Hook (Neverland Novels Book 2) Read online

  HOOK

  A Neverland Novel

  Gina L. Maxwell

  Contents

  Foreward

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Untitled

  Untitled

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Untitled

  About the Author

  Other Books By Gina L. Maxwell

  Copyright © 2019 Gina L. Maxwell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design: Jaycee DeLorenzo, Sweet ’N Spicy Designs

  * * *

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  * * *

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  * * *

  Editors: Rebecca Barney and Lea Schafer

  Created with Vellum

  Foreward

  PLEASE DO NOT SKIP THIS PAGE

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for picking up Hook! I’m so excited to take you into the seedier parts of Neverland for a truly epic love story unlike anything I’ve ever written. With that said, there are two things I want you to know so you can best determine how—or if—you continue from here.

  First, if you chose to read this because John works with the FBI and you love a good police procedural…this is not the book for you. Believe me, I had every intention of making everything as accurate as possible (as I do with all my characters/stories), but it wasn’t long before I realized I’d written myself into a corner with some of the things I wrote in Pan (book 1 in the series) and the timelines required to pull this book off.

  After struggling to fit my story to reality, I said screw it and decided to make reality fit my story. Because when it comes down to it, this isn’t a book on how government agencies work. It’s not even a book on how criminal organizations work (hint: I didn’t worry about those details, either). This is a book about two souls—one broken and one desperate to heal—coming together and fighting for their happily ever after.

  So I’m pulling the “creative license card” with this one, people. Just go with it and take the realistic specifics with a grain of salt, just like you do with Hollywood blockbusters. ;)

  Secondly, for those concerned about triggering content: Chapter 31 is the only scene that “shows” a past encounter of sexual assault. Nothing graphic or explicit is mentioned and it’s fairly brief, but you are aware of what’s happening as Hook is narrating his thoughts. If you’d rather play it safe and not read the full chapter, I have an alternative way to read it on my website that gives you a quick summary of the scene set up and then the rest of the chapter (after the trigger sensitive material) is posted in its entirety. When you get to Chapter 31, simply navigate back to this page and click on this link. www.ginalmaxwell.com/hook-chapter-31-alternative

  One last note: if you need it, there’s a Character Glossary in the back.

  As always, a thousand thanks for giving my book a spot on your shelf and a place in your heart. I hope you love Hook and John’s love story as much as I do.

  Literary love and kitten kisses,

  Gina

  Dedication

  For Captain James Hook

  * * *

  Never has a hero affected me so profoundly

  or been more deserving of a happily ever after.

  * * *

  “Always, Captain. Always.”

  Prologue

  Hook

  Four years earlier…

  Age 26

  Neverland, North Carolina

  * * *

  I’m getting more kids.

  Those were the words I overheard earlier today that froze the blood in my veins. Just like it froze every time I heard that same voice bark my name when I was younger.

  I’m getting more kids.

  Over my dead body.

  Fred Croc might have me on a short fucking leash, but I’ll be damned if I allow him to use the School for Lost Boys of Neverland to get a new crop of kids for his personal gain and sadistic pleasures. The school was supposed to be an orphanage—a place for boys without families to live and learn. Not with Croc running the show. As far as he was concerned, we were free labor for his chop shop and convenient targets when he wanted to blow off steam.

  Or worse.

  Never again.

  As I pull off the main road, I cut the headlights so I don’t alert Croc and his wife, Delia, in their house behind the school. The moon is less than half full, but it’s enough to see by as I drive toward the old, two-story building where I lived for nine years as a forgotten kid in the system. Nine eternal years that I try like hell to forget ever happened. Here’s hoping tonight hammers another damn nail in that coffin.

  I park in the grass a couple hundred feet away and pop the trunk to grab the two giant plastic containers. The night is quiet. Nothing but the sounds of cicadas buzzing, liquid sloshing at my sides, and grass rustling as I walk to the front stoop.

  Setting the cans down, I stare at the heavy wooden door and clench my fists to stop the tremors before they can start. I told myself I’d never come back here, not for anything. My life was never great—even before I was placed here, living with a junkie mom while caring for my baby brother as best I could was no fucking picnic—but here…this was where my nightmare began.

