Page 41 of Caging Darling (The Lost Girl #3)

CHAPTER 41

I find him just where I expect him. In the crow’s nest of the ship.

I’m not sure whether I climbed up here to think, or if I was hoping deep inside he’d be here. I suppose it’s the first, since the bargain let me do it.

His silhouette is dark against the evening sky as he stares out across the Gathers. For all I know, he’s counting ships and doesn’t hear me coming.

“Darling,” he says, not turning around.

“Astor,” I return.

“I don’t think your lover would like it very much that you’re up here with me.”

“Are you asking me to leave?”

He doesn’t answer.

I swallow, aching to take a step forward, but I don’t. I back myself against the edge of the crow’s nest, trying my best not to think about the last time we were together in one of these. Back when I knew better than to love him and did, anyway. Back when, for the one and only time, he almost slipped and gave in to the temptation of me.

My heart aches, and my limbs are shaking. I should get down. This isn’t choosing Peter.

But as long as I stay over here, on the other side of the crow’s nest, it’s not not choosing Peter. I’m still choosing Peter as long as I keep my distance.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“There’s an extensive list of secrets you could be referring to, Darling. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you came looking for me?” When he doesn’t answer, I grit my teeth in irritation. “You let me be so hateful toward you.”

“You deserved that release. It seemed cruel to take that from you.”

“You could have told me before I lashed out at you,” I say. “The night you came to get me from the Nomad’s room.”

He turns to face me, the moonlight highlighting the silver streaks that are just starting to form in his hair. “Is that what you would have wanted?” His gaze flits to my elbow, but it’s covered up. “Would you have wanted to feel confused?”

“I’m not confused.” It’s the first time in my life I feel as though I can say that honestly.

His look is full of pity. “I know you aren’t, Darling.”

He doesn’t. He truly doesn’t.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You’ve spent two years trying to find me, but when I wander into arm’s reach, you do nothing.”

“Is that what you want, Darling?” he asks. “For me to draw you into my arms and make you mine?”

My heart falters, but my mouth doesn’t. “No. I choose Peter.”

Sorrow lines his eyes. He swallows. “That’s my fault, I believe. That Mark of yours talking. If you think it hasn’t crossed my mind to hope that if the Mating Mark were taken away, you would want me, you’d be incorrect. If you think I don’t lose myself at times in the foolish hope that if it weren’t for Peter, there’d be nothing in the way, nothing getting between the two of us, you’d be wrong. But Darling, it’s not Peter who ruined us. So no, I didn’t think it worthwhile to tell you I’d been searching for you. Because all I ever hoped to gain from finding you was making sure that you were safe. And I don’t have to win your forgiveness to ensure that.”

“Charlie and Maddox,” I say. “They said you were sick for a while. That your hand was infected. I—I hurt you too.” It’s the most I can say without betraying Peter. Without choosing Astor over him.

“If you’re worried about me forgiving you, I’d say it was less punishment than I deserved.” He twists his hook, looking down at it pensively.

“There was something they weren’t telling me,” I say. “About the infection.”

Astor continues to stare at his hook, though he stops moving it about in the moonlight. The way he has it angled reflects a ray back to his chest, where one of his new tattoos creeps out of his shirt. When he glances up, he catches me staring and swallows.

“Can I see them?” I ask.

“That’s most certainly a request I should deny of a woman who belongs to another.”

I laugh, my voice shaking. “Should. But if I had to guess, won’t.”

Astor smirks half-heartedly. “You’ve gotten to be so forward.” All the same, he goes to unbutton his shirt, but when he fights with the top button, his fingers, unassisted by his missing left hand, struggle.

“You’d think I’d be better at this by now,” he says, somehow sounding sheepish. “I know you found me a scoundrel that night at Vulcan’s, but the buttons truly are more difficult than anything else.”

I take a step forward, and his hand stills. He doesn’t move, doesn’t blink as I approach him, pressing my fingers to the button and sliding it through the eyelet.

