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“Absolutely nothing.” Dyonisia paused. “But I did send one of my Mind Manipulators to visit the human.” She nodded down at the cottage I’d grown up in. At Fabian. “To make him think he’s the real father.”

Jagaros jolted into murderous stillness.

“You did what?”

“It’s better that way,” Dyonisia said matter-of-factly. “If Mydusia can send a mimic to kidnap my sister, she can send another to kidnap my niece. And where do you think is the first place she’ll look?” When Jagaros didn’t answer, Dyonisia snapped, “With you, you great, foolish brute!” Then she threw his own words back at him, another board game move, another show of superiority. “The girl is safer growing up in a tiny, unsuspecting village anyway, right?”

Jagaros still hadn’t moved. Wasn’t sure he ever would again.

Instead, he whispered, “Rayna deserves to know the truth. The human deserves to know. You can’t—we can’t just—”

“Need I remind you the human belongs to me, Jagaros Kalaidesique. I can do with him as I please.”

At that, Jagaros found a scrap of fight left. “And need I remind you that any faerie born of this island is mine to protect. Including my daughter.”

“Fine.” Through the rain, Dyonisia gestured toward the cottage. “Go take her from that man who obviously loves her so much already. Drag her back to your Uninhabitable Zone and wait for Mydusia to find her.” She bared her teeth and delivered the final blow. “Protect her like you protected her mother.”

Jagaros positively wilted, and I knew it was over.

He didn’t consider himself worthy anymore. Of his people. Of his title as king. Of Chrysanthia, whom he had lost over and over. Of me.

“Give her Wild Whispering,” was all he said finally. “I want to be there for her Branding. I want to be able to talk to her in animal form. I want to know who she becomes, even if she never knows where she came from.”

The rain poured. Thunder boomed. Lightning flared in the sky.

And at last, Dyonisia jerked her head in agreement.

I broke from Jagaros’s mind like the surface of a great, swallowing sea, gasping for breath after breath after breath. Jagaros himself twisted away, pupils fixed on the bars of my prison cell as if to anchor himself to something other than these memories that plagued him and my accusatory stare.

But that last part of me was no longer for him. It was for her.

My fucking aunt who had moved us all like pawns across her island board since the moment Fabian had whisked me away to safety.

She hadn’t just decimated thousands of lives over a misunderstanding. Hadn’t just pushed the survivors into a remote corner of their own native land and locked them up there.

She’d manipulated Fabian, invaded his sense of self in the most vile of ways. Ripped me away from Jagaros who had so obviously loved and wanted me, twisting the narrative until he believed it himself: that he would have been unfit to care for me. Instead of offering us greater protection against a common enemy, she had stripped us apart all under the guise of the greater good.

And she would not stop until someone stripped her apart.

Limb by limb, bone by bone.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” Dyonisia said now, scanning my face. Beneath her, Gregor Bilderas stirred slightly, but she didn’t spare him a single glance. “You’ve had the power to break into his memories and find this out for yourself for a year, yet you didn’t. You could have discovered that one of my own was hiding among your friends, but you never cracked beyond the surface of his mind.”

She stepped so close that I could see the veins pulsing in her throat.

“You could probably kill me right now if only you had your faerie fangs. If only you would mature. But since you don’t…” She snapped a finger at the elites still holding Jagaros’s chains, and they began to drag him away.

“No!” I reached for Jagaros, grasping at his fur. “Don’t take him!”

“If only you could stop me,” Dyonisia taunted.

A growl erupted from Jagaros’s throat. He leapt at Dyonisia, maw snapping open, and for a flash of a moment I thought he’d manage to do what I couldn’t: sink his canines into her flesh and sever the pulse of life.

Then something around his throat yanked him back. Not the chains cuffing his limbs, but the stripe inked into his fur. The oath.

“Bad tiger,” Dyonisia scolded with a smile when he crashed into the bars.

The elites tugged him away, hauling him out of my prison cell. A third stepped inside, holding a blazing instrument in his hand that carved out every other feeling in the hollow of my chest. Beating my worst fear back to life.