“They did fail to protect her,” he said. “They should have known I wasn’t myself when I ordered them to leave.”
“Of course.”
He looked at me a long moment, as if he couldn’t tell whether I was being facetious or not. “You and I, we’re alike,” he said at last. “More alike than my own daughter is to me.”
I swallowed hard. The realization that he knew I wasn’t his daughter sat uneasily inside me. I didn’t know what he’d do with it, why he’d even kept me around. Sure, the country had seen the queen pregnant, and they expected another baby, as unusual as it was for ocelots to have multiple children. Still, he could have sent me away to live in a convent or with some family of nobles, letting me be raised by nannies in some remote location where he didn’t have to think of me ever again. My mother had probably refused to do that when I was young, but once she was gone…
“How are we alike?” I asked, though people had been telling me all my life that I had his temperament.
“We’re ambitious,” he said. “No matter how much we have, we want more. More status. More wealth. More power.”
“I think you’ll find that our reasons for that are very different.”
“Does it matter the reason?” he asked. “All your life, you’ve ingratiated yourself to Camila, knowing she’d be queen. You’ve always wanted to be close to the throne. I never stopped you, so maybe this insurrection was inevitable. The truth is, I admire your shrewdness, Itzel.”
“You make it sound like I was scheming on her all along,” I said. “I was never planning to take the throne from her.”
“And yet, here you are,” he said. “I heard you got every single one of the amulets for her. I’m not sure which one of you to admire more—you, for your ambition and tenacity in getting them, or her, for playing you so beautifully that she didn’t have to lift a finger to get them. Her way is certainly more suited to a queen, you must admit.”
“She doesn’t deserve them,” I said. “Or the men that came with them.”
“Or maybe she played the amulet game just a little bit better than you did,” he said. “There are no rules for acquiring them. You both played to your strengths. You used your body, as would be expected of the High Priestess, and she used her mind.”
“Thanks for making me sound like a common prostitute.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I would never have allowed a common prostitute to accompany our future queen on her tour. But I wanted to know what you’d do as much as what she would. That’s why I sent you with her. I’m glad to see I’ve raised you both so well. Both my daughter and my ward served me just as expected.”
“You know what I am,” I stated, already knowing that he did. The men would have told Camila, and she’d have shared that information with him, just as they’d told her where I’d stashed the amulets with Shadow that morning.
“I suspected,” he said. “You always had the same sensual nature as your mother. When she died, the magic was passed on, and it didn’t take an idiot to know Camila would never contain such sexual magic. Of course, I couldn’t know for sure until one of you reached eighteen. It could have passed to someone else entirely, if neither of you possessed the capacity for such great magic.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t throw me down here in the dungeon instead of letting me go with Camila, then,” I muttered. “You could have been siphoning off my magic all this time.”
“I could have,” Father mused, folding his hands behind his back. “But I have other plans for you.”
A shiver went down my spine. “What does that mean?”
“I tried to interfere with fate after you were born,” he said, pacing back and forth on the hard packed dirt outside my cell. “I thought a mere human couldn’t contain such magic, so I would make you a mere human. I wanted to make sure it was my daughter who inherited the greatest magic in this world, the magic to make life on earth possible. But now I see the fates had decided long ago that as king, I should have access to this magic no matter where it came from.”
I stared at him, wanting to laugh at the incredulous claims he was making. Instead, I asked the question that caught at the corner of my mind as he was speaking.
“What do you mean, you made me a human?”
“Well, obviously I didn’t make you anything,” he said, giving me a sour look. “I didn’t make you at all. But I prevented you from being a shifter.”
My heart nearly stopped in my chest, and I gaped at him. “But… How? I thought only the first child of a shifter couple—” I broke off, realizing the answer to my own question was right in front of me. I wasn’t the second child of Mom and King Ocelot. I was the first child of Mom and Tsewang, my birth father.
I swallowed so hard I could hear it echo through the dim basement cell. “I’m a shifter?”
“No,” King Ocelot said, holding up a hand. “You’re a human. And, apparently, the High Priestess.”
“What did you do?” I growled, clutching the bars and glaring my hatred at him. “When you were trying to make sure Camila got Mom’s magic when she died, what did you do?”
“I had your feline spirit… Removed.”
“What?” I breathed. “How is that possible?” I remembered Balam telling me if his cloak was stolen, he couldn’t shift. That losing his jaguar would be like losing half of himself. A shifter’s animal was as important as their human, like a soul with animal instincts and powers a man wouldn’t have without them. You couldn’t separate them. Could you?
“It’s not easy, but if you get it right at the start, before a shifter has ever shifted into their animal form, when their cub isn’t fully developed, it’s possible. It requires a strong shifter like me, though. Not any shifter can separate a cub from a human baby.” He looked so smug with himself, as if he’d accomplished something worthwhile and not stolen the soul of a child.
“What did you do with my ocelot?” I asked through clenched teeth. I felt as if a hole was being torn in my chest. I could hardly breathe, and my head swam. I wanted to do the impossible, to shift into an animal form and rip his heart out with my teeth.
“You wouldn’t have been an ocelot,” he said, his brows drawing together in a frown. “You would have been some kind of… Crossbreed.”
