“Yes, I’m fucking hurt,” I snapped before I had a chance to reign myself in. I’d always had a temper, and I’d just been manhandled by my own mates, thrown across a room, and generally treated like the traitor he thought I was.
His eyes searched mine for a moment, and he lowered one knee to the floor, his voice dropping. “Are you injured?” he asked, his voice gentle even though he must hate me by now for my betrayal of his beloved.
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m going to put special cuffs on you,” he said. “They block magic.”
“Why do you have magic-suppressing cuffs?” I asked, shaking my hair from my eyes.
“They’re meant to keep us from shifting to escape.” He hesitated, his dark gaze searching mine. “Please don’t use your magic on me, Itzel.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, stung. But I was also aware of the fact that he had called me by my first name, like an equal, not using my title. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it tugged at my heart, despite my vow not to care about him anymore.
“Good,” he said. “Because that was absolute hell, what you did to me in the Lynx Commonwealth.”
“I—” I started to say I didn’t do anything to him, that it was an accident, but then I shut my mouth. He’d been just as affected as everyone else. I had influenced him with my magic, and of course Camila would have rebuffed any advances to keep herself pure. I’d been affected, too, so I knew it wasn’t unbearable—nowhere close to what the jaguar amulet had done to me—but that didn’t make it right. And it was probably a lot worse for someone who already loved and wanted a woman who didn’t love him back, who would never fulfill the need I’d put into him.
“I won’t,” I said quietly, my face burning with shame.
“Thank you,” Gabor said, sounding relieved. He took my hands and gently pulled them in front of me, securing them inside cuffs that resembled metal cups that covered my hands, with a chain between them that wrapped around each wrist.
“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to flog me or something?”
“You’re not resisting,” he pointed out. “I have no reason to be rough with you.”
“Thank you,” I said, my throat suddenly tight. “I… I really respect you, Gabor. I hope you know that.”
“The feeling is mutual,” he said under his breath, so low I thought I might have imagined it. Surely he couldn’t respect someone who was trying to overthrow his king. Or… Maybe he could. If Gabor had one thing, it was principles. Maybe he respected that I thought I was doing what was right, even if he disagreed.
“What’s taking so long?” Camila asked, stomping over. “Is she trying to lure you in with her indecent magic?”
“No, Your Grace,” Gabor said, giving the chain between my hands a tug. “Is that too tight?”
“Not tight enough,” Camila said, though I knew he’d meant the question for me. “She should be begging for mercy. Why are you going easy on a traitor?”
“She’s your sister, Your Grace.”
Camila snorted. “She stopped being my sister the day she stabbed me in the back.”
Now it was my turn to gape at her in disbelief. “You literally just made my True Mates fall in love with you. How much dirtier can you fight?”
“Tighten the cuffs, Gabor,” she said, turning a withering glare on him. Even with her nose smashed and blood dripping down the front of her shirt, she maintained her air of command. “Don’t stop until every single one of her fingers are broken and she’s blubbering like a baby. She doesn’t deserve to die with dignity. She betrayed our nation.”
“Is that really necessary?” Jetsun cut in.
“Who are you again?” Camila asked, arching a brow at him.
“Look, I don’t feel the way about Itzel that I did, but she’s still my True Mate,” he said.
“What about me?” she asked. “Do you feel that way about me?”
Jetsun swallowed, his cheeks going a little darker. “Yes,” he muttered, staring at the floor.
I thought my heart would die in that moment, that I’d simply stop living. He loved her. He really loved her.
But I couldn’t let myself think that way. If I died, they would stay in her control forever.
“Good,” Camila said. “Then you’ll want me to be happy. And what would make me happy is to hear my sister regretting what she’s done.”
“She can’t heal herself,” Prince Kwame pointed out. “She’s not a shifter.”
“She’s a traitor!” Camila screeched, specks of blood spraying from her lips and dotting the sleeve of Gabor’s uniform.
