Page 35 of Tick Tock, Darling

I’d seen the women he ran with. Painted and polished and poured into their dresses. I own three pairs of jeans and I don’t own a lipstick.

“What?”

“There’s only been one woman for a long time. I just kept picking others so I wouldn’t have to say so.”

Something gave way in my chest and I couldn’t get it back. My eyes burned. My hands had stopped pulling at the chains without my telling them to.

“I…I⁠—”

“You don’t believe me.” His chest rose and fell. “Have you ever loved anybody?”

“Yes.”

My parents. Christmas Eve, the tree still lit, and a witch’s curse working through them while I stood there with everything I knew and not one thing that touched it. I was the most powerful witch in that room and I watched them die anyway.

“But love hurts,” I said. “It’s better to be alone.”

He laughed and then winced. “Sometimes. But there’s joy too.” He looked at me. “Why do you think it hurts?”

I opened my mouth to answer him and his eyes rolled back.

“Caspian.”

His head went sideways on the mattress and stayed there.

“Caspian!”

Nothing. I watched his chest for the next breath and it took too long coming and then it came, shallow, and I didn’t trust it.

The first cannon boomed and the whole ship shook under me.

Chapter Thirteen

Tinker Bell

“Caspian, answer me.”

He didn’t move.

I never told him what he meant to me. He said all of it out loud with his back torn open, and what I gave him back was love hurts, it’s better to be alone.

That’s what he heard. That’s the last thing he heard out of me.

The thing laughed next to me. “Caspian and your friends will die. Unless you do what Pan wants.”

Darius was a Golden Demon. A runner. He’d throw out those wings and have Alice off that boat before the second volley.

Unless somebody had put a spell on those cannons. Wendy could do that in her sleep. She’d opened the Hollows and she’d bound my magic without breaking a sweat, and if she’d been up on that deck working the guns, then wings wouldn’t help anybody.

So I didn’t know. That was the whole of it. I didn’t know if my friends were alive and I couldn’t see the man on that bed breathing from where I sat.

Fine.

If I couldn’t fight them, I’d give them what they wanted and take something back for it.

Pretend to fold. Get the chains off. Get to Caspian. And a witch with her hands free and the Christmas Star in her blood is a different animal than a woman strapped to a chair.

He’d lie to me. I knew that going in. Pan would promise me anything and mean none of it, and the second I found that shadow he’d have no use for any of us.