Page 35 of The Never Queen

Vane snorts. “I don’t trust that man as far as I can throw him.”

“Well, me either. But again, our alternative options are too few.”

We’re quiet for a beat, the drone of the crickets filling the silence. But a question has been plaguing me for a while and I can’t stop myself from asking it.

“Can you sense where her head is at?”

“She’s overwhelmed.”

“I could tell.”

“And afraid.”

“Yes.”

“But not about dying.”

I spend the cigarette. “Then what?”

“I don’t know. It has the edge of loss to it.”

“Her mother?”

He shakes his head.

“Us,” he guesses. “Something about all of this, Doren, her mother, being here, old wounds splitting open and old fears burbling up.”

“We should reassure her.”

“Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

“It’ll distract her.”

He nods and drops the still burning cigarette in an old flowerpot full of rainwater. “She does love being on her knees.”

“Not as much as I love her on them.”

17

KAS

The first time I was in a room alone with Winnie Darling, she tried to use me and my body for sex to get beneath Peter Pan’s skin.

Pan had always had the same rule: we don’t fuck the Darlings.

Darling knew how to twist us to her will.

She still does.

Which is why her hand is now creeping up my thigh, edging dangerously close to my cock. Just the feel of her attention, even through a layer of clothing, is enough to send me over the edge.

My heart kicks up in my chest, thumping hard in my head.

There’s a tightening in my gut that feels a lot like a knot that needs to be undone.

And only burying myself inside Darling will loosen that knot.

She applies pressure, several fingers brushing up against my thickening cock.