  I take three slow breaths through my nose, willing my heart to stop slamming against my ribs like a medieval battering ram. But the memories this place evokes—ones I’ve relegated to the darkest recesses of my mind—stir my sleeping demons. They’re so real I can practically feel them. Every minute I’m here, they’ll grow stronger, scratching and clawing their way to the surface. Every cell in my body wants to leave. I’m tempted. So fucking tempted. But I’m here to do a job, and if that means facing the ghosts of my past while I do
it, fine.

  They won’t win.

  I worked too damn hard to put this hell behind me.

  And I have. I’m fine.

  I’m fucking more than fine.

  “Jesus, this place looks like shit.” By the time I moved out, it hadn’t looked the greatest, but now… Now, I think I’ll be doing it a favor. It used to be a well-maintained brick colonial home, a place of hope run by people who were devoted to caring for children with nowhere to go. I’d gotten a brief taste of that utopia with the Andersons, the nice older couple who originally owned the school. But a few weeks after my brother and I arrived, they died in a car crash, and everything changed.

  Tracing the words on the weathered plaque nailed to the door, I remember Mrs. Anderson telling me this was her favorite quote.

  “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” ~ Mother Teresa

  Difficult? Maybe. But not impossible. It’s been a lifetime since I last hungered for love. I learned early on that love isn’t necessary to make it in this world, not where I come from. Strength, respect, and smarts. Those are the things that’ll get you somewhere. Those were the things I hungered for, and they made me into the man I am today. A man who’s not afraid to kick over the hornet’s nest.

  Or set it on fire.

  Bottom line, I’m not about to let Croc use this place as a front for his free child labor. And it sure as hell won’t become some new kid’s version of hell. Not while there’s still breath in my body.

  Armed with two gas cans, a Zippo, and a grudge the size of the Atlantic, I check the door and find it unlocked with the security system disarmed. Guess there’s no reason to secure an empty building with nothing of value to speak of. I slip inside and leave one can on the main floor, then carry the other to the kitchen where the enclosed staircase to the second floor is located.

  I pause at the bottom and peer into the narrow unlit passage. My mouth goes dry and my pulse kicks higher as the memories rush in. Croc thinks I’m just another one of his abused mutts, like a thing he’s beaten so much and for so long that I’m afraid to leave my owner. He couldn’t be more wrong.

  Tonight, I send Croc a message: GO. FUCK. YOUR. SELF.

  Climbing the stairs, I ignore the creaks trying to drudge up those demons, until I reach the room that spans the entire second story that served as our living quarters. It’s like a mini barracks, a dozen single beds with metal frames lining the walls. Each of us had a bed and one dresser drawer to hold our clothes. There were no toys or books, no televisions or video games. We only had each other, our imaginations, and Peter’s stories to entertain us. Not that I ever joined in with the other kids. I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t. I never subscribed to Pan’s dumbass theory that we were all family just because we lived under the same roof. We were orphans lumped together through circumstance. The end.

  Even still, this room had been my sanctuary. A small part of me hates to destroy the one place in the world I felt safe, but I don’t want this to have to be another kid’s sanctuary. So down it goes.

  I start on one end of the room and trail the gas along the brittle wood floor, over the beds, past the window we sometimes escaped through, and across the dressers until I get to the bathroom. It’s large and tiled with three toilet stalls, a community shower area with six sprayers, and six sinks lining the opposite wall under a long, rust-framed mirror.

  The rubber soles of my boots are nearly silent on the tile floor as I move to where I can see a specific corner of the showers. My gaze falls to the wall about a foot and a half from the floor where an inch-wide groove is worn down in the grout. I tuck my thumb into my fist out of pure muscle memory, then force myself to relax my hand. My thumb isn’t bleeding. It hasn’t in years.

  Turning away from the missing grout, I grip the edges of a sink until my knuckles turn as white as the porcelain. There’s a permanent sea of rage that lies beneath my surface like boiling lava. It burns with every injustice, every instance in my life someone treated me like trash. I can go from low simmer to volcanic eruption in seconds with the right trigger. And this whole goddamn place has them lurking around every fucking corner.

