Chapter 10

The silence blooms in the Crocodile’s absence.

There is only the sound of my ragged breathing and the dripping of the washroom faucet.

I lay back into the pillows, close my eyes, and try to drift, but I can smell him everywhere.

In the air. On the bed. On my skin.

I can’t stop replaying the scene in my head.

The Crocodile on his knees. My cock in his mouth.

It takes no more than that to be painfully, obscenely rock hard.

Bloody hell.

Gingerly, I swing my legs over the side of the bed and heft myself up trying to keep my torso straight so as not to rip the stitches.

Once on my feet, I shuffle over to the table, my elbow tight against my side trying to keep myself together.

Please don’t start bleeding again.

That’s just what I need, the Crocodile returning to find me splayed out on the floor having fainted again at the sight of my own blood.

What an embarrassment.

I pour a drink and sling it back, but it does nothing to soothe my frayed nerves or the unsettled feeling in my gut.

I gave in to temptation and I’m not sure how I feel about it or how the Crocodile might use it against me.

Shame burns through my blood.

I should have known better.

I should have been stronger.

I knock back another shot and the alcohol finally hits, buzzing through my body, unknotting some of the tension in my gut and the dread in my heart.

There is only one reason I came to Everland and it isn’t to have an illicit affair with my immortal enemy.

It takes every ounce of strength I have to ease myself back into the bed. Once I’m lying flat on my back, I give in to the fuzzy warmth of the liquor and the relief I feel at having made it back to the mattress without fainting.

Sleep, I tell myself.

Just for a few hours.

And when I wake, perhaps all of this will be forgotten and I can move on with my mission so I can finally put the Crocodile behind me.

I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

I wake to Roc kicking the bed. “Get up,” he shouts but in a whisper and I half rise.

“What the bloody hell are you doing?”

His hand is on my mouth in an instant and my breath puffs out around his fingers. There is an emotion on his face, not quite fear, but a second cousin of it. Apprehension maybe.

“I was followed,” he tells me, removing his hand, then thrusting a shirt into my chest.

“Who?”

“Get dressed.” He goes to the window and looks out. There is still darkness beyond the thin, bubbled glass so I must not have been out long. Thankfully some of the pain has ebbed in my side suggesting my body did the miracle of fast healing while I slept.

I don’t heal like Peter Pan or his Lost Boys, or like Roc. But I’m not as disadvantaged as a mortal. It’s been that way ever since I was a young man.

I slip the shirt on over my head, then get up and tuck it into my trousers, secure my belt back into place.

“Who followed you?”

The Crocodile’s gaze is still on the courtyard beyond our room.

“I’m not sure. And I’m still trying to decide if we should allow them to catch us.”

“What? Why would we want that?”

He doesn’t answer me so I sit on the edge of the bed to buckle up my boots. This is one of the biggest things that changed when Peter Pan and the Crocodile took my hand. I could no longer tie boots with a hook. It was much easier to buckle and snap.

Inevitably, when I think about that night, the phantom pain comes back and for a second, my mind plays tricks on me making me think the hand is still there, that I can flex my fingers.

“Probably best if we run,” the Crocodile decides and crosses the room to me. “Do you have everything of importance?”

I didn’t pack much. I scan the room and find only my bottle of rum, some loose coinage. I think my comb might be in the washroom along with the straight razor I used to shave my face clean when I landed here.

“I’m good,” I tell him and he nods.

“We climb out the back window.”

“You still haven’t told me who we’re running from.”

He yanks the entire curtain and rod off the wall with little care and tosses it aside. The back window looks out on an uncut hedge and some briar bushes. It’s narrower, and shorter, than the front windows. Climbing through won’t be easy.

“Up you go,” he orders me.

“You first.”

He rolls his eyes at me. “I have two hands. I can pull myself through.” He threads his fingers together creating a step for me. “Hurry, Captain.”

I am distantly aware of the fact that the Crocodile can hear much farther than I can and must know better than I do just how much time we have. And yet I look down at his cupped hands and the tension around his eyes and decide it’s the perfect time to be difficult.

“What if this is some kind of ploy to get me out of my room and lock the door behind me? So I have to sleep in the bushes?”

His brow furrows. “I assure you, Captain, I wouldn’t waste my time on ploys.”

He says the word like it’s a child’s game, like it’s beneath him.

“You have about five seconds,” he tells me.

“Five seconds?!”

“One.”

I look from him to the front door and back to him.

“Two.”

I’m still barely awake, barely thinking straight.

“Three.”

“Christ,” I say and plant my boot in his hands.

“Four.”

“I’m going. I’m going!”

I place my hand and hook on his shoulder, braced for him to haul me up.

The front door bursts open, splintered right down the middle by a hand-carved battering ram with a roaring lion’s head on the front end.

“You dragged your feet too long, Captain,” the Crocodile mutters to me, unlinking his hands and dropping my foot back to the floor.

Several men spill in.

It is immediately clear who they are — they’re wearing the uniform of the royal guards. Navy blue pants and jacket with royal blue epaulets and a crest embroidered on the left chest in matching royal blue and gold. The roaring lion’s head. The mark of the Grimmaldi family.

“On your knees!” the stout man in front bellows.

I look over at the Crocodile. “What did you do?”

“Me? Nothing.” He smiles at me like he might be lying.

“On your knees. Now!”

“I must apologize for this beast,” I say. “He is neither friend nor companion. Whatever he has done, I have no part⁠—”

The stout man waggles a finger and a lanky man behind him comes around and punches me right in the nose.

“What the bloody hell?!” I stumble back and then sink to my knees, covering my nose just in case there is blood.

Thankfully I seem unharmed save for the ringing in my ears and the blurring of my vision.

“Apprehend them,” someone proclaims and within seconds, I’m handcuffed and yanked from the room by the Everland Royal Guard.