I clenched my fists. I wasn’t the one who’d killed him. I knew exactly who had, and why.
I repeated their names nightly.
Especially the one person I never saw coming.
“I was… betrayed. Framed. I thought I could trust someone, but it turns out he wasn’t on my side.”
Those words stung the most.
More than admitting I’d been outwitted.
It was the sheer fact that I’d been betrayed by my best friend, my first love, and that was the reason I was rotting alone in a dark cell, on a forgotten island.
Mazin had been the one to put me here.
Even just thinking his name had anger thrumming through my blood like the gathering of water behind a dam threatening to break loose. Soon, it would. But today, a slow exhale calmed the rage simmering beneath my skin.
“I can’t do much about it, not when I’m in here, and they out there.”
Noor toyed with the edge of her filthy kurta, the dirt coloring the garment so that it was crusted and gray. “And what if you weren’t in here anymore?”
I closed my eyes at her words, at how they latched on to my heart with sharp hooks and refused to let go. “If I wasn’t imprisoned anymore, I…”
I thought of my family, of my father who must be worrying about me. Then I thought of those who’d framed me.
Mazin to whom I’d entrusted my whole heart, for him to skewer it beneath his scimitar. Darbaran, the head of the palace guard who’d arrested me. Emperor Vahid who’d used me to get rid of a powerful political opponent without a thought about my life or my family. I curled my bruised and bloodied hands into tight fists.
If I were free, I would make them all pay the price for what they had done.
They would feel every bruise, every moment of humiliation and betrayal.
But somehow, I couldn’t say it. Not yet. Not when I’d only repeated these words to myself for the past year.
“I’m not sure.”
Noor gave me a look as though she didn’t believe me, as if she could see every thought I’d had for the past three hundred and sixty-five days and was aware I knew exactly what I would do as soon as I broke out of here.
She chewed the inside of her cheek.
“I want freedom,” she said finally. “I want it so badly I can taste it. But I also want retribution. Emperor Vahid stole my entire life from me. And I want it back.”
Her words were vehement, and suddenly we weren’t just two girls sitting in a prison cell together with no hope of a future. For a moment it felt like we might have the power to actually do something.
“And you’re right,” she said finally. “Digging on my own takes an awful long time.”
I stilled, afraid to move.
“It would be much faster with a partner.” She glanced over at me. “Though you’d need to recover first.” She reached forward, as if to touch me, and I shriveled back in surprise. I hadn’t been touched by another human in kindness since before my arrest.
But instead, she extended her hand. I glanced at it warily, before reaching out in return. Her fingers curled in mine and we shook hands, sealing our bargain.
“Together, it won’t take us another year to get out of here,” I said, my voice as hopeful as the rising pressure of possibility in my chest.
She nodded, and that spark of hope spread through me.
“But you didn’t answer my question. If you were free, Dania, what would you do?”
Mazin’s face filtered through my mind, the one who had thrown me in this hell and left me here to suffer. Who had abandoned me to the royal guard, and served the emperor above all else.
