Hook (Neverland Novels Book 2)

by Gina L. Maxwell

  Of all of us, Starkey’s the last person who deserves to be locked up. Every one of the Pirates are stone-cold criminals. Even Smee has a dangerous streak in him. He hides it well, but push that Irishman’s buttons and you won’t want to be on the other side of his knife. He might not kill you, but once he’s done, you’ll wish he had.

  Starkey’s not like the rest of us, though. I should’ve sent him to Peter when I took him out of that school. I should’ve sent both him and Smee to the Lost Boys. I was going to. And then I didn’t. I hadn’t always liked it, but the ten other kids I grew up with were as close to any kind of family as I’d ever had. Peter got seven of them. It was sheer pride and selfishness that wouldn’t let me give him the last two. They could’ve had a better life, and I prevented it. In that respect, I’m not any better than Croc.

  “Captain,” he says, his eyes welling up with unshed tears and his voice thick with emotion.

  “Yeah, kid.”

  “They told people I’m in here for…” He swallows hard and whispers into the phone. “For raping kids. Underage boys. But I swear to God, Captain, I never did anything like that. I would never do that.”

  My eyes close as I blow out a heavy sigh. I have to pull the phone away from my ear for a second because Starkey’s pleas for me to believe him are blades plunging into my chest. I bow my head and rap the heavy receiver against my skull several times, the sharp spears of pain only a fraction of what I deserve.

  I did a measly two years of hard time, but you only have to be inside two days to know which crimes the inmates consider heinous enough to break their loose moral codes. One of those unforgivable crimes is anything sexual with a kid. You go to prison for that and you might as well have a target carved into your back. And prison justice is of the biblical sort. Very eye for an eye, what you’ve done, they’ll do unto you, and all that shit.

  If that’s what Starkey’s been going through, then everything I’ve done in my life up to this point has been all for nothing. The one fucking thing I tried to do as his big brother was spare him that kind of suffering…and I failed.

  Starkey bangs his phone against the plexiglass to get my attention. I force my eyes open and lift them to meet his gaze. He’s shaking his head, and when I press the phone to my ear again, his pleas continue to slice me open.

  “Stop,” I snap, unable to hear it another second. “I know you didn’t do it. You didn’t do anything. You’re in here because of me, Starkey.”

  “What?” A hank of his hair falls in front of his eyes, but he doesn’t move to fix it. That would require taking the phone away from his ear, and I have his rapt attention now.

  “It’s Croc’s power play to get me to do what he wants. It’s taking me longer than I thought, but I’m gonna get you out of here, I swear it.”

  He frowns. “I don’t understand. How—”

  Before he finishes his question, the door behind him opens and a guard walks in. Starkey starts to argue that he needs more time, but the guard doesn’t make a move to haul him away. Instead he hands him a folded piece of paper, then disappears the same way he came.

  The hairs stand up on the back of my neck as he opens the note. “What is that? What’s it say?”

  My questions fall on deaf ears because the phone is still in his right hand with the note in his left. Confusion is etched on his battered face, and when he finally looks up at me, it’s like he’s seeing me for the first time.

  “Damn it, Starkey, what’s it say?”

  He turns the note around and presses it to the glass. Bold capital letters are scrawled across the paper: HE’S YOUR BROTHER

  Oh. Fuck.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hook

  “Is…is it true?”

  I’m still trying to process the rabbit Croc just pulled out of his hat, so when I don’t say anything, Starkey raises his voice in desperation. “Captain! Is it true? Are you my brother?”

  My secret is finally out after all this time. Relief and terror collide inside of me, fighting each other for dominance. Swallowing around the fist in my throat, I nod. “Yeah,” I finally manage, the word shredding my vocal cords on its way out. “I’m your brother.”

  A multitude of emotions cross his face—elation, more confusion, back to elation, then doubt. “What’s my real name?” he asks carefully, like he’s testing me. Not that it’s a very good test since he doesn’t know the answer.