The men winced at her sudden, shrill outburst. But I’d seen this enough to know when she was losing her shit because she didn’t get her way. They’d get used to it.
Shadow exchanged a worried look with Lord Balam. “Right, but…”
Camila whirled on him. “You’re supposed to love me! She tried to kill me. Don’t you want to avenge me?”
“Well, yeah,” Lord Balam said. “But she’s no threat to you right now.”
“She needs to pay for what she’s done,” Camila raged. “And I’ll hold you all as traitors if you try to stop me.”
“We don’t belong to this nation,” Sir Kenosi pointed out. “We can’t be traitors to it.”
“You’re traitors to me,” Camila fumed. “To my heart.”
“Loving you doesn’t preclude having a moral code, Your Grace,” Gabor said.
“Yes, it does,” Camila snapped. “Loving me should come before everything. You’re loyal to me. You do everything I want. Why aren’t they following my orders?”
“Because you’re not their queen,” he said quietly.
“In other words, because you can’t threaten to behead us if we look at you wrong,” Tadeu said. “Yeah, you put some love potion shit on us, and for some fucking reason I feel like I’d jump in front of a bullet for you, so I guess it worked. But that doesn’t mean I want to watch someone suffer.”
“It doesn’t?” I asked, turning hopeful eyes to him. I didn’t know how the love potion worked, how it felt. I just knew Gabor had stopped looking at me like I was tearing his soul from his chest every time our eyes met. Now he looked at Camila that way.
“I treated you shitty,” Tadeu said with a shrug. “But I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t?” I asked, my heart squeezing. “And now you’re going to tell me?”
“I was pissed that you fucked someone else the night I died,” he said. “Seemed like I meant nothing to you, while you’d meant everything to me.”
“You meant everything to me, too,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “I never stopped loving you. You of all people should know sex can be meaningless.”
He swallowed, frowning at the ceiling for a second. “Maybe I’ve been punishing you for that. But now… I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to bother me anymore.”
I should have been happy his resentment was gone, but his confession only made me realize more fully that he didn’t love me anymore. His anger, his hatred, was born out of love. Now that he no longer loved me, he no longer hated me, either.
I blinked hard, trying to stop the tears from falling, but one slipped through my lashes. I started to raise a hand to brush it away, but they were still encased in the iron cuffs. Gabor saw my dilemma and stepped in front of me, tipping my chin up. He gently wiped the tear from my cheek with his thumb, meeting my gaze as he did. I told myself I should be happy he no longer looked at me with pain in his eyes. I’d expected him to look at me with complete, stony indifference, the way he had before the amulet tour. But his eyes were neither cold nor hot.
There was concern there, even tenderness. He may not love me the way he loved Camila, but he still cared about me in some way.
The realization strengthened me. It gave me hope. The ocelot amulet didn’t change everything.
“What are you doing?” Camila demanded. “Don’t even think ab
out trying to use your magic on my guard.”
“I don’t have to,” I said. “Gabor is a good man. He won’t hurt a defenseless woman even for you.”
I was gambling on that one. I had no idea if he would hurt a defenseless woman or not. I only knew that right now, appealing to his sense of honor was all I had.
“I don’t understand,” Camila huffed. “They did everything for you!”
“I never asked them to torture someone.”
“Do it!” Camila snarled at Gabor. “Crush her hands to a pulp.”
“Your Grace,” he said, cutting his gaze to me. “The king wants her unharmed.”
“I don’t care,” she snarled. “I want her to suffer for her crimes!”
“You know I cannot defy the king’s orders.”
“Then what use are you?” she demanded. “I don’t need you in my guard if you won’t obey me. Go guard the horses. You’re dismissed.”
Gabor hesitated only a moment, and I could have sworn there was sympathy in his gaze when it met mine. But he turned away and left the room without another word.
“I guess love doesn’t make people into brainless, heartless puppets,” I said. “Shocking, isn’t it?”
