt her. Perhaps Peter hadn’t corrected her because he was afraid of her.

“I stopped taking my faerie dust…” I say, tracing the skin of his forearm with my finger. He stiffens under my touch. “Well, really, I purged myself of it.” I don’t feel as if the drowning part is relevant, so I continue. “I wanted to see the wraiths. Wanted to hear what they had to say…”

Peter’s expression turns to stone, his eyes slightly widened, blank as he stares at me. As if he thinks one movement will give him away.

But it’s no use. I already know. “Peter, I love you so much.” It’s not difficult to infuse my voice with earnestness. Not when I feel it so deeply that it’s inextricable from my own feelings. I know it’s unwise to trust him, but I can’t help myself. I just ache so badly for him, I can hardly stand it. “But I can’t…It’s bothering me, rapping at my mind, and I can’t get it out. Please, I just need you to explain.”

Peter swallows. “Which wraith did you speak to?”

I frown, and start with, “John’s, but?—”

Peter stands from the bed and runs his hands through his copper hair, tousling it. “Why did you not tell me you were going to talk to him?” he asks, anger suffusing his tone.

I blink, confused. “Peter, I want to trust you. I know you. I know you’re good, that you’d never hurt me. I just need an explanation.”

Please. Please, any explanation for why you ruined my life, is what I don’t say.

Peter goes still, his fingers still splayed through his hair, his elbow pointed toward the ceiling. His eyes go distant, like he’s calculating a complex equation. Then they dart to the inside of my elbow, like he’s reassuring himself that it’s still there.

After a moment, he breathes, then softly climbs back into bed, placing a thumb on my Mating Mark and stroking it. There’s a gentle flame where he touches, my Mating Mark delighted to be reunited with its pair, even if the match is fake.

“Wendy Darling, I’m so sorry. I should have told you earlier. I can see that now. But I was so afraid. I couldn’t see a way you could forgive me. Couldn’t see a way to make you understand. And you were so crushed, so lost, for so long. I was afraid telling you would break you. Just…promise you’ll listen.”

He wipes a tear from my cheek as I nod. His blue eyes turn grateful, like he’s shocked at my willingness to forgive.

“It was self-defense,” he says. I frown, unsure of what Iaso could have done to threaten Peter, but before I can ask, he continues. “You know I’m not myself when I’m in my shadow form. What he does when he takes over—Wendy, not a day goes by when I don’t wish I could take it back. I’ve gone to the Sister, begging her on my knees to undo what I’ve done, but she won’t. You have no idea how many times I’ve pleaded with her to find a way to bring him back.”

My mind snags. Him. But Peter’s not looking at me anymore. Instead, he’s staring at my hand, which he’s wrapped in his, where he’s stroking my skin like he can’t bear to look me in the face.

“I never meant for him to stop eating the onions.”

My mind catches. Simon. He has to be talking about Simon. He’s blaming himself for Simon’s death.

“But he wouldn’t listen to me. Try as I might, he never trusted me. The wraiths on the island, they must have gotten in his head. Turned him against me. He came at me with Victor’s crossbow one night, determined to kill me. I didn’t even realize he was there. My instincts just told me there was danger. I shifted into my shadow self without thinking about it. I barely remember what happened after that. Just that when I shifted back, John was dead.”

Time stands still, but Peter doesn’t seem to notice. My jaw works, my tongue too, but words have escaped me. I’ve forgotten how to form them.

The image plays out in my mind like I’m reading a novel, not real life. It doesn’t seem logical for John to try to kill Peter. Almost laughable, my peaceful brother raising his hand against anyone.

Then again, he had seen what went on at the storehouse.

He figured Peter would stop at nothing to own me. He figured there was only one way to stop Peter.

John’s wraith had witnessed John heading up to the reaping tree. We’d all assumed it was to kill himself. Because that’s what Peter had wanted us to believe. The story he had planted in our heads, without ever having to say a word.

