Page 52 of Caging Darling (The Lost Girl #3)

CHAPTER 52

T he Nomad is waiting for us when we arrive in the courtyard.

The air is cool, the wind lazy as it whips against my skin, threatening to chastise me, just like the guilt welling in my chest.

But no, the guilt I had stocked up for myself had been for the version of Wendy who wasn’t strong enough to fight the bargain. The version of Wendy who hadn’t realized that with the help of a friend, she might not need to fight at all.

I nudge the guilt to the side, tuck it away, and instead squeeze my friend’s shoulder.

She’s slumped before me, her hands tied behind her back as she stumbles forward. Her head wags, a drunkenness to her expression that makes my heart hurt. If we fail, will this be her reality? The Nomad claims he doesn’t want her for her faerie dust, but there’s something special about Tink he chose not to disclose to me. Will the Nomad drug her and keep her in a cage, easily accessible to harvest whatever power she has that he so desperately wants?

Peter is a monster, but he’d at least given her a pen instead of a cage.

My chest tightens, and the Nomad stares at both of us, a heady excitement in his eyes when he sees Tink. I wonder if when he looks at her, all he sees is his own freedom.

“I wouldn’t have expected her to come so easily,” he says, his voice drawling.

I shake my head, exaggerating my discomfort with this situation. It’s not difficult to feign, so much of it rooted in reality. “They’d been keeping her in a cell,” I say. “She was already drugged when I found her.”

The Nomad tenses. “Had you brought her to me earlier, she wouldn’t have been damaged.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” I mumble under my breath.

The Nomad’s ears perk, amusement in his expression.

He can’t seem to wait for me to hand her over, can’t wait for me to walk her across the courtyard. He comes pacing in our direction, his eyes full of greedy ecstasy.

Tink’s hand tightens around the knife behind her.

We’re halfway across the courtyard, when a whirl of shadows soar out from behind the nearest turret, straight for Tink.

Peter lands at the same time his shadows coalesce, forming shackles around her wrists, confiscating the knife and bringing it to her throat.

“No, Peter,” I say as he yanks my friend away from me.

Peter pulls Tink’s back to his chest as she wriggles in his arms. There’s something about his touch that incites more fear in her than just the knife to her throat, and for a moment I wonder if Peter’s flesh against her skin is the velvet against mine.

Anger rolls up within me, but I have to contain it, have to…

The Nomad flinches, but he regains his composure quickly enough. “You’re aware that if you don’t give her back to me, your Darling little possession, as you like to call her, will die.”

Peter laughs, the sound manic as he looks around Tink’s shoulder, the blade pressed against her throat. “Then both our darling little possessions will die.”

The Nomad’s lip curls. “I have other streams of income,” he says, meaning he hasn’t told Peter about Tink’s vital role in freeing him from this realm. “For you, replacing your Mate will not be so easy.”

Peter cocks his head. “Except she’s not just a stream of income for you, is she?”

The Nomad stares at him. “Are you accusing me of sentiment? Because if you are, that’s quite the gamble.”

“I peeked in your ledgers,” says Peter. “There are notes on faerie dust mills, but no plans. No money set aside to purchase one. Not even a contractor to build the equipment if you intended to make your own. And even if there were, you’d need more than just one faerie to be profitable. But there’s no evidence that you’ve looked anywhere else.”

“Why purchase what I can steal?” says the Nomad through glinting teeth.

Peter shakes his head. “No. No, I think Tink means more to you than just her dust. You forget, she belonged in my bed first. You forget the secrets lovers will share with each other when they have the voice to do so.”

The Nomad’s hand taps against his side. Otherwise, he remains perfectly still.

I glance at Tink, and there’s desperation in her eyes. But she’s not afraid of the knife at her throat. Her gaze is transfixed on the Nomad, an insect caught in a web, paralyzed by the sight of a spider as it approaches.

“Remember when I found you,” seethes Peter into her ear. “At that awful circus, a slave in a cage. But there was a part of you that was difficult to persuade to leave. It took so much convincing on my part. I couldn’t understand why you would want to stay there, in that dirty, awful cage. But it wasn’t because they kept you in, was it? It was because of what they kept out.”

Tink’s face blanches, but she doesn’t give Peter a reaction. Not when she can’t take her eyes off the Nomad.

Not for the first time, I wonder why Peter hunted Tink down so that her voice could be used to seal Neverland in place, keep it from unraveling. Why her? Why Tink’s voice?

And why does the Nomad need her to escape this realm?

“So no,” says Peter. “I can’t replace my Mate. But you can’t replace this one, either, can you?”

The Nomad’s face loses its smirk. The pleasant but terrifying facade has been shed, and now there’s only grim determination in his eyes. A promise of death if Peter hurts what is his.

“I suggest you let her go,” says the Nomad.

“Release Wendy from her bargain with you,” Peter says.

“That’s not how it works,” I say.

The Nomad slowly turns to look at me. “Is that what he told you? About your bargain?”

I face Peter. It’s not pain I feel at his betrayal. At least it’s not pain because he betrayed me. More pain at myself for, yet again, believing a lie that came out of his mouth.

The night I’d slept with him, he’d told me he’d wished he could remove it. That he knew it was keeping me from loving him completely.

