He tips the bottle.
The champagne hits my throat like a flood of liquid fire. It’s cold, stinging the tears in my mouth, the bubbles exploding against my tongue in a way that feels like needles. I try to swallow, but the heroin has made my throat slow, unresponsive. I choke, the vintage gold liquid spilling out the corners of my mouth, running down my chin and soaking into the lace of the dress, mixing with the dried blood on my chest.
“D-don’t…” I gurgle, the word a wet, drowning sound.
“Drink it all,” he commands, his voice a terrifying mix of tenderness and mania. He begins to stroke my cheek with his gloved thumb, wiping away a tear even as he forces more alcohol down my throat. “There we go. That’s my girl. I want you drunk and high and ruined. I want you so far gone that you don’t even remember the colour of Hale’s eyes.”
I am gasping, the champagne burning my sinuses, myvision fracturing into a thousand shimmering shards of light. The car begins to move, a silent, powerful surge that feels like we’re being launched into space.
“You’re… you’re h-hurting…” I whisper, my eyes rolling back. The world is spinning—the matte-black roof of the car, the red leather, the man’s porcelain mask. It’s all melting into a single, terrifying scream.
“I’m loving you, Wendy,” he rasps, his hand sliding down to squeeze my throat through the steel collar. “This is what love looks like when it costs a hundred million dollars.”
He leans in, licking the spilled champagne off my collarbone, his tongue rough against the brand. I lie there, a broken, gilded bird in a speeding cage of carbon fibre, watching the lights of the estate disappear through the tinted glass. I am being driven into a darkness that has no end.
The car hums, a low-frequency vibration that rattles through my drug-soaked marrow. We are moving fast, the world outside a smear of streetlights and winter fog. Inside, the air is thick with the scent of spilled vintage grapes and the metallic tang of the collar around my throat.
He lets the empty bottle of Cristal drop. It thuds onto the deep-pile carpet, rolling uselessly. He’s breathing hard, the porcelain mask heaving with every jagged inhale. His gloved hand reaches up, the leather creaking as he hooks his fingers under the edge of the white, cracked face.
“You look so confused, Wendy,” he whispers, his voice dropping the gravelly rasp, smoothing out into something hauntingly familiar. Something that tasteslike salt air and old, forgotten dreams of the woods. “You’re wondering which monster bought your soul.”
With a violent jerk, he rips the mask away.
My breath hitches, a sharp, painful catch in my chest that has nothing to do with the heroin. I stare at him, my eyes wide and stinging, trying to stitch together the shattered pieces of my memory.
He is beautiful.
Not just handsome—he is a god carved from granite and moonlight. His jaw is a sharp, lethal edge, dusted with a day’s growth of dark stubble. His skin is tan, a stark contrast to the silver-blonde hair that falls in messy, effortless waves over a forehead marked by a thin, jagged scar. But it’s his eyes that break me. They are a piercing, electric blue—the colour of a shallow tropical sea just before a storm hits.
“Felix?” I breathe, the name tasting like ash and childhood.
The Lost Boy. Peter’s right hand. The one who used to track the shadows in the forest, the one who taught me how to hide when the world got too loud. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be loyal. He was the brother Peter chose when he had nothing.
“The one and only,” Felix rasps, a smirk playing on his full, swollen lips—lips that just used me like a piece of discarded meat.
He looks older, harder. The boyish softness has been replaced by a predatory grace that makes my skin crawl and burn all at once. He is wearing a suit that cost more than a house, but he still looks like he belongs in the wild, holding a knife to someone’s throat.
“You… you were his b-best friend,” I slur, my tongue heavy, my heart fracturing in my chest. “You s-sold… you bought… why?”
Felix leans inclose, his scent—cedar, gunpowder, and something darkly sweet—overwhelming the perfume and the booze. He reaches out, his bare hand—no longer gloved—sliding behind my neck. His skin is scorching hot against the cold steel of the collar.
“Peter became a King, Wendy. And Kings forget that the boys who helped them build their thrones are still hungry.” He runs a thumb over my split lip, his gaze dropping to the blood he smeared there. “I didn’t just buy a prize. I bought the only thing Peter Hale ever truly loved. I didn’t want the money, Wendy. I wanted the crown. And in our world, the Queen is the crown.”
He leans in, his nose brushing mine, his electric eyes boring into my soul. “He made you need him, didn’t he? He made you think he was the only sun in the sky. Well, look at you now. Drowned in my champagne, marked by my rival, and chained to my wrist.”
He lets out a low, dark chuckle, his hand sliding down to squeeze my throat just enough to make my head swim. “You look so beautiful when you’re broken, Wendy. It almost makes me want to be a better man. Almost.”
The Maybach swerves off the asphalt, the tires crunching over frozen pine needles and gravel until the headlights cut out,plunging us into a world of oppressive, ancient green. The silence of the forest is heavy, broken only by the ticking of the cooling engine and my own jagged, drug-thickened gasps.
Felix doesn’t say a word. He reaches across me, the scent of his skin—sharp and masculine—filling the small space. He unlatches the door and hauls me out by the chain. I hit the ground hard, my knees scraping against the frozen earth, the silk of the black dress fluttering like a dying crow’s wing.
“Get up,” he growls, jerking the lead.
He drags me deep into the tree line, past the point where the road disappears. The moon is a cold, silver eye watching through the canopy. He stops at a fallen cedar, the wood rotted and soft, and shoves me against it. The bark bites into my shoulder, right against the weeping brand Viktor gave me.
“You remember the woods, don’t you, Wendy?” Felix whispers, his voice a low, vibrating rasp. He steps between my legs, his thighs like pillars of heated stone. “This is where we used to play. But there are no games tonight.”
He sinks to his knees in the dirt.
