Their Vicious Darling (Vicious Lost Boys #3)

HOOK

When the Crocodile has devoured every last one of my men, he turns to me last.

I should have known.

He cannot be trusted. He already took my hand.

Will he take the rest?

His steps are slow and deliberate, but it’s still hard to make out his features.

I pull one of my pistols. It’s my last resort, even though I’m absolutely sure it will make no difference at all.

He keeps stalking me, eyes glowing yellow in the dim night.

I pull the trigger and a musket ball shoots through the air.

It sails clean through him and plops into the lagoon.

How the fuck am I to fight a man who has no substance?

Of all the ways I thought I would leave this plane…

The Crocodile comes within two feet of me and stops. His edges blur, but his eyes are steady.

“Well go on,” I tell him and raise my hook in his face. “You took my hand, you might as well have the rest of me too.”

He blinks at me.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Captain,” he says, his voice strangled and raw.

And then suddenly he’s solid again and collapsing in my arms.

I catch him at the last second, but he’s all dead weight and I sink to the sand with him.

“Christ,” I mutter and roll him over. “Wake up.” A slap to the face doesn’t rouse him. “Crocodile, I’ll leave you here if I have to.”

I hold my hand up to his nose to test his breathing, then check his pulse point. He’s still alive judging by breath and heart.

But the rest of him is lifeless.

From the bottom of Marooner’s Rock, Peter Pan and his merry gang of Lost Boys—and girl—make their way to me.

“Bloody hell,” I mutter.

All of them are covered in blood.

Out of one frying pan and into another.

That used to be my mother’s favorite saying when I was a boy.

“Looks like you’ve got your hands full,” Bash says.

Vane comes over and crouches beside his brother. “He’ll be out like this for approximately four to five days. Make sure you give him water and blood. Mix them together and pour it down his throat. He won’t need food. He’s clearly had his fill.”

“This is normal?” I ask.

Vane nods. “We never shift if we can help it. The cost is too high.”

So Vane is like his brother. I always wondered. Probably the shadow kept it at bay.

“Lucky for you, Hook,” Peter Pan says, “I’m feeling generous today.”

He gestures to the twins and Bash takes the Crocodile while Kas helps me to my feet.

Peter Pan straightens my jacket, smooths down the tattered lapel. “You’ll leave my island. You have two days. You’ll take Cherry with you. If either of you sets foot on my island again, I will string you both up from my tower and watch you hang.”

I bristle beneath his commands. “This is my home. You can’t—”

“I can. I will. And you will do as I tell you.” He curls his hand around the curved tine of my hook and in an instant, it bends back into a snake and slithers up my arm.

“For fuck’s sake!”

The snake hisses at me and I knock it away.

“And take the Crocodile with you too,” Pan says.

Bash shoves Roc back at me and I catch him around the waist.

“The Crocodile” —I leverage him up and lean him against my hip— “isn’t my problem.”

“He is now,” Vane says. “Don’t forget to feed and water him.”

The twins laugh.

I grumble and readjust the Crocodile’s weight again. For his size, he feels like he weighs a fucking ton.

“Go on,” Pan says and gives me a shove. “Tick, tock, Captain.”

It takes me until mid-morning to drag the Crocodile back to my house. He doesn’t regain consciousness, just as Vane predicted.

I am drenched in sweat by the time I reach the front steps to my house and I’m far too pissed for bullshit.

Thankfully all of my pirates are dead and currently in the deep magical abyss of the Crocodile’s stomach.

I suffered no attachments to my men, but it still infuriates me.

Smee meets me at the front door and takes half of the Crocodile’s weight from me.

“You’re alive,” she says.

My back is aching, my thighs numb. “Barely.”

We return Roc to his room and lay him on the bed.

Arms crossed, Smee says, “Déjà vu.”

I collapse into the chair. Smee pours me a drink and I gladly down it in one long gulp.

When I come up for air, I find Smee watching me.

“What?”

“You lost,” she guesses.

I sit forward, my elbows on my knees, the empty glass still clutched in hand. It’s cool in my sweaty grip.

