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“You can’t do this,” I growled, pushing myself up. “I don’t belong here.”

“You attacked the Minister of Intelligence,” one of the helmeted guards said. Her hoarse voice lilted with bleak amusement. “You’re exactly where you belong.”

I met her dark eyes through the bars—the same eyes that had trailed me as I’d stormed toward the council chamber. Something small and glassy gleamed between her fingers before disappearing up her sleeve.

Then the guards pounded away.

For several shaky seconds, I could only breathe through the fresh pain—my throbbing shoulder, still healing from its dislocation; my thigh burn, now flaming past the last of the salve I’d applied under the bandage. The bars’ shadows cut through the watery light to produce a visceral fear inside me, reminding me of my time in Erik’s dungeons.

But I focused through the panic as Keil had taught me on Banarrat; I narrowed in on the feel of the stones under my hands, and on the pull of my updo against my scalp, braided too tight around Keil’s hairpin.

At last, my tunneling vision gained clarity. And from the shadows of the opposite cell, over the drip-drip of a broken faucet, I heard the huff of laughter.

“Attacking your own kind now, cousin?” Mara’s voice was a scrape of phlegm and blood. “Whoever said Wielders are uncontrollable beasts?”

I stood, trying to make her out in the gloom. “Don’t call me that.”

“A beast?” she asked.

“Your cousin,” I corrected.

Mara’s next chuckle turned into a guttural cough. As I drew closer to the bars, a chill ran through me. Because while Stian had treated her most pressing injuries, a day of neglect had made her other wounds more gruesome: raw burns reddening her face, pustules oozing into her collar.

But I had too little sympathy inside me to waste a drop on Mara Capewell.

So, I reached toward the hairpin holding my entire updo in its embrace and slowly drew it out. My hair uncoiled, the waves cascading down my back.

I gripped the hairpin in my fist as though it were a knife.

“What are you going to do?” Mara’s cracked lips slanted upward. “Throw it at me?”

I shifted my hold on the hairpin until the long, sharp prongs glinted.

They’ll search you for weapons, Osana had warned before she’d headed to her aunt’s apartment, where she stored her old belongings.

Including her armored uniform from her time as an imperial guard.

With the palace gates open and the halls in disorder, it must’ve been easy to slip among the guards. Easier still to station herself outside that council chamber, where her dark eyes could follow my progress. The hard part would have been ensuring she was the one to reach me first, to drive that black-striped dispenser through my skin.

You’re exactly where you belong, she’d said only minutes ago, grimly amused.

Because if I wanted to know how to stop Erik, this was exactly where I needed to be.

And so, we’d found a way to get me in.

Now I looked at the bars of my cell and took a deep breath. Ansoran locks were filled with dullroot. But I wouldn’t need to use the lock.

In one solid heave, I blasted my specter forward, toward the hinges.

And the iron broke.

Mara made a shocked, strangled sound as I maneuvered out of the cell, metal screeching. I crossed the open space between us, then repeated the strike on her bars.

Her panic pervaded the air as I approached, the whites of her eyes shining wide. I savored her fear, letting it feed my specter—the specter that had, thanks to Osana’s empty dispenser, never been confined.

Mara panted as I crouched to her level. Slowly, I pressed the twin prongs of the hairpin against the tender flesh of her throat.

“You wouldn’t.” Mara laughed roughly, but her loathing was charged with desperation. “You’re not a Hunter.”