The moment the first bit of fabric releases is when I realize that Astor’s chest isn’t moving, that he’s no longer breathing.

When I first laid eyes on the tattoos, I’d thought they were vines. I still can’t tell what the design is, not without seeing the rest, but the edges truly are blurry. I’ve seen tattoos like this on former militia, meant to cover scars or burn marks.

Astor has a burn mark on his chest, a brand from the orphanage warden, but it’s far enough to the right to be covered by his shirt. If these tattoos are an attempt to mask the brand, they’re overkill, and decades late.

Still, there’s something graying underneath the skin, buried underneath the ink, but not fully. It’s the same gray of his Mating Mark, below his wrist, where it withered when the Seer transferred part of it to Peter.

I take my fingers and press them to his tattoo, running my fingers over the curved but blurred edges.

“Darling,” he says, finally taking in a breath, his voice a half-hearted warning.

“Charlie said you contracted an infection,” I say, my voice as distant as a ghost’s. “She wasn’t talking about a normal infection, was she? She wasn’t talking about your hand, your wound.”

“As it turns out,” Astor says, voice still tight, chest hardly moving underneath my touch. Like he’s using the minimal amount of air possible. “Mating Marks aren’t particularly fond of being severed.”

I trace my hand down to undo another button, but Astor latches his fingers around my wrist. “I’m going to need you to stop that, Darling.”

When I glance up at his face, his eyes are closed, his jaw gone tense.

I nod, embarrassed now. “Okay,” I whisper, and he nods in return, but he doesn’t release my hand before opening his eyes again. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“For the record,” he says, “there’s never a need to apologize for touching me.”

I flush, then go to take a step back, but his grip is still tight around my wrist. As if we’re both thinking of the moment he trained me how to get out of a grip like this one, he trails his fingers up my wrist and maneuvers them between my hand and his chest. The movement serves a dual purpose—a steady barrier to bar me from touching him further, while also keeping me from pulling away.

A miserable limbo the two of us inhabit.

“You’re still sick, aren’t you?” I say, dreading the answer. “You never got all the way better. That’s why you didn’t want me to know…” Panic surges through me when he doesn’t deny it. “Are you going to die?”

A sad smile overtakes his features. “I wish you wouldn’t worry about such things.”

Pain lances through my chest. “Charlie said there were healers. What do they say about it?”

“Relax, Darling. They have everything under control. I’m walking and fighting, aren’t I?”

Among other things, I don’t say, thinking of the woman at the pub.

As much as it hurts, none of that seems to matter now.

“I did this to you,” I say.

“No, Darling. I did this to us.”

My breath catches. He’s staring down at me now, looking like he might die, not of illness, but of me.

He squeezes my hand gently. “What all did Charlie tell you?”

“That you were sick. That Peter sabotaged the ship’s flying mechanisms, and you scoured the world trying to find a way into Neverland.”

Astor nods, then sighs. “So she left the rest for me, then. I suppose that is like her.” He rolls his eyes, if not affectionately. “Wendy, I need to tell you something, though doing so, I must admit, is incredibly selfish. It’s not the right time, not with that Mating Mark warping the way you think about things, but I can’t bear it on my own any longer.”

I nod, hanging on his every word. There’s nothing he could tell me at this point to dissuade me from wanting to know the truth.

He sighs. “You really should tell me not to tell you.”

“You know that’s not really in line with my temperament.”

He laughs, then goes to run his hand through his hair, except he’s still clinging onto my hand for dear life, so it’s his hook that ends up wiping his hair back across his face.

“When it became evident that we weren’t getting into Neverland by the ship, the crew and I returned to the Nomad to recruit his help. He was…smug, if not eager to have help in getting his hands on that faerie. And once he realized Peter had made Neverland impenetrable through stealing our equipment, he was more open to my less conventional idea.”

“Which was?”

