When it splatters across my face, I finally exhale, and the urgency ebbs away.
The party is silent as the blood patters to the stone.
The boy slumps over in the chair, eyes wide and dead.
When I turn back to the Darling, a heart in my hand, her eyes are full of tears.
Good.
She needs to know…there are no white knights here.
Just monsters.
And I am the worst one.
17
WINNIE
Peter Pan drops the heart to the patio and uses his bloody hand to grab my arm and yank me away.
I’m still tipsy, but the buzz has burned away, leaving me shivering and foggy.
Pan just killed that boy.
He tore out his heart.
Is this really happening?
The others scatter as Pan drags me across the patio and up the stairs. Kas and Bash and Vane follow us.
I try not to trip over my own feet.
When we’re back in the house, in the loft, Pan yanks me into the dining room and tosses me into a chair.
He sets his hands on either side of the seat, caging me in.
There is blood splattered across his face and the sight of him covered in carnage makes butterflies take flight in my stomach.
“What part of this do you not understand, Darling?” His voice is a razor teasing at my skin. One wrong move and the blade will part me, let the blood well to the light.
“Pan,” Bash starts, but Pan cuts his gaze to Bash, silencing him.
“I have rules,” Pan says.
“So I’ve heard.”
“It’s for your safety.”
“Is it? Because last I checked, you kidnapped me.”
His jaw flexes and he grinds his teeth together.
“I’m trying to save this fucking island,” he says.
“I don’t care what you’re doing,” I hear myself say. “This isn’t my home. And I didn’t take your fucking shadow.”
He scowls, then shoots a glare over my head. “Who told her?”
“Wasn’t us,” Kas says.
“Don’t look at me,” Vane says. And then, “Probably Cherry.”
“You going to kill her too?” I throw in his face. “Maybe you’ll kill me next? Dig out my insides and search for your answers. Maybe it’s printed here on my bones.” I lift my middle finger to him and glare.
He’s silent and stoic for a second and then suddenly he’s yanking me back to my feet and pressing me to the edge of the table. “What are you doing? What is your plan? Fuck every Lost Boy on the island just to provoke me?”
I frown up at him, catching on the words he used.
There is always something to glean from words, which ones, how they’re said.
If they’re used as knives or balms.
Provoke me.
Provoke me.
I’ve gotten to the mighty myth of Peter Pan and my heart beats a little harder with excitement.
“Yes,” I hear myself saying. “They call me Winnie Whore, you know. Fucking boys is what I do best.”
The breath he takes in is long and labored and it rumbles in the back of his throat.
I tremble beneath him, not from the cold. Never from the cold.
I sense the rising fury in his body, the tremor before the earthquake.
I have one second to breathe before he’s spinning me around and bending me over the table.
His left hand presses at the back of my head, driving my face to the wooden table. His other hand bunches my skirt around my waist and yanks down my panties.
I gasp out, sending a fallen leaf skittering over the table.
“If you want to fuck the Lost Boys,” Peter Pan says, “why not start at the top?”
He kicks my legs apart, baring me and I hear the rasp of a zipper opening.
“Maybe I will,” I say.
My heart is thudding so hard, I swear I can hear it ramming against the table.
This is insane, all of it is insane, but my pussy is throbbing, my clit pulsing, and I can feel myself growing wetter by the second.
I sense Bash and Kas and Vane beyond us, watching, and that makes the butterflies in my stomach turn to a frenzy.
The head of Pan’s cock comes to my opening and I let out a little yelp.
The hand at the back of my head tangles in my hair, slides to the back of my neck.
“If you want to act like a whore,” he says as he leans over me, “then I’ll treat you like a whore.”
He shoves into me.
I gasp out.
One of the twins says, “Fuck me,” low and beneath his breath as the table shudders from Pan’s thrusts inside of me.
He’s big, stretching me wide, and I tense beneath him as he slides in and out, not with speed, but force.