“I’ve come to realize, Smee,” I say, “that I am endlessly searching for something that I don’t think I will ever find.”

She grabs a nearby chair and brings it over. She sits on it backwards, arms braced on the curved back. “I have to tell you something.”

“Okay.” I gesture to my glass. “Do I need another drink?”

“Maybe so.”

I nod and get up, fill the glass halfway and return to my chair. “I’m listening.”

Every word Smee utters makes me number despite the heat of the alcohol burning through my veins.

I’ve never been so angry that the anger vibrates in my ear drums. And yet I can barely hear Smee over the ringing in my ears.

“Say something, Jas.” I only know the words because I can read the movement of her lips.

What the fuck am I supposed to say?

“You betrayed me.”

Those are the only three words I can get out past my rage.

“I did what I needed to do.”

I stand. “That’s the difference between me and you.”

She stands next to me. “Is that right?”

“Yes. You don’t think in loyalty. You think in strategy. I traded my sister for you!”

I may be drunk now. I’m shouting, my voice filling the room.

“I never asked you to do that,” she says.

“But I did it anyway. I risked my own flesh and blood for you. And for what? Secrets and lies? Wendy Darling is in the Isles and she was pregnant with—”

I can’t finish the sentence. I don’t know if it’s true.

But if it is… Christ.

The room sways.

“Did he know?” I ask and jab my finger in the Crocodile’s direction.

“He did.”

I down the last dregs of my drink and slam the glass on the bedside table.

Five days he’ll be out? Plenty of time for me to get a head start.

That fucker planned to keep Wendy from me. I know he did.

He used me, gorged himself on my men, and kept Wendy Darling from me.

In fact, maybe his plan to kill Peter Pan was all a ruse considering he failed.

I look down at him still sprawled in the bed. There is blood smeared all over his face and down his clothes in splatters and stains.

When I look at him, when I follow the curve of his lips and the cut of his jaw and the complex lines of all of his tattoos, I am rendered shapeless. A puzzle with no solution.

I can hear the heavy drum of my heart in my ears.

I turn and leave the room.

“Jas,” Smee says and follows me out.

“I’m leaving,” I tell her.

“Slow down. Think about what you’re doing…”

“I don’t need to think about it, Smee.” I go up the staircase and to my private quarters. “How many men do I have left?”

I start packing a bag.

Smee says nothing.

“However many are left, tell them to be ready to leave within the hour. Tell Cherry too.”

She and I both know that I am leaving out her name purposefully.

There is nothing as important to me as loyalty.

Right now, the anger festering like an open wound, the one thing I want to do is sit down with Smee and vent about misdeeds and disloyalty. Smee was the one person who would listen and never judge me.

Deep down, I know what she did was the safest route.

The logical one. Not motivated by greed or emotion or fear.

She wanted to protect me.

I know she did.

And yet…

She comes around, removes the bag from my hand and wraps me in a hug.

When I was eleven, I had a cat that was trampled by a horse. I held its crumpled body in my hands and sobbed over it.

My father found me, pried the cat from my grip, tossed it into the nearby woods and told me to stop acting so foolish.

I refuse to shed tears.

Poor form, indeed.

I sink into Smee’s arms and return the embrace.

“I’m sorry, Jas.” She pulls back, shoves her hands into her trouser pockets. Our moment of weakness has passed and we will never speak of it again.

“I’m staying,” she says.

I nod. It’s probably for the best.

But it still feels like I am leaving something of myself if I leave her behind.

I can’t come back. Peter Pan made that clear enough.

“The house is yours,” I tell her. “The town as well. Do with it what you please.”

“And the Crocodile?”

I look past her toward the hallway and the stairs beyond, as if I can sense him just barely out of my reach.

He is at his most vulnerable again and in my house and taking up space in a bed I own. I could kill him.

I want to kill him.

But I want to reach Wendy Darling first and see his face when he catches up and realizes I’ve bested him.

“If he survives this coma, when he wakes, tell him exactly where I went.”

“Another fight, Jas?”

“The last one, Smee.”