  I scrub a hand down my face. There’s no point in holding anything back anymore. Croc dealt me the hand. I have no choice but to play it.

  “Your full name is Marcus Allen Hook. We have different fathers, neither of which were ever in the picture. Our mother, Marion Hook, was a heroin addict who OD’d when you were almost two, which is how we ended up at the school.”

  He blinks back the moisture and sniffs hard. “Then what’s Starkey from? Is it really because of my hair?”

  “Yeah, kind of. We called you Markey. One day someone commented on your blond hair. Mom said, ‘That’s not blond; it’s stark white.’ Then she started calling you Starkey Markey, but she always dropped the second part whenever she was high, which was more often than not before you were even a year old. By the time we got to the school, you refused to answer to anything but Starkey.”

  He chuckles a bit, like everyone does when they hear a cute story about themselves from when they were little. It gives me hope that this might all be okay, that maybe I’d been worried about him finding out for nothing, so I continue.

  “Mrs. Anderson, the nice old lady who ran the place, said it was okay to indulge you with whatever name you wanted for a while. You were young; she said she’d switch it back to Markey gradually over time once you were settled. But three weeks after we got there, she and her husband were killed in an accident, and the school went to Croc and Delia. Since they didn’t care to read any of our files and all the kids knew you as Starkey, that’s what stuck.”

  He frowns. “I don’t understand. You knew my real name,” he says, and I can practically see the wheels spinning in his head. “But you never corrected anyone. And you never told anyone I was your brother, not even me. I’ve been following you around my whole life, but you treated me no different than everyone else. Why?”

  “I did it to protect you. Croc’s a manipulative bastard who’s always had it in for me. Who knows what kind of bullshit he would’ve tried with you?”

  Starkey seems to think about that for a second, then shakes his head. “That doesn’t exactly wash, though, does it? That only explains why you didn’t let Croc know. Maybe even why you didn’t tell the others. But why not me? Why not tell me when I was old enough to understand and keep a secret?” He swallows hard, and the tears finally spill over to stream down his cheeks, one swollen and one scarred. “You should’ve told me.”

  Frustration at this shit situation—that I can’t get him out of here now, that Croc is fucking with us, that I can’t strangle that asshole with my bare fucking hands—builds in my chest and expands until my rib cage feels ready to tear through my skin. “I couldn’t take the chance you’d let it slip. I told you, it was for your own protection.”

  “Bullshit. Me and Smee have been loyal to you from day one, but we barely rank above the rest of the crew. Even without the shared blood, our shared past should make us more like brothers. Like me and Smee are to each other. Like Peter is with the Lost Boys. But fuck anyone who could ever give a shit about you, right?” He scoffs and swipes at his eyes. “You wanna know what I think? The secret wasn’t about protecting me. It was about protecting yourself.”

  I pound the counter with my fist. “You have no idea what kind of sadistic fuck Croc is. He would’ve used our relationship against us.”

  “Oh, you mean like he is now? Guess this means the cat’s out of the bag, huh? That’s fucking great,” he says, his words stained with sarcasm. “Glad I went twenty-two years without a brother so that the very reason I couldn’t have one ended up making my worst nightmares come true anyway.�
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  “Starkey—”

  Starkey pops up to his feet, sending the chair toppling over behind him. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing to me in here? Do you?”

  I stand and brace my fist against the glass. “I’m gonna get you out of here, I fucking swear it. I just need a little more time.”

  He shakes his head, causing some of his hair to fall forward, but not enough that I can’t see the fresh tears gathering in his silver eyes before he blinks them back. “Don’t do me any more favors…Captain.”

  And with that, he hangs the phone up, turns, and shuffles away.

  He bangs on the door to be let out as I bang on the glass to get his attention. I yell his name and pound with my fists and the flat of my hands, even the end of the receiver, not giving a shit if I bust the phone or scratch the plexi. I need him to turn around, to come back, to listen to me, anything, anything but walk away from me.

