Page 139 of Caging Darling

But I’ll give it my best.

My best won’t be good enough.

That’s where I’m resting my hope, anyway.

“I’ll meet you outside,” I whisper to Peter as I let my hand fall from the clasp, then I slip away and toward the door.

“You can’t do this,” says Peter, his voice panicked from the other side of the window pane. “You think she’s your friend, but she won’t hesitate to kill you if she thinks you’ve betrayed her. Trust me, she doesn’t take betrayal well.”

I don’t offer Peter a goodbye. When I reach the door, my hand on the knob, his voice grows deeper, louder, resounding in my ears. “Wendy,get back here.”

I step into the hall.

CHAPTER 50

When I reach the hallway, I find my legs are wobbling too hard to hold myself up, and I press my back against the wall, my entire chest trembling.

Already, thoughts of how to trick Tink into returning to the Nomad have swarmed my head. Claiming there’s danger inside she doesn’t know about. Claiming there’s something outside I need her help with to save Michael.

I feel as though I could throw up.

I’m going to betray her.

I’m going to betray my friend.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

And even if there were, I don’t know that I’d want to.

If I fail, I die. For so long, that’s been my only wish aside from Michael’s safety, to finally be released into the peace of darkness, to drift off and no longer have to feel the shackles of my own body.

If I succeed, I’m still chained to Peter. But I’m as foolish of a girl as I’ve ever been, and the hope for a future between me and Astor, the ember I should have let fade—it’s glowing again.

That awful, cancerous hope has multiplied in my chest, and I possess no cure, no means of containing it.

I want to live. Even if the only life I’m destined is one where Iknowthat out there somewhere, he’s coming for me. Even if he never succeeds.

Because the hope that one day, he will, won’t seem to die. It infiltrates my reason, filling my head with tales of romance in which love actually wins in the end.

Except the love I have for Astor isn’t the only love that exists, the only love that matters.

Wendy Darling’s sleeping, I hear Michael say from the past. If he saw me, would this still be his mantra, how he’s remembered me all this time? So easily swayed. So unable to say no.

I’ve been manipulated so many times, it’s as if I’m in a dream. One that keeps changing on me. A nightmare from which I can never wake, but in which I continue to make horrible decisions, then wonder what came over me.

All at once, every manipulation swarms my head. Killing Victor’s father on the beach, not knowing who he was, because I thought Peter’s life was worth defending. Making the bargain with Peter in the tower, thinking it was the only way to save my brothers’ lives, when I now know Astor wouldn’t have laid a finger on either of them. That he never would have hurt John. Even the Nomad didn’t have to spend more than half an hour with me to know which weak spots to hit, that I’d give up Tink at the chance I might solidify Peter’s love for me, just to know that someone’s wanting of me was real. The Nomad had sensed that I was weak, broken-hearted from learning Astor had once been my Mate, only to trade me away, and he’d used my pain for his own benefit.

He’d seen right through me. Used my pain, my fears against me.

And now he is going to win.

If only that came so easily to me. Knowing how to win. If only I could read other people to get them to do what I want them to do.

The thought is wry, but it sets in my belly like concrete, refusing to be washed away.

I roll it around in my mind.

And an idea blooms.

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