“I know I shouldn’t have covered it up,” Peter says.

I glance up at him, his voice yanking me from my trance.

Is that what he’s calling stringing my brother’s corpse up in a tree for Michael to stumble across? Covering it up?

I blink, and Peter stares at me, sorrow painting his deep blue eyes. “Wendy Darling, please say something.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I’m not prepared for this information, much less this conversation. What would come out of my mouth, anyway? What does a girl say to her Mate upon discovering he killed your brother?

In the end, I settle on, “I wasn’t talking about John.”

Peter blinks. Then blanches. “You said you talked to his wraith.”

He thinks John’s wraith was made during John’s death. The implications of that makes me ill.

Of course it would have been agonizing. There had been strangling wounds Peter had needed to cover up with a noose.

“His wraith was made before his death,” I say. “It wasn’t there when he died.”

Horror overtakes Peter’s face. If I wasn’t completely devoid of all emotion, I might be amused.

Peter grasps for me. “Wendy Darling, it wasn’t me. I know I should have told you earlier, but I was so afraid?—”

“Of losing me?” The words come out empty of emotion. It’s as if a slate of gray has been laid over my heart, over everything I’m seeing, feeling. The emotion wiped clean from the world, my surroundings. “You let me sleep with you. You let me sleep with my brother’s murderer.” There’s no emotion in those words either. I can’t tell if it’s because the bargain will only allow me to state it as a fact rather than an accusation, or if it’s because my entire world has been leached of color.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting from Peter’s response, but it’s not, “Yet you would have slept with Astor, if you’d had the chance, even after having watched what he did to your parents.”

One would think that by now I would anticipate Peter’s attacks, the ones he uses to deflect blame, but the concept is still so foreign to me, I’m too stunned to respond.

“I couldn’t bear it, Wendy. The thought of losing you.”

“I know,” I say. “They couldn’t bear it either…”

My mind goes back to my parents. To my mother explaining to me before she invited yet another suitor to the parlor that it was for my own good. That the family couldn’t bear to lose me.

That I was just too precious to them.

Peter stills. Blinks.

“Oh,” I say, the word a half-laugh. “That’s right. I never told you, did I? What my parents did to me.”

Peter takes a step forward, but I slip from his grasp, evading him. I cross to the other side of the room, tracing my finger through the dust on the bedside table.

“That’s right…” I say. “I remember now. I told him.” I don’t have to look in Peter’s direction to sense the pang emanating from his chest. “Now, how did I get that confused?”

“Whatever you want to tell me,” Peter says, “I’m listening now.”

“Whatever I want to tell you?” I keep tracing in the dust. “I doubt that very much, dear.”

There’s a pleasant smile, even in my tone. The smile on my face the same as my mother so often wore.

“Wendy Darling, I wanted to tell you earlier…”

“But you needed to sleep with me first.”

Peter breathes heavily. “I think we both know that I could have slept with you any time I wanted, and I waited…waited until…”

I spin around to face him. “Want to know why I slept with you?”

He’s breathing hard, his chest heaving. He looks me up and down as if in the shadows, in the folds of my attire or the curves of my hips, he’ll find the answer.

He bites the inside of his cheek and turns to the side, crossing his arms at his chest.

He doesn’t ask why I slept with him. I suppose he doesn’t really want to know.

There was a time when my bargain would have kept me from telling him. But I’m tired of what it means to choose Peter.

Language is funny that way. What does it even mean to choose someone? I’d thought I’d known. Thought it was being everything Peter wanted from me. But magic is fickle, and Peter was too dull to make our bargain specific. It’s not bound to specifics like my bargain with the Nomad.

Choose me. I’ll rewrite the meaning, twist it until it fits my own agenda. Just like he’s been twisting me.