  But it’s no use.

  The door is pushed open by the guard, and Starkey walks through it without a second glance in my direction. Then the door slams shut…and he’s gone.

  He hates me he hates me he hates me.

  I fucked up. I fucked up bad, and I can’t fix it, even if I could get Starkey out of here right now. He’s a mere shell of the easygoing, eager-to-please, quick-to-laugh kid he was six months ago. Once the innocence is stripped away, there’s no getting it back. I know that better than anyone.

  I feel sick and helpless and murderous. Like I could puke until I’m empty or scream until my throat bleeds or kill someone until they bleed.

  That’s when my cell phone rings. Thinking it’s Smee or maybe even John, I pull it out from my back pocket. But the contact picture staring back at me isn’t a playful Irishman or the tatted version of a certain LEO. It’s an image of a crocodile I’d grabbed from Google.

  Taking a deep breath in through my nose, I remind myself that I can’t promise to end his life. Whether I like it or not, he holds all the cards right now, or so he thinks. I can’t show him my hand; it’s too early for that. His goal with this was to break me down and keep me in line, so I have to give him what he wants. For now.

  “Was that fun for you, old man?”

  “Come on, now, you don’t think I enjoy hurting you, do you, James?”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” I say, my tone defeated for his sake. “How long have you known?”

  “Shortly before I had him arrested.” I can hear his smile and blatant pride through the phone. “I’m not stupid. I know my ambitions aren’t yours. You play your part, but you lack the sense of urgency I need from a captain. So I finally looked in your file and found something to motivate you. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the white-haired kid is actually your baby brother. Incarcerating him was a no-brainer.”

  “And today,” I say, referring to this whole fucking charade he put me and Starkey through, “this was just for kicks? To remind me who pulls my strings?”

  “No, this is because you’ve been slacking,” he growls, his harsh ire slicing through my eardrum. “This was to show you that your poor brother’s life hasn’t been a picnic in there, but it’ll get a hell of a lot worse if you don’t redouble your efforts to move this product. A lot worse.”

  Fucking hell. Starkey won’t survive worse.

  My body vibrates, fighting to keep the bear trap of control snapped shut on my basest instincts. Without it, I’d be tracking him down with a single-minded purpose: to once and for all, end Fred Croc. I doubt John has enough sway with the FBI to get me off Murder One, and rotting in prison for the rest of my miserable life means I leave Starkey on his own. On the other hand, he’ll always have Smee. Forfeiting my freedom to spare the world from a sadistic tyrant is quicker than waiting for this undercover bullshit to work. If it even works at all.

  “Even loyal dogs can turn on their owners if provoked, Croc.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” he sneers. “I’ve made sure that if anything happens to me, your brother’s as good as dead. You hear me, Hook?”

  Grinding my teeth into dust, I grate out, “Yeah. I hear you.”

  “Good. Do not fail me—or your brother—more than you already have.” Maniacal laughter echoes through my head before I manage to end the call.

  My cell drops from my hand to the counter where I brace myself as air saws in and out of my lungs, the thread of my control fraying with every exhale…and then it snaps. Hatred—for Croc, for myself, for a system that failed us as kids and set all this in motion—rips through me from the bottom of my black soul until I let out a deafening roar and tear the visitor’s phone off the partition wall to whip it across the room.

  Reining myself back in, I plow my hands through my hair, fisting it at the scalp and pulling until the pain makes my eyes water. I can’t lose my shit, not now. My need for vengeance is what kept my baby brother in harm’s way. I was so goddamn naive to think I could get the upper hand on the monster who’s controlled my every move from the time I was nine.

  I was so fucking stupid, and now Starkey’s paying the price. And if I don’t get him out of here soon, he might end up paying it with his life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hook

  Then

  Age 9

  * * *

  “James, would you like a doughnut?”

