Page 32 of Tick Tock, Darling

I made myself look at the room instead.

Chains hanging from the ceiling. Four of them, spaced out, hung that morning by men who’d known exactly where to put them.

Nobody hangs chains for a woman who’s already in a chair.

Cold came up through me and settled. This wasn’t a cell. It was a room he’d arranged, and he’d dressed me for it, and he’d sat me down facing the middle of the floor.

I was the audience.

Guards outside the door. I counted the boots. Two of them, maybe three.

“Carry him inside,” Pan called.

Him.

Darius. Or Caspian. My mind wouldn’t pick one and it wouldn’t stop trying, and I sat there in that stupid red dress with my hands chained and watched the door.

The door swung open. I jumped, my heart thundering.

Two men dragged Caspian in, grunting under the weight of him. He was wet and soggy and didn’t look like he was breathing. They chained him up and left him hanging.

Caspian.

Something went out of me. Not relief — I don’t know what to call it. He’d come. All the way through a portal and across that water, for me, and here he was hanging off a chain with his hair wet and his arms over his head.

Pan came in behind him. Wendy after that.

Her eyes were black and staying black, shiny with it, like the thing inside her couldn’t wait for what came next. It looked at me. Not the woman. The thing rotting in her. And it smiled.

Cold went through me and kept going. Whatever they were about to do to him, I was going to have to sit in this chair and watch it.

Somebody had cut his shirt off him. There were scars across his back and a ship inked over his shoulder, and I thought about him standing at a wheel somewhere with all of that under a shirt, doing his job, before any of this.

Pan snagged his hair and snapped his head back.

His eyes found mine. Wide open. He was awake in there — I could see him looking at me, I could see him trying — and he didn’t move, didn’t struggle, didn’t make a sound.

A spell. He was under a spell.

They were both under one, the brother and the sister, and I was powerless to break either spell.

Pan clasped my cheeks. “The Christmas Star won’t let me hurt you. I can’t make you talk and find my shadow, but let’s see how it works when someone suffers for your stubbornness.”

Stubbornness? No. That’s not what it was. It was refusing to walk his dark path. It was having a soul. I didn’t want what was living in Wendy to live in me.

Pan released me. “Bring me the whip.”

One of his men left.

Stay calm. Stay calm.

I wasn’t calm. My breath came out harsh and my heart slammed and my hands went slick on the arms of that chair.

Every stroke was going to be mine. That’s how he’d built it. Pan couldn’t lay a hand on me so he’d put it on Caspian’s back instead, and every time I kept my mouth shut, that whip was coming down.

And then I saw the rest of it.

Caspian couldn’t make a sound. He was spelled quiet, the same as he was spelled still, and he was going to take all of it without one word.