"No," Liora whispered to her reflection. "No, that can't be right. They wouldn't....."
But they had drugged her. They had watched her drink poisoned wine and said nothing. They had let her be taken. Marcus, her brother, with whom she'd laughed just hours before. Celeste, her sister, who'd hugged her goodbye. Her mother, Queen Elara, who'd barely looked at her during that last dinner. They'd all known. And they'd let it happen.
Liora's legs gave out. She sank to the floor, her back against the wall, and realized with crystal clarity that she'd never really mattered to them at all. She'd been a chess piece. A pawn to be sacrificed when the game required it.
"Princess!" The female guard's voice echoed from the main room. "You've been in there for five minutes! Get out here before we come in and drag you out!"
Liora forced herself to stand. She washed her face one more time, trying to erase the evidence of her tears, and walked back into the cage. The guards were waiting, looking annoyed.
"Trying to hide?" the male guard asked.
"No," Liora said quietly. "Just trying to think."
"Well, don't think too hard," the female guard said. "You might hurt yourself."
The music was still blaring. The lights were still blinding. And Liora was still trapped with no way out. She sat down in the center of the cage, careful not to disturb the photographs, and made a decision.
She couldn't sleep. She couldn't escape. She couldn't even defend herself effectively. But she could survive. She could endure this torture until her mind was clear enough to think. To plan. To figure out who had framed her and why. And then, somehow, some way, she would prove her innocence.
Not for Thessian, who had already decided she was guilty. Not for the guards, who didn't care. But for herself.
Because Princess Liora Ashenbane had spent twenty-two years being nobody. Being nothing. Being the invisible child who didn't matter. And if she was going to die in three weeks, if she was going to have her throat ripped out by an Alpha King who hated her, then she was going to die knowing the truth. She was going to die knowing she'd fought back.
Even if she had no idea how to fight. Even if she'd never been strong. Even if the odds were impossible. She would try.
"You okay over there, Princess?" the male guard asked mockingly. "You've got a weird look on your face."
Liora looked up at him, and for the first time since waking in this cage, she didn't look away.
"I'm innocent," she said clearly. "And before this is over, I'm going to prove it."
The guards laughed. But Liora didn't look away.
Somewhere in this building was an Alpha King consumed by grief and rage. Somewhere in Valeria was a family who'd betrayed her. Somewhere was the truth about who really killed Aria Nightfang. And Liora was going to find it. She just had to survive long enough to start looking.
The music pounded. The lights blazed. The exhaustion pulled at her like quicksand. But Liora stayed awake. And she started counting the hours until she could begin fighting back.
Sixty-one hours to go.
By the twentieth hour, Liora's hands wouldn't stop shaking.
She'd tried everything to stay awake, standing, pacing, doing jumping jacks until her legs gave out, reciting every poem and story and scrap of knowledge she'd ever learned in the palace library. But her body was rebelling against her will. Her eyelids felt like they had weights attached to them, and her thoughts were becoming sluggish and disconnected, slipping through her mental grasp like water through cupped hands.
The guards had changed shifts twice now, bringing new faces but the same cold eyes and cruel smiles. The current pair seemed to take particular pleasure in their assignment. The man, introduced by his partner as "Darius", kept throwing things at the cage bars: coins, pebbles, anything that would make noise and jolt her alert when her head started to droop. The woman, "Kira", was worse. She'd pulled up a chair just outside the cage. She was reading aloud from what appeared to be the incident report from the attack, her voice a clinical monotone as she described each death in excruciating detail, how long each victim had suffered, how many bullets it took to kill them.
"Subject seventeen," Kira read with bored precision, "female, age thirty-four, died from multiple silver bullet wounds to the chest and abdomen. Estimated time of death, 1:47 AM. Subject eighteen, male, age six....."
"Stop," Liora whispered, pressing her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to block out the words. "Please stop."