“I chose you that night, Peter. I’d been holding out for him to come back for me. But I overheard in the washroom from another woman that he’d been in Chora. That he was on his way to Kruschi, on the other side of the world from the warping. He moved on. I’d been waiting for him, but I decided I was tired of waiting for someone who didn’t want me back. So I chose you.”

The next best thing. The second choice, is still a choice, is it not?

“You’re angry with me,” says Peter, swallowing hard. His fingers are tapping at his hips.

I laugh and cock my head at him. “Am I, dear?”

There was a time when I would have thought the bargain a curse. Chains holding me in place, keeping me from screaming at Peter. From telling him how much I hate him.

But that would be such a waste. I can do so much more damage this way.

“Why don’t you just tell me how to feel?” I say, and my voice comes out so eerily sincere, in a way I wouldn’t have been able to act on my own without this curse binding me.

I revel in it.

“Wendy Darling…I think you need some time to process.”

“Good.” I say. “Tell me what I need, too.”

Peter grits his teeth, takes his fingers to his furrowed brow and pinches. “I’m going to make this up to you.”

“I’m sure you’re capable of that.”

“I didn’t mean to kill him, Wendy,” Peter says, his voice desperate now. He’s trying to keep calm, but he’s squeezing his arms so hard his knuckles are turning blue.

“I never said that you did.”

Peter approaches me, desperation in his crazed eyes. “I know you’re mad. I know you think you’ll never be able to forgive me. But please, Wendy. Please, I’m begging you.”

When I lean forward, I smile at Peter. “I choose you, Peter.” My smile is the edge of a razor, dulled by time and depression and faerie dust.

But don’t they say that the dull knife is the most lethal object in the kitchen?

He closes his eyes, frustrated. “No, I know that. But I need you to forgive me.”

I grin. “I forgive you, then.”

Peter’s face falls as he examines me, what he’s done to me. It’s as if for the first time he’s realizing just how much of a facade this curse has turned me into. A prisoner in my own body.

A prisoner who will gnaw her own arm off to get out if she has to.

“You don’t mean that,” says Peter.

“Of course I mean it.” But he’s right; I don’t. The curse only bears down on my actions, not my feelings, not my thoughts.

For over a year, I’ve not been able to distinguish between what is me, what is the bargain, and what is the Mating Mark. Now, they untangle before me, a cord unraveling at the fraying edge of Peter’s favorite sweater.

The feelings for Peter, those belong to the Mark. The fire I feel at his touch. The thoughts that I love him, that I’m comforted in his arms. All Mark.

The compliance, the choosing Peter, the actions, those are all the bargain.

For a while, it was me, too. Me, Wendy, the compliant girl. The girl who lets life happen to her.

Correction, the girl who let life happen to her.

The girl who believed, deep in her very being, that she couldn’t resist Fate. That the magic of the Mating Mark was too strong.

If I’ve learned anything from having my heart shredded to pieces by Nolan Astor, it’s that Mating Marks can be resisted if you put your mind to it.

I might not be able to resist the bargain in the same way, but I can twist it. Make it mean something else. Make the meaning suit me.

For the first time, I am no longer entwined with the Mating Mark and the bargain. Instead, I am the third force, looking down upon the other two as hands gripping my wrists.

But Nolan Astor taught me how to get out of such a situation.

I just have to find the weak points and throw my entire being into them.

“Wendy Darling, please don’t be angry with me forever. I tried to get him back. I begged the Sister to get him back. I wasn’t myself when it happened…”

I stare into Peter’s eyes. It almost makes me pity him, how fully he believes his own words. How easily he can banish the less swallowable facts. Like how, when he brought me back to Neverland, he already knew John was dead, hanging from that tree. He knew he’d killed my brother when he called in the bargain that forces me to choose him.

It hadn’t been about Astor at all.

He’d just wanted to make sure I couldn’t leave him if I ever figured out what he did.

“I understand why you did it.”

Peter’s shoulders sag in relief. “You do?”

I smile, but this one’s not my mother’s. It belongs entirely to me. “I do.”