“What did you do with her?” I growled, my knuckles aching with how hard I was clenching my fists inside the cuffs. If I let go of my anger, I’d fall to the floor and never get up, or I’d reach through the bars and try to strangle my father with the chain between my hands, and he’d kill me on the spot.
“I disposed of it,” he said, his lips curling down in disgust. “It was unnatural. An abomination. And you were nothing more than a newborn. You can’t remember that. Don’t act so outraged, Itzel. I didn’t have to tell you this. You’d never have known the difference.”
Rage boiled in my head, pulsing red at the corners of my vision. All my life, I’d been told every fucking day that I wasn’t special because I wasn’t a shifter, that I was common, that I was unimportant. All the years feeling like I was nothing, that I was inferior, and it was all because of him. He’d made me that way on purpose, hoping that it would ensure Camila got Mom’s magic when she died. Surely a common human had no such capacity for magic.
I’d rather him have sent me to live in a convent somewhere in the country. I’d rather he’d sent me halfway across the world, shipped me off to the Snow Leopard Nation the way he’d shipped Tadeu away when he’d become a tiger. If my father was already dead, I could have been raised by Jetsun or anyone, anywhere. I’d given King Ocelot credit for raising me, despite all the things he’d done to my mother and countless others. Now I saw that he deserved no credit. He was purely evil, and nothing could ever redeem him.
“That’s why I turned into a cheetah,” I muttered, mostly to myself. The others had told me that shouldn’t have happened, that after Kenosi’s cheetah healed me, it should have left me. If it didn’t, and somehow it stayed inside me, it still shouldn’t have made me into
a shifter. Lord Balam had told me that was impossible. Now I knew why it had happened that way. I’d always been a shifter, but without a feline form to shift into. When an animal spirit entered my body, it had filled the empty cavity inside me, and I’d shifted as I was always meant to do.
I wondered now if that accounted for my loneliness as a child, the ache that formed inside me when my family left to go to shifter events. Maybe it wasn’t just that I felt left out. Maybe some deep, subconscious part of me longed not for their company, but the company of my feline companion. And that feeling of not being enough, maybe that had been born from the fact that my human side wasn’t all of me, that I was missing half of my being.
“You’re wrong,” I said, my voice strong but quiet. “I may not have known what the difference was, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it every fucking day of my life.”
The king stopped his pacing and wheeled to face me. “What would you have had me do? It was one thing to cover up your mother’s indecent acts when she was far from our nation, at the international conference. When we found out she was pregnant, I let her keep it. I didn’t know for sure that you weren’t mine until you were born, and by then, it was too late. The country had seen that she would have a child. The moment you shifted, it would have been obvious that you weren’t mine. You wouldn’t have looked like an ocelot, and even if we could have put some kind of disguising spell on you, that wouldn’t be enough, either. We couldn’t have had a second shifter child. A second child of ours would be human. So I made you human.”
“You killed a cub,” I said flatly, though my heart quelled at the thought of that little ocelot-snow leopard baby being torn from me and discarded like a tumor. “My cub.”
“It was that or kill you both,” he snapped. “Would you rather not be here at all?”
“Did Mom know?”
“No,” he said, turning away. “I did it as soon as you were born, before she ever left the doctor.”
“She didn’t wonder?”
“I told her it must have been a doctor’s mishandling during your birth.”
“I’m guessing that doctor didn’t live to dispute your story.”
“To die for your king is an honor.”
We stared each other down for a long moment.
“I couldn’t be a cuckhold king,” he said at last. “I wasn’t going to look like a fool to my own people. I could have killed your mother instead. I could have exposed you and your mother for what you both were and had her executed for treason for her indiscretion. Would that have been better?”
Of course it wouldn’t. She was the one good thing about my childhood. She’d always made me feel like I was as good as Camila, like I wasn’t inferior because I wasn’t a shifter. She’d loved me, which was apparently something that was hard to come by in our family.
“And now you’re going to execute me for treason, anyway,” I said. “All that work to hide what I am was for nothing.”
“I could do that,” he said. “Or we could work together to find a way out of this predicament. You’ve put me in a tough position, but I’m a reasonable man, Itzel. You know that. I think we can work something out.”
I should have been happy, but I had a feeling his proposal wasn’t going to be much better than execution.
“What’s the offer?” I asked.
“You’re like me, but you’re also like your mother,” he said. “The people love you. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Camila is shrewd, but people don’t always like shrewd, do they? You’re more… Accessible. I allowed you to mingle with them as much as I did because I hoped that one day, you would bring their love to Camila through your own love for her. But I’m afraid the time for that alliance has passed.”
“An alliance?” I asked. That implied that he thought my presence was valuable, maybe as valuable as hers.
“Even if I could talk you into it, I don’t think you could convince her,” he said. “I never thought she’d be the High Priestess, anyway. There was a chance, of course. But now that I know it’s you… You have such power, Itzel. More than your sister. More even than me. You have one little problem, though.”
“I’m on death row?” I said, knocking the cylindrical cuffs against the bars.