“Oh, someone gag her, please,” Camila said. “I can’t stand to listen to her inane drivel another minute.”
Seemingly uninterested in torturing me if Gabor wasn’t involved, she turned and flounced out the door. I had to wonder if maybe she did feel something for him. If she was hoping he would prove his love was real, even deeper than the potion made it feel. But that was the thing about dabbling in magic. She’d never know what he could have felt without it.
I spent about two seconds feeling bad for her, and then my former lovers, now lovestruck by her against their heart’s wishes, took me by the shoulders and marched me toward the palace where my father would determine my fate. Any sympathy I’d felt for my sister quickly vanished.
In the palace, the guards took me from my lovers, who didn’t even spare a backwards glance. I felt hollow and shellshocked as I was dragged down the stone stairs to the dank basement prison where convicts huddled behind bars, awaiting their sentences. The guards pushed me inside and slammed the iron gate.
“Have at ‘er, boys,” one of them said, a taunt in his voice. “You don’t get a woman down here too often. Enjoy it while you can. Might be your last taste of pussy before you die.”
They walked away chuckling, and suddenly, I had a much more pressing problem than my sentencing. I turned to squint into the dimly lit, dirt-floored cell. There were five other inmates, all of them male, all of them staring at me with unnerving intensity. They ranged from my age to my father’s, but all of them had a tough, angry look about them. Their tattered clothes showed off dirty skin covered in scars and tattoos. One was missing an eye, and between the five of them, they probably only had enough teeth to make a full set.
I flattened myself against the bars, staring back at them. There wasn’t one damn thing I could do if they decided to take turns with me. The cuffs still bound my hands and blocked my magic, and even if my hands had been free, I couldn’t have fought off five men without a weapon.
“Well, well, well,” one man said slowly, his eyes gleaming as he looked me over like a lion eyeing a juicy piece of meat. “Guess it’s our lucky day.”
“Wait,” I said, my mind racing for a way out of this. I could tell them I had True Mates, that they’d come down here and make them pay if they touched me.
But that was an empty threat. The guys wouldn’t come to my rescue now, and the prisoners would probably call my bluff, anyway. Humans didn’t have True Mates.
I could tell them I was a shifter, but they probably didn’t care about status, either. If anything, that would make them resent me more. They’d spent their whole lives being treated as if they were less than the ocelots. These guys were Tadeu’s type but rougher, and they had nothing to lose. They wouldn’t respond to threats. They didn’t care if someone came down and beat them up. They were already probably going to die in the arena for the king’s entertainment.
“Yeah, wait,” said the guy with the missing eye. “Aren’t you the princess?”
I swallowed hard. Well, fuck. So much for them not knowing I was anyone special.
“Shit, this’ll be even more fun than I thought,” said a third guy, this one wearing nothing but a scrap of stained, greyish cloth to cover his genitals. He grinned, revealing jagged, broken teeth.
“The king wouldn’t throw his own daughter to us,” said a fourth guy, his voice a lisp since he had not a single tooth in his mouth. “It must be a trap.”
“Well, girl,” said One-Eye. “What you got to say for yourself?”
“I am Itzel,” I said.
“Ooh, boy,” said Hungry Eyes. “If it’s a trap, I’ll risk it. Most men can’t say they’ve had princess pussy before they die.”
“Yeah,” said Nearly Naked. “Might as well go out on top—literally.”
They all chuckled and then went back to sizing me up.
“Who first?” asked the last guy, a giant in the corner with snake tattoos ringing both arms and extending up his neck.
“Look,” I said. “This is what they want you to do. Turn on each other like animals. But we’re not animals. We’re people. We can do more than fight and fuck. We can plot our escape. Let’s find a way out of here, and I’ll pardon you.”
This time, they all burst out laughing in earnest.
“She thinks she’s getting out,” howled One-Eye.