“I’d never been one to believe all the rumors about the Nomad, but I was desperate. They say he’s been to the realm of the dead. That he befriended the Fates in order to claw his way back to the realm of mortals. So I asked him to arrange a meeting between the Fates and myself.”

My heart stops in my chest, the idea of Astor subjecting himself to the Middle Sister provoking a surge of fear deep within me.

“He advised against meeting with the Middle Sister. Said she was unreasonable and that the Eldest Sister would be more likely to feel sympathetic to my cause, given her priorities.”

Love; I remember from the story. My heart stutters.

“So he arranged a meeting. Summoned her on my behalf. The meeting was…” He pauses for a moment, looking past me. “Enlightening, to say the least.

“She wasn’t pleased with me. Apparently, she takes her Mating Marks very seriously, and that I’d transferred mine was a grave offense. Although, she considered the fact that I’d lost my hand to be a fitting punishment. That, and the infection—” He winces, and I realize now that he’s been in pain this entire time. “I think she received not a small amount of pleasure from enlightening me regarding my innumerable mistakes.”

“What did she show you?” I ask, though I’m unsure I want to know.

He leans backward, props himself against the rim of the crow’s nest, looking toward the stars instead of toward me. His hook angles downward, digging into the wood of the rim.

“She brought with her a tapestry,” he says, then, lingering on the word. “Our tapestry.”

I swallow. “You saw our future?”

He shakes his head. “I’m afraid not. The Sister was too wise for that. This tapestry was torn.” My chest tightens, and he continues. “It was how our lives were supposed to go, how our story was supposed to play out had I not intervened. Had I not taken to removing the Mark, transferring it to Peter.”

Tears swell in my eyes, stinging.

He hesitates, his breath fogging in the cool night. “I won’t tell you, if you don’t want to know.”

I pause, and though I already know my answer, I weigh the pain.

There’s no future for me and Astor. Not in this life. Not in this version of events. But there’s a sick part of me that knows that when I’m lying in Peter’s arms, a puppet in the life I was sold into—sold myself into—I’ll want a place to go. A corner that, rather than being dank and lightless, is thriving with the blossoms of a life passed up. The garden that was taken from me.

“It can’t hurt much worse than what I’ve already experienced,” is what I settle on.

Astor’s throat bobs, but he continues all the same. “I was supposed…” He stops, takes a breath. “Had I kept the Mark—” Again, he halts, and I wonder if he’ll back out of telling me the story, but he digs his hook into the side of the crow’s nest and starts again. “When my Mark first appeared, I thought my Mate would take me away from Iaso. I thought it would cause me to be unfaithful. I’d resolved in my heart that if I couldn’t remove the Mark, if I couldn’t control myself, I’d leave Endor, leave Iaso behind to find a man who could actually love her without distraction. Without secretly longing for another. But I couldn’t bear the thought, so I went to the Seer in Endor.”

I know this part of the story, but I can tell Astor is working himself into the worst part, so I don’t stop him. “I thought that if I kept my Mark intact, I would ruin the woman I loved. That I would destroy her. I didn’t know…” He closes his eyes, wincing. “When the Sister showed me the rest of the tapestry, I realized I hadn’t accounted for certain outcomes. In the Eldest Sister’s original plan, Iaso and I were to marry at sixteen. At twenty-six, she was going to bear our first child. A daughter.” His throat bobs with a wistfulness that is agonizing. “And then our second, two springs later. She was going to love being a mother. And the girls were going to adore her.” He blanches, looks ill, and though I can’t tell if it’s from the story or his infection, my heart aches. “And then, when she turned thirty-three, there was meant to be an accident. A fall, and she was…” Tears spring from his eyes, run down his cheeks. “Iaso was meant to have a quick death, a painless one. She was meant to die a woman whose dreams had been fulfilled. She was meant to be happy and adored, and then pass from this life to the next in a moment. She was never supposed to hurt.”

My heart aches for Astor, but for Iaso, too. For the life she was meant to live. The life that was stolen from her.