“That’s right,” he said. “It’s within my power, and in fact, completely acceptable for me to deliver whatever sentence I see fit. You have committed unforgivable betrayals to your country, after all.”
“Get to the point.”
“It’s a king’s job to sentence a traitor as he sees fit. What that sentence is… That’s up to you.”
“I’m listening.”
“You have something I want,” he said. “And I have something you want. There’s only one thing standing in our way.”
“What, exactly, are you proposing?” I asked.
“You want your freedom,” he said. “I want your magic.”
“You want me to let you siphon off some magic, and you’ll let me go?”
“Just like your mother,” he said, shaking his head. “So nearsighted. Think bigger, Itzel. You have the most powerful magic in the world. You can literally stop the seasons from turning. Do you realize what we could do with that?”
“We?”
“Camila isn’t this nation’s only princess.”
I slid my cuffs through the bars, resting against the chain between them as I stared out at my father, the king who had groomed my sister in his image all my life, who had coaxed her to strength and used me as a crutch to keep her upright when she wanted to fall. I thought nothing he could say would surprise me anymore, but he kept getting more despicable with each revelation.
“You want to kill your own daughter?” I asked at last.
“We don’t have to go that far,” he said. “Right now, her pride is hurt, and she won’t think of even speaking to you, let alone having you help her rule. But when she sees that I’m on your side…”
“She’ll be devastated,” I said. “She’ll never forgive us.”
“She’ll cave,” King Ocelot said, his voice hard. “She’s clever, but she’s not strong.”
“So you’ve turned on her,” I said. “For what, exactly? What are you getting out of this?”
“I’ll be king for a year and a half more,” he said. “You’ll take over when you’re twenty. You already got all the amulets, so you won’t have to do another tour. In the eyes of the ICFN, you and Camila both gained all the amulets. You are both eligible in their eyes. It’s our own country whose laws of inheritance might prevent you from taking the throne. And luckily for you, the one person who can change those laws is on your side.” He gave me a sly smile, like we were in on this together already.
“You’d betray your own daughter for one more year on the throne?”
“It’s so much more than that,” he said, his eyes glittering with excitement. “Don’t you see, Itzel? I’ll have your magic to work with in whatever way I want. During that year, you’ll be at my side, learning the ins and outs of ruling and using your magic to influence important world leaders. We can get whatever I want from them. And when you take the throne, you’ll keep me by your side as your closest advisor. Together, we can do so much, more even than I accomplished with your mother. She didn’t have the drive like you do. The world will be ours, Itzel!”
I remembered all the times I wanted to sit in on diplomatic meetings with him, but he wouldn’t let me. All the times he pushed me aside or brushed me off in favor of Camila, the golden girl, the daughter of destiny. All the times I’d wanted everything he was offering—time with him, learning how to run the kingdom, being someone important, having his admiration. But it all seemed hollow now. The admiration of a monster meant nothing to me.
“Clearly, you trust me more than I trust you,” I said.
“Oh, there will be contracts to sign in blood,” he said. “Vows for your life. There will be guards who remain loyal to me, ready to swing the blade at your first betrayal. I will make new provisions
during my year as king to let you take the throne, even though you’re not an ocelot shifter. You have ocelot blood, and the people need not know it’s not royal blood. But my guards will know. They’re sworn to the throne, not an individual, and the moment you make a move against me, you’ll be treated as a traitor to the ocelot throne—because you will be one. You have no claim to the throne because you’re not descended from the royal bloodline.”
“I see.”
“They’ll protect that throne by treating you as the traitor you would be if you turned against me—the only true royalty in the palace.”
“So, really, you’ll still be king.”
“Oh, no,” he said, a smirk toying with his lips. “I’ll be a silent partner, an advisor shaping policy and influencing your decisions behind the scenes. I’ll no more be king than you would have been queen if you’d held the same position in Camila’s court.”
I swallowed hard, remembering all the times I had used similar words about my role in Camila’s reign. Was he right about me? Had I always been gunning for more power, even more than I’d admitted to myself?
“I’ll be a figurehead, though,” I said.
“Think of it more as… A secret weapon,” he said. “The greatest the world has ever known. Your magic can change the shape of the world. You can withhold a country’s crops, their livelihood. You can bless them with abundance. You can make all their royals barren, end their bloodline, with a flick of your wrist.”
“What if I don’t want to do that?”
“You’ll have a say,” he said. “But you’ll also be a queen. That’s what you always wanted. The power, the prestige, the adoration of our entire country. You’re smart enough to recognize a good thing when you have it and not lose it all over a little dispute regarding the use of your magic, aren’t you, Itzel? Those uses of magic won’t even affect us.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“There is none,” he said, his lips flattening into a thin, white line. “I can execute you for the treason you’ve committed by attempting a coup to take Camila’s place. But I think you’re smarter than that. You won’t let emotion cloud your judgment. You want the money and the power. After all, you brought home some of the world’s greatest shifters to surround you on the throne. A famous billionaire to give you all the riches you desire. A prince to give you a title even outside the Ocelot Kingdom. A monk to show the world how irresistible you are, that even a holy man gave up his practice for a night between your thighs.”
Fallen Princess Page 15