Masked Prince (Fated Royals 2)

“It’s him,” I said, my voice creaky because it had been so long since I’d spoken aloud, and shaky with emotion. “He helped at my family farm once. I saw him today in the hall. It’s the same man. He is to be our king.”

Joy peeked through the misery then. But only for an instant. Even if it were true, they all agreed, it wouldn’t help our situation down here. The queen, they said, would stop at nothing to prevent Randal from taking the crown.

“It’s true enough,” muttered the old man next to me. “Just think of what she did to him as a child.”

I looked up at him once again.

He stared down at his lap, shaking his head. “Imagine burning a baby boy. It’s the work of the Devil come to life.”

“What?”

The old man was close to tears. “Aye, burned him alive, just weeks after his poor mother was put in the ground.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The scars Randal bore on his body…they had been there since he was a baby? And the suggestion that the queen herself had ordered such a horrific end for her stepson, bastard or not…

“How do you know?” I asked.

He took a deep breath, blowing it out heavily through his nose. “Lass, I’ve carried that secret with me since the day it happened.”

I had to know. I simply had to. I pressed my hand to his arm. “Please. I need to know.”

Nodding slowly, he blinked a few times. “Suppose it doesn’t much matter now, seeing where I’ve ended up and how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see outside this prison cell again.” His eyes were damp. “I’m a smuggler as you can see,” he rolled his wrist over to show the tattoo that I had already noticed. It was old, fuzzy around the edges, hidden among salt and pepper hairs. He traced the back fin with his fingertip. “Never much cared who was paying me or what they were paying me for, to tell you the truth. Smuggling, sure, piracy if needs be. Theft, robbery…” He hesitated, then cleared his throat. “Murder, once or twice, but only those whose hearts were as black as my own, mind you. When a messenger from the castle sought out people like me for a job that was going to pay handsomely, I was interested and made it known.” He gritted his teeth, growling under his breath. “But when I found out what the task was? I’d never hurt a child, lass, of that I can promise you, but clearly someone had fewer scruples. I have no doubt that the messenger I spoke to was sent from her majesty, and I have no doubt that I was lucky to find passage on a ship heading to the south seas that very night, or I would have been found in my quarters with my throat slit.”

A wave of powerful sadness rolled through me and I pressed my palm to my mouth. Randal was a wonderful man. My heart hurt at the thought of him in such pain. I loved him so much. But with each passing minute, my hope at ever seeing him again began to fade away. I fought the tears as hard as I could. But I couldn’t stop them.

That first day and night, we shared what little sustenance the guards gave us—handfuls of rancid rice and a leaky bucket of tepid, dirty water. But as the hours slid past, the life drained out of the room. We were like tadpoles in a shrinking puddle, huddling closer and closer for less and less, moving slower and more desperately as the life disappeared from among us. Tempers flared. Despair overtook us all.

Everything will be okay, I told myself, again and again. I repeated it so often, I heard it in my dreams.

I hung onto that—my belief. I clutched at it like it was the only thing in the world. In my heart, I believed that Randal loved me. I believed he would come for me. I believed he would save me. Somehow, someway, I believed that he would find his way to me and pluck me out of this terrifying wretchedness.

I clung onto my belief in him as the hours dragged on. And on. Into miserable, endless days of starvation and thirst.

The morning of the fourth day. Or the fifth. I didn’t know which. Curled in a ball in the corner of the prison, I watched two women fight almost to the death over a maggot-infested potato.

This must be a nightmare. Wake up. Just wake up.

But the harder I willed myself into consciousness, the more awful reality became. I was so weak and exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open. I surrendered to that exhaustion, drifting in and out of sleep.

In the afternoon, the guards said there would be no more water. Nobody was strong enough to protest. The old smuggler next to me groaned with hunger pains, until finally going quiet. He was alive still. But only barely. All of us were only barely alive. The queen had left us to rot there, I knew it. And when I closed my eyes the next time, I imagined a cave full of bones.