“She was supposed to get thirteen more years and two beautiful daughters,” he says. “We were supposed to be happy together. And I was to mourn her, instead of clinging onto her. And her spirit was supposed to pass on.”

It’s awful of me, but I find myself doing the math in my head. But Astor has already reached this point of the story. “In this version, I would grieve her for two years. And then one day, I’d receive an invitation. One from a nobleman who owned a fleet of ships and needed a privateer to protect them on the waters as they sailed for Kruschi. I was to meet him at his manor to bid for the job. He’d invited several others, but I was to turn down the opportunity, considering the pay was much too low.”

His eyes go glassy, and it’s as if he’s there, reliving the life he never experienced. “But then, just as I walk out of his office, eager to find my next contract, I stumble into the library to fetch my daughters. I’d left them with the nanny of the house to watch while the nobleman and I discussed business, you see.”

My breath catches, heart spasms, but Astor doesn’t stop there. “And when I stroll in, there’s this beautiful woman on the floor playing with them. One of my daughters is late to speak, and the woman is familiar with this because of her brother, so she’s gotten out this contraption and is using it to play with the little one. And I just watch for a while. The woman is so caught up in the world she and my daughters have created that she doesn’t even realize I’m standing there. She’s made up this far-fetched story, something about a woman who is cursed to live out a thousand lives in her dreams as she sleeps perpetually, and she’s telling it to them as they play with the toys she fetched for them out of her brother’s room. And my girls are laughing for the first time in a long time—they have a morbid sense of humor, you see—my oldest beaming in a way I haven’t seen since their mother died.

“And then, I shift or move, or something gets the woman’s attention, and she jolts her head up like it’s she who’s been woken from a dream, and…” He taps his hook against the side of the crow’s nest. “And she has these beautiful golden freckles on her cheek. They course down to her jaw.” He mimics the motion with his hand, caressing my Mating Mark down to my jaw as the tears fall. “And I find myself mesmerized.”

“How does she react?” I ask, my voice trembling.

He snorts, and it’s a pained but amused laughter. Tears wet his eyes. “She apologizes for not noticing me earlier.”

“And you?” I ask.

“I tell her never to worry about apologizing to me again.”

My legs are shaking, and from the way he has to prop himself against the crow’s nest, I imagine his are, too.

“And what then?” I ask, like I could keep asking the question for an eternity and never be satisfied.

“I waltz out of the room, storm into her father’s office, and tell him I’ll take the contract, provided he grant me permission to court his daughter.”

I laugh. It’s so preposterous. “And then?”

A sly smile curves on his lips. “The courting process doesn’t take all that long. You’re rather easily convinced to marry me.”

I laugh, gasping, and elbow him in the ribs. He laughs too, but it’s on the edge of a cough. “And then?”

His gaze dances upon me with a longing that makes me want to die. “And then I take you back to my ship and make you my wife. And I give you anything and everything your heart has ever desired.”

My throat hurts. “Do we…do we have children?”

He winces, shutting his eyes. “Another daughter.”

My heart hurts. “Was she supposed to have been born already?”

He nods, tears falling onto his cheeks.

There’s an aching in my soul I can’t quite describe, for the child I never felt swell in my belly, never felt kick. For the baby I never held in my arms, never knew to love. The pain isn’t only for her, but for Astor’s eldest two daughters, the girls I would have loved and adored as my own.

I take a step toward him, but Astor actually flinches, shaking his head. “Darling, I know you’re quick to forgive, but before you do, I’d like for you to consider this—I took everything from you. I took half of your Mating Mark and hoisted it upon someone else. You weren’t…You weren’t ever supposed to fall sick as a child. You weren’t supposed to have a bargain tying yourself to Peter. Meaning your parents weren’t supposed to cage you up, then barter you to potential suitors when you’d come of age.”