  A growl builds in my chest as the rage funnels into my arm and I explode, my fist smashing into the face of the man roaring back at me. Shards of glass litter the tiled floor where thick drops of blood leak from busted knuckles. Lungs heave and nostrils flare with shallow breaths as I stare through what’s left of the shattered mirror. I don’t see the twenty-six-year-old man with a muscular build and trim beard looking back at me. I see a fourteen-year-old boy with shaggy black hair and too-thin frame. I see guarded blue eyes—his innocence long gone and his innate hunger to be loved plucked out and crushed under a steel-toed boot. And he’s blaming me for his pain.

  Why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you stop him?

  Why didn’t you kill him?

  There it is. The million-dollar question. Answer? I was too scared. No matter how many times I wished for Croc’s death, I knew if I failed, the consequences would be unimaginable.

  “All in due time,” I tell the boy. “You’ll have your revenge. I fucking swear it.”

  I splash gas on anything that isn’t tile, then go back to the staircase and pour the rest of it behind me as I head down. Grabbing the full can, I make quick work of dousing the main floor—kitchen, living room, master bedroom where Croc and his wife stayed before they built their house out back, and the schoolroom…until I get to Croc’s old office.

  The door is closed, but I know what’s on the other side—a metal desk that always felt cold against my bare skin, a rolling office chair that squeaked when he shifted, a dusty file cabinet he never bothered to open with metal handles that dug into my chest and stomach. I was the only one he ever brought in there. He said I was privileged. I said we’d have to agree to disagree. At no point did I ever feel privileged to be singled out by Fred Croc, but I accepted it and made sure his “generosity” never went past me. It was the longest four years of my life, and I have no desire to see the inside of those walls again, even for this.

  Reaching back, I yank my T-shirt off and tuck half of it under the door, then pour enough gas to soak through to the other side. Of all fucking places, I’d hate for this to miss out on the cleansing baptism of my fire. If sins could leave stains behind like traces of gunpowder, this room would explode in a brilliant display of utter devastation.

  A dog barks off in the distance, pulling me back to the present. I don’t know if it’s a stray or Croc’s mongrel, but I can’t risk getting caught before I finish. Forcing my feet to move, I stride down the hall. On my way out, I grab a framed article hanging on the wall, smash the glass, and pull out the yellowed newspaper column about Fred and Delia taking charge of the orphanage. Then spill a trail of gas behind me as I cross the lawn to my car.

  Tossing the empty container to the side, I light a cigarette with my silver Zippo and take a long drag, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs. Exhaling, I stare at the side of the lighter where the engraved words “Captain Hook” are illuminated by the moonlight. It was a gift from Starkey—the last of us to finally “age out” of the system, one of my loyal Pirates…and my eighteen-year-old baby brother.

  Not that anyone knows that.

  Not even him.

  He still has that big-brother-hero-worship thing for me regardless. If I wasn’t sure he’d be okay with Smee and the other Pirates watching out for him, I wouldn’t go through with this. Starkey is my first and only priority, always has been. Which is why before I turned eighteen and was forced to leave the school, I made sure I had something big to hold over Croc’s head to keep him in line, and it worked. He was still a cruel asshole, but he never laid another hand on the kids after that.

  But if Croc is allowed to reopen the school, the shit starts all over with a new group of orphans. And I can’t let that happen. My leverage on him might spare them his worst, but even his best isn’t fit f
or a fucking goldfish, much less kids.

  Once I do this—once I destroy this last reminder—I can finally put my past behind me. I’m determined to do this, and I have no intentions on running. I want him to know it was me, and I’ll gladly serve the time. Because every minute spent in prison is one I don’t have to look my childhood tormentor in the eyes and do his bidding. I need a goddamn break. Since leaving Neverland isn’t an option—not until I find a way to bring him down—prison’s my only chance for a temporary escape.

  Flipping the Zippo open again, I light the wick and stare at dancing flame. I was a lot like it before Fred Croc came along. I might have been a little fucked up, but my fire was contained. Under the right person’s care, it could’ve stayed that way. Maybe even tamped out completely. Instead, Croc pumped it full of oxygen until it blazed out of control and ravaged everything good inside me.

  So, fuck him, and fuck this school.

  The split knuckles on my hand throb in time with my galloping heart. I ball up the newspaper article, light it with my Zippo, then drop it on the gas-soaked grass. It catches the fire with a satisfying whoosh and races down the invisible track, straight through the open front door, and into the building.