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Now here was a goddamned plan I could put my weight behind.
“Bring it the fuck on.” The only way I think I could bear to look at that motherfucker again is if he was dead at my feet.
My uncle made a mocking face of sympathy.
“But so inconvenient that you’re otherwise engaged,” he said, glancing around the cell. He sighed. “You’ll miss the duel and be labeled a coward. I’m sorry, but it’s for the best. I know you haven’t been here this past week, which means you’ve been up to something. Probably nothing dangerous but one can never be sure. Galen might be one of the best swordsmen I’ve ever seen, but I’d prefer not to leave things up to chance. No, you’ll stay here, out of the way, then be found running like a coward in, oh, a week or so. By then, your little sister will be married off and very sore, no doubt.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He really was a piece of shit. Too afraid, even now, to give me a fighting chance.
“Listen. I know you like to play with people’s lives like chess pieces, but I don’t. She’s fucking mine. I will fight for her at dawn. You said it yourself, Galen has every chance of beating me.”
My uncle crossed his arms.
“That you’re so eager only makes me more suspicious. You will not fight him. Prince Galen is the finest swordsman anywhere, but you have your father’s cunning. I have to give him his dues, my brother knew how to strategize.”
There was jack shit I could do about it, chained up there like an animal. So, I gathered a mouthful of spit and launched it at him.
“I fucking hate you,” I snarled.
“Do you really think it matters to me what you think of me? I’m king. You’re not. And soon, you’ll be no more.”
He turned without a second glance, and wandered away.
* * *
Hours and hours passed. Every minute away from Anika was agony, every second chained up there was unbearable. Long after my hands had gone numb from my restraints, and long after all the other prisoners elsewhere in the jail had drifted off to sleep, I heard it. The creak of a door, the jingle of keys. Someone was coming.
Light footsteps moved quickly down the corridor. There, in the low light, was a servant boy, with downcast eyes, carrying a tray of food. A chunk of bread, an apple, a piece of cheese. “Keep it,” I said, my voice thick and low from not speaking for so long. “Give it to someone who needs it more than me.”
The servant boy didn’t reply, and didn’t turn away. Instead, he very slowly raised his face to me… and beamed. There she was, looking back at me.
Anika.
CHAPTER 25
Anika
I pressed my finger to my lips and smiled at him as I set down the tray on the floor. In his eyes there was such relief, such joy, it made the agony of the last day evaporate. He was alive; he was whole. Thank goodness.
Using the keys the head jailer had handed to me, I wordlessly and soundlessly unlocked Maksim’s cell door, muffling the noise of the key in the lock with the cuff of my sleeve. Luckily, my stepfather hadn’t been aware of the previous drugging, and the guards left holding me had fallen for the same plan again. I picked my steps carefully in the low light, creeping across the cell. Palming the keys to stop them from jingling, I allowed myself one kiss of his scruffy cheek before counting through the keys to the right one. As soon as Maksim had one arm free, he pulled me to him in an embrace.
“Are you okay?” I whispered into his ear, barely doing more than making the shape of the words on my out breath.
He nodded. “Are you?”
And I nodded, too, not willing to risk more than that.
I made short work of the second cuff, and he took me by the hand, leading me through the back entrance to the dungeons, which I unlocked with one of the least-used skeleton keys on the ring after sliding the tray of food under the door of the nearest cell. Whoever the prisoner was, he was in for a treat when he awoke—I’d brought the food from the royal kitchens, not the dungeon larder.
“Where did you get the keys?” he asked.
“Apparently, the head jailer likes you. Come on, this way.”
Maksim shook his head. “Someone I need to speak to first.”
“What? No! We have to go.”
“I’ll be quick.”
I followed him down a passageway to a number of cells that looked like they hadn’t been used in years, then he turned his head.
“It’s me. Prince Maksim. Where are you?”
Silence. Then, “Prince Maksim?”
Maksim grabbed the keys from me, then went to the door the voice had come from. He tried each key in the lock, as I glanced around, expecting at any moment to be found out. Finally, the key threw and the door opened. And there, inside, was one of the filthiest looking creatures I’d seen in my life.
