Page 123 of Caging Darling

No. No, no, no. Please don’t walk away. Please, why can’t you see I’m trapped? I scream at him in my head, fight with the words to push them out, but they won’t obey me.

When he’s halfway down the hallway, I say the only thing I can manage, just to make him pause. Just to keep him here in this hallway with me a moment longer. “I choose Peter.”

Astor stops, then looks over his shoulder. “Are we rubbing it in now, Darling, pouring salt in the wound? Or are you worried I didn’t hear you the first time?”

“I choose Peter,” I say again.

Slowly, he turns his entire body to face me. Takes a step toward me in the hallway.

“Darling, tell me if you love Peter.”

“I choose Peter,” I say again, as deliberately as I can manage.

Astor cocks his head to the side. “And if you had what you wanted, if there was nothing else influencing you?”

“I choose Peter,” I say.

His footsteps are hard and soft at the same time. Hesitant as the wheels and cogs turn in his head. When he reaches me, he stares into my eyes. “Is Peter making you say these things? Has he cursed you, compelled you somehow?”

“I choose Peter,” I say again, my voice so close to death, it’s trembling.

Astor’s forehead wrinkles. In a blink, he’s grabbed my arm—no, not my arm—my glove. With a flourish of his hook, he rips it down the seam, too precise to mark my skin.

It falls away, flitting to the floor, revealing the three-link chain in the crook of my elbow.

Astor stares at it. Where I expect to glimpse anger, there’s only blankness. I wonder if this is what Astor looks like when he’s going back in time, recounting every interaction with mesince arriving in the Gathers, reframing them through the holes of these three links.

He takes his hand and glides his thumb over the bargain. The chain. “I take it you weren’t allowed to tell me about this.”

When I don’t answer, that’s answer enough.

There’s something simmering in Astor’s face. Anger, rage at the realization of how I’ve been caged, but something else, too.

When he turns his neck to face me, his ivy green eyes are alight with desire. Longing. Hope.

“What all are you not allowed to do?”

I don’t answer.

“Alright then. Tell me exactly what you’re allowed to do.”

For the first time in a long while, hope springs up within me as well. The loopholes I’ve all but memorized spring up in my mind. “I can talk to you. Converse with you. I can…well, I can insult you.”

He laughs wryly.

“I can work with you, like when we’re searching for Tink.”

Astor swallows. “Are you allowed to feel? Are your feelings your own?”

“I can feel whatever I like. It’s the choices I make with those feelings that…” My bargain stops me. “I choose Peter, always.”

Astor stares at me. “But what others do—that, you’re not held accountable for?”

“What others do isn’t up to me. I can’t control the choices others make for me.”

He reaches out, his hand trembling as he wipes a loose strand of hair from my cheek and tucks it behind my ear, letting his fingers graze the bone behind my ear on the way down.

“That’s why the Nomad was able to kiss you,” he says.

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