He watches me, making sure I’m processing. Men in the parlor, who were never supposed to touch me. My parents, never driven to evil by their fear, their virtue still intact. Peter, never craving me because of the Mating Mark on his back. No visits from the shadows in the windows. No masquerade ball where my parents slit their throats. No entering into a blank-check bargain with Peter. No taking my brothers to Neverland.

No taking my brothers to Neverland.

I swallow. “In this tapestry, was John still alive?”

I know the answer deep down already, but Nolan Astor doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t hold back the truth for his own sake. “Yes.”

My palm finds my mouth just in time to catch the sob.

“Darling, I am so sorry.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, and his hand finds my chin, lifting it up. “Open your eyes, Darling. Look at me.”

I do. He’s staring into my eyes, but his gaze doesn’t stop there. It searches through the depths for the girl I should have been in a world that was kinder. When he speaks, his voice dips to the ebbing waves below.

“I would claw through the realms, find a way to turn back time, if I thought it possible. If I thought I could go back and keep you from all the pain and suffering I caused. If I could give you the life you’ve always dreamt of, the love you’ve always craved. When we were together on the Iaso , all I kept thinking was that I wished I could go back to the night we met. Be kind to you, set aside my vengeance for a while and just let myself feel what I felt toward you. I thought that night was the moment that mattered, that I could have married you the evening of the masquerade and kept you away from Peter. But I hurt you long before that night, Darling. I simply didn’t know it yet. The moment I stepped into the Nomad’s office and saw you there, I wanted so badly to take you up in my arms and never let you go. To steal you away again, never let Peter near you. But I… Darling, are you listening? Are you hearing me?”

I nod, realizing my gaze has gone glassy.

“I ruined your life. It wasn’t Peter. It wasn’t your parents. It was me. And I know, I know that beautiful heart of yours is so inclined to forget, to push it aside and bear the pain on your own. I know you’d rather take the pain upon your own shoulders rather than allow it to land on the person who caused it. But I just…I need to know that you’re not sweeping this away, locking it away to think about later. I need to know you’re not retreating into the back of your mind, shoving the truth into a corner.” He brushes a strand of my hair away from my face.

“I love you, Wendy Darling. I love you, and I hate myself for what I did to you. I was selfish, so unwilling to be controlled, to be pushed.” He laughs ironically. “I thought I was doing you a favor by pushing you. But I refused to let anyone sway me. It didn’t matter that my two closest friends were advising me to let myself love you—I wouldn’t be persuaded. The Eldest Sister, she had good things stored up for me—pain, too—but good things. For you especially. And I was so preoccupied with making my own choices, exercising my own power, so intent that I would not be controlled, that I never stopped to think about whose life I would trample on the way. Whose agency I would steal in claiming my own.”

He frowns. “If it weren’t so selfish, I would beg. But I fear if I got on my knees and pleaded with you to be my wife, to come away with me and start a family with me and be my everything, I fear you would say yes. And that you wouldn’t be doing it for yourself, but for me. But I…Wendy, I’m not asking you to choose me. I love you too much for that. I adore you too thoroughly to ask you to live out the rest of your life with the man who ruined it. No, I won’t ask you, I won’t beg you to do that.”

“But?” I ask.

He looks up at me, his eyes soft for the first time. “But if it came from you. If it was what you, Wendy Darling, wanted, I would steal you away and never let you go.”

He waits, my silence carried on the wind whisking between us.

I open my mouth to tell him I’d go with him to the pits of the afterlife if I could. But all that comes out is, “I choose Peter. I’m always going to choose Peter.”

Astor blinks, then slips his hands into his pockets, but his hook gets caught on the outer flap. He fidgets with it, and soon enough, the fabric rips, the sound tearing through the night. He exhales forcefully, then nods his head toward me in the most awfully formal gesture. “Of course.”

He goes to push past me, gently placing his hand on my shoulder as he maneuvers me out of the way. I spin around, wanting nothing more than to chase after him, to find something, anything to say that will make him stay with me, even if it’s only for a moment longer.

But the words don’t come.

And even if they did, it’s not as if I could speak them, anyway.