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Yes, my aunt would be absolutely ecstatic to know I’d been keeping secrets from her. That I’d never been her pawn, but a player of my own.

“Can’t wait,” I said out loud.

I forced my expression to maintain some semblance of composure, but I couldn’t stop my heart from scampering around inside my ribcage.

Just as snared as I was.

When the carriage door flew open, invisible hands yanked me out, and I stumbled to my knees onto a mound of hard-packed snow.

My breath plumed out in front of me. Through it, I finally slammed my gaze into the looming, sharp-cornered prison perched on the tip-top of the mountain. Dyonisia’s antipower encased it like a spiderweb, strands of her milky magic worming through the walls themselves. No windows. Only one door.

Elites, on the other hand, were everywhere. They stared at me from their positions along the piked gate surrounding the prison, cloaks billowing in the icy breeze, poised to attack.

There was no need for them to be so worried, honestly. My hands were still tied, literally and magically. I couldn’t even fight the same invisible force from before as it tugged me back up to my feet. Urged me toward the piked gate, which screeched as a mansion-high entryway swung forward to admit me.

This was it. Shivers racked my throbbing body, and I took one last chance to glance over my shoulder, toward the foggy swirl of ice and snow that obscured the view of the island of Eshol and my jungle and my home around us.

Toward the help that had not come.

Coen… I still didn’t know where he was. If he was okay. Why he hadn’t showed up at Wasteon or the Element Wielder ball.

Would I ever know?

Would I ever see him again?

My heart twisted so tightly I couldn’t breathe. I could only hope that he was safe. That my letter had reached him in time. That he knew regret was snarling through me and I wished I would have said yes before the chance was ripped away from us forever.

The invisible force led me forward, toward the tendrils of Dyonisia’s antipower. I had a moment to stare longingly at the nearest elite’s Good Council brand, at the dot in the center that supposedly granted him immunity.

Before I staggered into the web of antipower.

CHAPTER

48

RAYNA

Whatever the elites had done to me back at Wasteon and the Esholian Institute, it was nothing compared to the lashing pain of Dyonisia’s antipower.

She’d strung it out just barely thin enough to keep a disintegrating death at bay. Just a notch lighter than what it would take to send me crumbling into a million pieces as I was dragged through the prison’s open maw.

My back arched. Knees buckled. Ears rang with my own shrieks. I couldn’t make sense of direction, left, right, up, or down as the elites marched on either side of me and that invisible force hauled me onward.

I only knew it was dark. So dark and cold except for the strings of milky mist that cast a murky glow onto doors and cells and stairwells and the white-hot anguish they struck me with every time we passed through a strand.

“Rayna?”

The voice was merely a whisper of a croak, but I recognized it instantly.

“Don? Don! DON—!”

My shout for my father erupted into a scream as I was forced through another strand of lashing mist. I cranked my head over my shoulder to find his silhouette stirring in the corner of a cell, trying to crawl toward me and slumping back down before he could make it to the iron bars.

What had they done to him? The Don who’d raised me would have been ruddy-faced and raging with his fists at the sight of me here.

I couldn’t form the words to ask. Not when another shriek poured through my teeth and the invisible force yanked me around a corner, out of view. All I could repeat to myself over and over was that Don was alive. Weak, yes, maybe dying like Fabian was on the other end of the island, but alive.

For now.