“What do you think?” I ask Smee.
She uncocks the hammers on her twin pistols and returns them to her holster. “Shoot him.”
I retrain the pistol on his head. He’s so close.
I’ve dreamed about this moment for ages.
He is a spider I lost sight of, a beast who slipped through the cracks.
I’ve been waiting for the moment he popped back up so I could squash him beneath the heel of my boot.
He’s practically dead already.
But if I put a bullet between his eyes right now, he will never know who bested him.
Killing a man when he’s already down? Poor form indeed.
“Jas?” Smee says.
I can barely hear her over the loud thumping of my heart.
My hand is shaking and my residual limb is a phantom ache at my side. I bring the hook up and watch it gleam in the light.
The anger returns.
Anger at what he did and what he had no right to take.
I can’t kill him.
I can’t let him get away with it so easily.
“Get him up.” I return the pistol to my hip.
Smee gives me a look.
“We might need him,” I tell her.
“Doubtful.”
“I know what I’m doing! I’m no amateur, Smee.”
“Then stop acting like one,” she says.
“Fine. I’ll get him up.” I go around to his head and look down at him.
Some odd feeling comes across my chest. It’s the same feeling I get when I spot land from the bow of my ship.
Excitement.
Excitement to murder him, no doubt.
I hook him beneath the arms and drag him back leaving a trail of blood.
Smee follows and watches me struggle with his weight. He’s all solid muscle, corded with it from shoulder to bicep to forearms. Thick veins run over his tattooed hands.
I imagine what he must look like shirtless and immediately regret the thought.
Shirtless with my blade protruding from his ribs.
That’s more like it.
I drag him to one of the spare rooms at the end of the hall and kick the door in. There’s a single bed shoved into the corner, a desk and a dresser. When I built this house, I included several spare rooms despite having no plans for guests.
The room smells stale and dust swirls in the faint ray of moonlight.
Smee lets me struggle with him a little more before she finally grabs him by the legs and helps me hoist him into the bed. The mattress dips, the springs creak.
The Crocodile is in my home, in my bed.
I swallow bile and my eye starts twitching.
“Now what?” Smee asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“We really tending to him?”
Why did he come here?
Why to me of all people? Is this another game? Arrive on my doorstep pretending to be injured so he can slither into the shadows and ambush me when I least expect it?
The Crocodile may be ruthless, but he has no qualms about being brutal in the daylight.
No, I think if he wanted to kill me, he would do it out in the open.
“Find out how badly he’s injured,” I tell Smee.
“And if it’s fixable?”
I lick my lips, my mouth dry. “We should keep him alive.”
She wraps a hand around her hip and tilts her head, watching me with that deep wariness that only Smee can get away with. “I don’t like this, Jas.”
I stagger back into the wall and slouch against it, sighing loudly. “To be frank, Smee, I don’t either.”
She nods at me and then gets to work.
18
WINNIE
“I do not have the Death Shadow.”
I’m sitting on Pan’s bed, leaning against the headboard, my knees drawn to my chest. I feel like a little girl again, terrified about having the flu. I always hated throwing up and my stomach had been in knots, my body burning up and trembling. I knew it was inevitable, but still I denied it was happening.
Until it did.
“Darling,” Pan says.
“There must be a mistake.”
“There isn’t. I watched it come out and I watched it take over.”
“And? What did it do?”
His brows draw together in a concerned frown.
I’m covered in blood, so I guess it was bad. But the look he’s giving me has me wondering if there is something worse than bad.
“What happened?” I ask.
He lets out a breath and then tells me everything.
I yank his door open and race up the stairs.
“Darling,” he calls.
“No. I did not do that.”
“Darling, wait.” There is a ring of command in his words, but I ignore him and take the stairs up two at a time. I don’t know what I intend to do once I’m at ground level, but I’ll figure it out.