“They took her, Peter. Snatched her right out of the smoke while I was busy keeping your heart beating.”
The world stops. The red lights, the vibrating floor, the sound of Tahlia’s gum—it all disappears. I look down at my hands. They’re covered in her blood. And then I look at my own finger, where the secondary receiver for her ring is embedded.
The light isn’t red anymore. It’s a flickering, dying amber.
“Find her,” I whisper, my eyes locking onto Hook’s with a desperation that makes him recoil a fraction. “Find her, James, or I swear to God I’ll burn the docks to the waterline with you on them.”
I try to lunge off the cot, my muscles screaming, my vision white with a sudden, jagged flare of agony. I don’t care about the hole in my chest; I care about the empty air where she should be.
“Wendy!” I roar, but it comes out as a wet, broken sound.
I get halfway up before three of Hook’s men—massive, faceless shadows in tactical gear—slam me back down. My head hits the metal frame with a sickening clang, and for a second, the world turns into a grey static.
“Let go of me!” I snarl, my fingers clawing at the black Kevlar of their vests. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill all of you! Hook, tell them to get their fucking hands off me!”
Hook doesn’t move. He stands there, silhouetted against the vibrating steel of the van, watching me struggle like a pinned insect. He steps forward, the tip of his hook glistening in the red light as he presses it firmly against the centre of my bandaged chest, right over the wound.
“Don’t be fucking stupid, Peter,” he says, his voice a low, lethal vibration. “Look at you. You can’t even hold your own head up, and you think you’re going to storm a North End stronghold? You’d be a corpse before you cleared the driveway. You think you can save anyone like this? You’re a liability, not a King.”
“I don’t give a fuck!” I scream, the rage boiling over,hot and bitter as bile. I grab the shaft of his hook, the cold metal biting into my bloody palm. “Why did you leave her? Why did you fucking leave her there, James? You had the guns! You had the men! You should have let me rot on that floor and taken her! You should have left me!”
Tahlia lets out a sharp, mocking breath from the corner. “Yeah, well, some of us have a thing for ‘bad form,’ Peter. Don’t flatter yourself. We only saved you because the Boss has a debt.”
“Shut up, Tink,” Hook snaps, his eyes never leaving mine. He leans in closer, his face inches from mine, the scent of expensive tobacco and gunpowder rolling off him.
The pressure of the hook on my chest increases, forcing the air out of my lungs. I stop struggling, my body trembling with a mix of shock and pure, unadulterated fury.
“You want to know why I saved you?” Hook whispers, his voice dropping to a haunting register. “Because of what that girl did. While the world was ending, while the bullets were flying and the ceiling was coming down, she wasn’t looking for the exit. She was cradling your pathetic, dying head in her lap like you were the only thing left on earth.”
My heart stutters. I can feel the tracker ring on my finger pulsing, a ghost of her heartbeat.
“She looked me in the eye,” Hook continued, a strange, dark glimmer of respect crossing his features. “Covered in your blood, shaking like a leaf, and she didn’t ask for her life. She begged for yours. She said, ‘Save him. He’s my husband.’ And then, right beforethey winched her into the dark… she said she loved you.”
The words hit me harder than the bullet did. I go still, the rage draining out of me, replaced by a cold, devastating clarity. She loved me. She said it while I was dying. She said it to the man with the hook.
“She’s yours, Peter,” Hook says, pulling his blade back and straightening his coat. “She’s branded to you in ways I don’t even think you understand yet. So you’re going to lie there, you’re going to let my medics stitch your miserable hide back together, and you’re going to behave. Because if you die now, you’re proving her a liar. And I hate a liar.”
I lie back, the cold metal of the cot biting into my spine. I look up at the red lights, my breath hitching in my throat.
I love you.
She’s out there. Somewhere in the dark, wearing a ruined white dress, waiting for the man who promised he’d never lose her.
“Get the kit,” I rasp, my eyes turning into bottomless pits of obsidian as I look at Tahlia. “Stitch me up. No anaesthesia. I want to feel every fucking second of it. I need to remember why I’m going to kill every man who touched her.”
The van screeches to a halt, the heavy doors throwing open to reveal the skeletal, rain-slicked ribs of an abandoned shipyard. I’m hauled out on the cot, the movement jarring my ribs, sending a fresh wave of agony through my chest that makes the world tilt and grey out.
“Into the shed,” Hook commands. “And bring the whiskey. He’s going to need something to bite on.”
They dump me onto a rusted metal table in a room that smells of saltwater and industrial cleaner. The light above is a single, flickering bulb that hums like a hornet’s nest. Hook’s medic—a man with dead eyes and hands that move with the cold precision of a butcher—slices my charcoal suit away until I’m bare from the waist up.
The wound is a jagged, purple-rimmed crater, weeping a steady stream of dark blood onto the cold steel.
“No morphine,” I rasp, my head thrashing against the table as the medic swabs the area with iodine. The sting is a lightning strike. “I told you. I want to feel it.”
“Suit yourself, Hale,” Hook says, leaning against the doorframe, crossing his arms. He looks at me with a detached, clinical curiosity. “Tink, hold his shoulders. I don’t want him thrashing and ruining the needlework.”
Tahlia sighs, stepping forward. Her small, strong hands clamp down on my collarbones, pinning me to the rusted metal. She doesn’t look sympathetic; she looks bored, but her grip is like iron. “Don’t bleed on my boots, Peter. I just polished them.”
