Page 79 of Caging Darling

The old woman scoffs. “You come here and tell me how to do my job. It won’t work. You have to sever the limb on which it’s attached. It’s the only way to free her. Unless you can?—”

Peter cuts her off. “Then can you track who put it on her?”

I pray not. I didn’t want Peter fulfilling the Nomad’s bargain before. Now, knowing Tink, loving her as a friend, I can’t bear the thought of her being placed in another prison, siphoned off for her faerie dust. Not when she’s been taking care of Michael…

“Please. Please don’t…” I whisper to the old woman.

If she hears me, she pretends she didn’t. “It’ll cost you,” she says.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” says Peter.

The toothless grin makes another appearance. The woman shuffles to a dingy corner of her workshop, then returns with an onyx-colored box. “A shadow then.”

“You ask too much,” he says, slyly. Though I can’t see him the way my head is angled, I know his face well enough to see the smirk stained in my head.

“Then you don’t want this enough,” she says.

“Something else.”

The woman says nothing. Instead, she waits patiently. Eagerly.

Peter is silent for a moment. Then, slowly, a black tendril forms at his back. It slithers through the air and hovers over the open onyx-colored box. I’m not sure if it’s just my imagination, but the shadow seems to hesitate.

The woman snaps the lid shut over the shadow. She takes the box to her ear and shakes it. To my surprise, it rattles, as if she’d trapped a rock inside rather than a shadow.

“The adamant, girl,” says the woman, perceiving my surprise, though she doesn’t explain further.

The old woman whistles to herself, clearly pleased.

I imagine whatever she’s about to do to me will not be all that difficult. On her end, at least.

She hums as she pads over to a cluttered workstation, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she prepares whatever it is that will help her track this bargain.

I suppose I could tell Peter. Spare myself of whatever agony and torture this old woman has planned for me. But I’ve learned that Peter doesn’t recognize my suffering unless it’s bold. Dramatic. He doesn’t recognize my pain until I’m screaming.

So I stay quiet and keep the truth to myself. Just a little longer.

I will no longer be complicit in my own lack of agency. They can pry the truth from my jaws if they wish, but never again without getting bitten.

When the old woman returns, it’s with a vial full of black serum that steams out the top of the vial, filling the small room with a pungent scent I imagine will taint my memories for a long while.

I get the feeling this is going to hurt.

Peter must get a similar feeling, because he has the gall to take my hand in his and squeeze it. Like I’m a woman readying to give birth and he’s a doting husband, ready to stroke my forehead and wipe it of sweat and do whatever adoring men do for the women they cherish.

Nausea churns through me as the woman pulls down the back of my collar, exposing my skin.

“An urn, eh?” she says. “Strange symbol for a bargain.”

I don’t have time to consider what that means as the woman drips the serum onto the back of my neck, and I plunge into another world. Another version of how things turned out. In this world, it’s not Peter holding my hand, but Astor. And it’s not the agony of the serum ripping through me, threatening to tear apart my body, but the pangs of childbirth. My and Astor’s child.

And I’m enduring this for them. For us.

For the joy on the other side.

As the pain rips through me, I let out a scream so bloodcurdling, it takes me a moment to register that it’s coming from my own lips. Faintly, I hear Peter whispering my name in the background.

In my mind, I switch the voice out for Astor’s.

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