“Hate to break it to you, Princess, but this is the execution block,” said Toothless. “No one’s getting out.”
“Which means that pussy’s looking awfully tasty right now,” said Hungry Eyes.
“I haven’t had pussy in years,” said Nearly Naked. “Not since the last time they threw us a bone.”
“And we’ve never had royal pussy,” said One-Eye. “Think it’s got diamond lips?”
“How long have you been in here?” I asked, taking another look at the greasy rags hanging from them. All but one still wore clothes, but I couldn’t tell what color they’d been. Now, they were all the color of dirty dishwater, and the skin that showed through the holes and missing pieces of clothing was no cleaner. None of them wore shoes, and they all had varying lengths of greasy hair hanging in limp strings from their heads, though Tattoo’s head was mostly bald with just a ring of indeterminate-colored dark hair around the edges.
“About a hundred years,” said Toothless, offering me a gummy smile.
“I thought you said this was the execution block,” I said. “I’ve only been gone a few months, and my father had someone executed right before I left. How have you been here that long?”
“Not literally a hundred years,” said One-Eye, laughing mirthlessly.
“I know that,” I said. “But you’ve obviously been here a while.”
“I was keeping track, but I lost count when this asshole erased my tallies,” said Tattoos, nodding at Hungry Eyes.
“You couldn’t even count that high,” Hungry Eyes shot back. “You were just making marks for nothing.”
“I can count the number of teeth I knocked out of you,” Tattoos said, punching a fist into his palm. “Ready to lose some more?”
“Let’s just figure this out first,” I said, holding up a hand.
“Why’s it matter how long we’ve been here?” Nearly Naked said. “We’re never getting out. That’s all that matters.”
“But if the king means to execute you, why are you still here after all this time?” I asked. “Maybe it’s important.”
They all stared at me blankly for a second.
“How could it be important?” One-Eye asked at last.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we should figure it out.”
“How about that pussy?” Hungry Eyes said.
“If we can get you out of here, you can find all the pussy you want,” I said. “Now, what did you do to g
et thrown down here?”
They all stared at me another long moment.
“What did you do?” Toothless asked.
“I tried to overthrow the king,” I said. “Well, really my sister, who will be taking the throne… Any time now.”
My throat tightened at the thought. Shadow would have given up the last two amulets by now. But I knew better than to think I’d missed her coronation. The pomp and circumstance took weeks to prepare. They might have announced a date, but that’s all that would have happened yet. Until the ceremony, she’d enjoy leading my mates around like circus ponies and teasing them mercilessly. I wondered if any of them would get to her, if they’d treat her like they’d treated me. She’d execute them if they did, even if they weren’t from our nation.
But I was also worried about what that would do to her. She was stronger and sneakier than I’d given her credit for, but she wasn’t equipped to handle the physical and emotional toils of their brutal sexual desires.
I realized the prisoners were all staring at me again. “What?” I asked.
“You tried to overthrow King Ocelot?”
“Camila,” I corrected.
“Princess Camila is twenty?” asked Nearly Naked.
I nodded. “And she’s about to take the throne. But she’s a monster like our father, so I tried to take it from her. Since I’m here with you, you can guess how well that went.”
“I’ve been here… Six years, then,” Toothless said.
I gulped, my blood running cold. “Six years?”
“I been here eight,” Nearly Naked said, a boastful tone in his voice, like he was proud he’d been here longer.
“I don’t remember,” Tattoos muttered. “I’m not real good at math. That’s why I was using tally marks before some asshole erased them.”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” Hungry Eyes growled. “There’s no use for a calendar in here. Every day is the same as the last and the next.”
“Know what I think?” One-Eye said.
“I know you’re going to tell us,” Hungry Eyes said.
“Shut up or I’ll be fitting myself with an eye tonight—yours.”
“What do you think?” I asked, trying to dispel the quarrel. Now I knew why there were all scarred up and missing teeth. They had nothing to do in the cell but fight each other.
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