“You lied to me,” I say, and I can’t bring myself to sound surprised. Just disappointed.

Disappointed that all this time, he could have let me go. I could have spent my time manipulating him into setting me free. I thought I knew the game we were playing, but he’d neglected to tell me the rules.

I frown, glancing back and forth between them. If Peter had just let me hand her over, there would be no bargain binding me to the Nomad.

So what rules is he playing with? Did the Nomad offend him so badly by kissing me that Peter’s ego compels him to win one last time?

“Hand her over to me, and we can all go home,” says the Nomad.

Peter presses the knife further to Tink’s throat. She winces, but no whimper comes out of her mouth.

“Have you not done enough already?” I ask.

Peter’s face actually falters. That he somehow still cares what I think baffles me. I’d laugh if my friend’s life wasn’t hanging in the balance.

“If you just give Tink to me, you and Wendy can walk away,” says the Nomad cautiously.

“Except Peter doesn’t want me,” I say.

All heads turn in my direction, none as confused as Peter.

I shake my head, staring in disbelief at my counterfeit Mate. “You don’t like me how I am. Can’t you see that? You liked me better when I was under the influence of faerie dust. Subdued. Without Tink supplying the faerie dust, you lose the woman you love. Even if you do manage to take me back home.”

Shock paralyzes Peter’s lips for a moment. I watch him reason through, not what I’m saying, but how I was able to say it while still bound by my bargain to him.

“Choosing you,” I say thoughtfully. “I think I misunderstood initially. I don’t think it means withholding everything that’s unpleasant for you to hear.”

And suddenly, I feel the chains of Peter’s bargain loosen around my throat. Just slightly. It’s still there, the chain. But how tightly it’s been wound—how much of that has been my own belief about what it means to choose someone? How much of my choking was at my own hand?

“Wendy Darling,” says Peter, because my name on his lips is the only defense he has for himself.

I find myself hugging my torso with my shivering arms. My posture isn’t bold, but it gives me the support I need to speak my mind. “You and I both know it’s true. The best night we ever spent together was the first night you took me dancing in the stars. But it wasn’t you I fell in love with, Peter. It was the taste of the dust you pressed to my lips. The feeling of getting to be someone else for a little while. The thrill of falling. But me? Peter, I have no wings. I was never made to fly.”

“You don’t belong on the ground, Wendy Darling,” says Peter.

I shake my head, glancing down at my palms with a soft smile as I examine the calluses that never completely faded from my years climbing my parents’ clock tower. “No. I’m made for somewhere in the middle, it seems.”

“Enough,” says the Nomad, putting his palms up. “Enough with this nonsense. Wendy’s purpose in life doesn’t concern me. Just hand over Tink, fulfill Wendy’s bargain, and settle your little lovers’ spat between yourselves.”

Peter presses the tip of the blade into Tink’s throat. She gurgles, except the sound is silent. There’s panic in her eyes, and I can’t help but be whisked back to the time I scratched her throat in Peter’s room, and what should have been a minor annoyance paralyzed her temporarily.

I wonder if it hurt when they took her voice.

“Peter, please.” My voice warbles, but it melds with the Nomad’s.

“Stop. Please,” he says, his blue eyes transfixed on the way Tink’s chest is pulsing rapidly. There’s no lust in his gaze, only horror as he watches the panic overwhelm her body. Everyone in the garden pauses, staring at him in disbelief. But any sympathy in the Nomad’s face is already gone as he whisks his hand. “Well, she’s no use to me dead, is she? Wendy, consider yourself released.”

The back of my neck stings. I grasp at it, only to find flecks of curled up ink stuck to my palms as the bargain wilts away.

Peter flashes a grin. “Come now, you two. It’s time to go home.”

My feet obey without my consent.

My hands don’t.

As I step toward Peter, the Nomad moves, but Peter misjudges it. Assuming he’s coming for Tink, Peter goes to shield her.

But the Nomad’s not coming for Tink.

Across the courtyard, the Nomad’s knife comes flying.

I catch it, my fingers curling around the hilt.

The last time I held a knife like this, I brought it down upon a Mating Mark.

This time, I’m going for a different sort of magic entirely.

When I bring the blade down, aiming for the crook of my elbow, I don’t give myself enough time to think. Enough time to hesitate.

All I know is that I won’t go with him.

I was never strong enough to gnaw my own arm off. Would always overthink it. Talk myself out of it.

So I don’t let myself think. I just do.

I don’t even brace for the pain.

There’s a clashing sound, but no pain. Metal against glass.

Because between my blade and my arm is a hook.

No.

I glance up to find Astor before me, sorrow and regret and an apology in his eyes as with his other hand, he wrings the blade from my trembling hand.

“No,” I say, my mind racing, trying to make sense of which direction he came from, if he’s been hiding in the hedges the entire time, why he’s ruining my life again.

“Darling.”

“Don’t make me. Please don’t make me go back.”

“How, Darling,” Astor says, “do you intend to climb without your arm?”

“Astor, please,” I whisper. “There will be no climbing where I’m going.”

He smiles at me, but it’s almost a wince. “Do you trust me, Darling?”