  My eyes whip up from the plate in the middle of the table to the old lady sitting across from me. Her name is Mrs. Anderson. She has silver hair and rosy cheeks, and she hasn’t stopped smiling since my caseworker, Miss Janell, dropped us off. It’s kinda weirding me out. The only time Mama smiled was after using her “happy kit” or if she wanted me to do something for her. Since I don’t think Miss Janell would bring me to someone else like Mama, I’m guessing she wants something.

  “They’re jelly-filled,” she says, pushing the plate closer to me before checking on my brother who’s playing with some blocks on the floor.

  My mouth is watering. I really, really want one. But what’s it gonna cost me? I shift in my seat and fist my hands in my lap under the table. As much as I want it, I hate what comes with getting special treats.

  Remember when I bought you that ice cream cone, James? Be a good boy and feed your brother, then give him a bath, or I won’t get you any more ice cream.

  Here’s a candy bar. Share it with your brother tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow.

  James, bring me my happy kit… Don’t tell me what I need, you ungrateful little shit! You don’t need to play with friends, that’s what I gave you a brother for, so bring me my kit and fucking play with him!

  That was the last thing Mama ever said to me. After I took the kit to her and Officer Ricky—he came over after work all the time—they stuck the needle in their arms, then stumbled down the hall to her room.

  My mom had lots of guys she did that with. Sometimes they passed out right away. Sometimes they made noises I didn’t want to hear, so I’d take the baby out of the apartment and sit in the stairwell until they stopped.

  But that last time, there weren’t any noises. I was in the kitchen feeding my brother our last can of SpaghettiOs when I heard Officer Ricky freaking out in Mama’s bedroom. I ran in and found him shaking her and yelling at her to wake up but she didn’t move. When he put his fingers on her neck and then backed up real fast, I knew. My mom was gone.

  I thought he would call for help—we didn’t have a phone but he was a cop, so I know he did—but he didn’t. He grabbed his shirt and gun belt and told me that if I ever told anyone he was there, he’d make sure I never saw my brother again. Then he left.

  On her better days, Mama liked to talk about life lessons. I didn’t always listen, but as the door shut behind Officer Ricky, I remembered one of her favorites. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s the truth, James. It’s their actions—what they do—that speaks the truth. That day I learned to never trust a police officer. And if I couldn’t trust the “good guys,” there probably wasn’t anyone I could
trust. Even if I’d asked a neighbor for help, they’d just call the cops and then what? Would Officer Ricky really take my brother away? I couldn’t risk it.

  So I stayed in the apartment and did what I always did: I took care of my brother. I didn’t cry over Mama. Kids and babies can cry but I had to be Starkey’s parent, and parents shouldn’t cry.

  After a couple days I opened the window in her bedroom, then closed the door and put a towel under it because she started to stink bad. We ran out of food and diapers after five days, and when I tried to steal some from the corner store, I got caught. Cops showed up, but I didn’t tell them who I was or where I lived. That’s when they called Miss Janell. She said she wasn’t part of the police, so I told her about Mama so I could get back to Starkey. But I kept my mouth shut about Officer Ricky.

  Now me and my brother are here, at some Lost Boys school or something. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but I’m guessing it could be worse. At least we’re still together.

  “Usually we don’t give out big snacks right before lunch, but something tells me a doughnut won’t ruin your appetite,” Mrs. Anderson says.

  She’s still smiling. It doesn’t look like the weird kind of smiles Mama had, though. Maybe she’s not all bad. “What do I have to do?”

  Her mouth curves down for the first time. “What do you mean?”

  “If I have a doughnut. What do if I have to do for it?”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, her hands pressing over her cross necklace, “you don’t have to do anything. We don’t use food as punishments or rewards here. You’ll get three meals plus snacks or special treats every day. All you’re expected to do is your schoolwork, which you’ll get help with, and then you get to play with the other boys. Sometimes we’ll take trips to the park and go for walks. And Mr. Anderson loves baseball, so he likes taking everyone to the occasional game.