Page 119 of Caging Darling

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 theIaso, 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. Heexhales 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.

CHAPTER 42

The next night, when the Nomad throws a dinner party, he sits me to his left.

And Astor to mine.

When Peter, who returned grumbling earlier that day from whatever fool’s errand the Nomad sent him on, protests, the Nomad responds, “Our guests, the ones with intel into the Whittakers’ business dealings, have a custom where lovers sit opposite one another.” He nods at the seat across from me with the casualness of a man who knows a matter has already been settled.

By the time Peter takes his seat, he’s practically fuming.

I try to control myself. Try to keep from glancing in Astor’s direction.

I don’t have that kind of self-control.

In the end, I look, and my stomach swells with warmth at the slightest smirk I glance on the corner of my once-Mate’s lips.

The Nomad’s guests soon arrive, a young couple with matching silver bands around their ring fingers.

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