Chapter One

"Does that hurt?"

The words, whispered in my ear by someone I couldn't see, made me go rigid.

But my limbs were bound tight, as they had been since I'd first been brought here, leather straps lashing my arms, neck, and ankles to tall posts driven into the ground until I could barely move an inch. I'd broken one of the restraints the second day, pulling against the cord that bit into my wrist until it snapped, but my captors had responded quickly and viciously, beating every inch of my body until darkness took hold and I'd woken secured twice as effectively as before.

"You're a tough one, big guy." The whisper was back, and fuck, I'd hoped to never hear that voice again. "I can always get my guests to scream, but you're holding out on me, aren't you?"

I didn't respond.

Ademar would have backtalked them until they took his tongue. Luis would have cracked jokes. Elías, I expected, would have delivered his flattest, most unimpressed look until they withered under his stare.

I favoured silence. Pretending my captors didn't exist, that I wasn't here but was back with Ren and Mathias in that hut in the woods, that was how I was getting through this. Feeling the reassuring hilt of my sword under my fingertips, the grip worn and familiar, as I kept one wary eye on the door and the other on the two boys curled up together on the ratty bed. The way my prince's fingers entwined with Mathias'; how the northerner pressed his face into Ren's hair in turn. Sleepy little gestures of effortless affection between them that warmed my heart and confirmed that watching over them was not a chore, but the greatest honour I could have received.

"Let's try this again."

Vicious pain blossomed through the side of my head, sending flashes of light and colour across my vision. Through the agony and disorientation, I saw the hammer that had just been used to hit me drop to the ground at my feet, soil coating the blood in a sticky, gruesome mess.

"You're going to die from that, big guy." The tone, as always, was conversational. "It's taken a nice chunk out of your skull, all that shattered bone and brain matter, and you really don't have long left. Want to tell me where that prince of yours is?"

I couldn't think of anything I wanted less .

The inside of the basement I was being kept in swam before my eyes, refusing to stay still.

"We're going to find him, you know," the man said as nausea made my stomach roil, the pain bitter and horrid. But it wasn't as foul as the words that rolled from my torturer's mouth as he sank into the part of the endless cycle I hated the most.

The taunts. The sick promises.

"And when we do find little Renato, we'll be sure to make you watch as we cut out his eyes. As we fuck his pretty corpse. We'll send him to the afterlife with your name carved into his fucking heart so Dios will know who was responsible."

He leaned in to whisper his next words in my ear.

"Tell us where he is, big guy, and I can promise you both quick deaths instead."

Never .

The thought...the oath , echoed around my head and darkness began to take me.

As I wondered if this was it at last, the day I was finally allowed to die, the flicker of blue and red sparks flashed in the gloom. The rebel healer sighed as he restored my body whole, patting my shoulder as if in reassurance.

"Very well." He bent to pick up the bloody hammer. "Let's try that again."

A grunt pushed its way between my lips, a scream threatening to follow on its heels, but something clamped my mouth shut before it could erupt. I struggled against the gag I didn't remember them putting on me, feeling warm flesh on my lips and-

"Jiron!"

No. They'd never known my name: that was something else I'd refused to give them. How did...

"Jiron, you daft bastard. Come back to us!"

The tension left my body as I finally recognised the voice, the familiar scent of baked goods and seed oil helping me to place it through the horror of the nightmare.

Luis.

I forced my eyes open, snapping them to the other man's. Luis had a knee tucked onto what little space was left at the side of my cot, pressing a hand firmly over my mouth. He was one of the few people who could hold me down with nothing but his own strength, and only because my limbs had become uselessly tangled in the thin, sweat-soaked bedsheet.

"You're in the palace," he told me, reciting the usual assurances. "The pricks who did all that to you are dead. Ren is safe."

"That one comes first ," I snarled at him, grabbing his wrist and removing his hand from my mouth.

"He does," Luis conceded. "He always does."

There was a clatter of plates from the royal antechamber next door, followed by a loud, haughty Mazekhstani curse that left neither of us in doubt as to its speaker.

"They both do," Luis amended, grinning through his snort of amusement as Mathias continued to hurl insults at our king.

I pushed myself up so I was sitting on the cot, stretching out my shoulders and grimacing at the bitter taste in my mouth that made me realise I'd bitten my tongue sometime in the night. Luis handed me a clay cup of water without being asked and I grunted out my thanks, downing it in a single gulp.

"Jiron," he began hesitatingly, scratching at his knee. Realising that he was still sitting naked on my bed, I waved him back to his own on the other side of the room. He went begrudgingly, keeping a wary eye on me as if he expected me to relapse any moment.

Which, I supposed, was entirely possible. And that was the worst of what had been done to me: I'd rebuilt the muscle I'd lost from the torture and starvation, and Starling had healed the remainder of the physical damage that the rebel healer hadn't fixed before he died, his only goal being to keep me alive so they could continue to fuck me over.

But what all that had done to my mind? By the Blessed Five, I hadn't even realised at first, sinking into that place I'd retreated to when the pain became unbearable, and it was only after I'd been rescued and saw the worried expressions of my friends that it began to dawn on me that something was wrong. I'd fought it as fiercely as I'd defended both my princes that day in the north Quarehian woods, but also like that day, determination itself wasn't enough to stave off my defeat. The trauma and damage continued to steal pieces of me: a few minutes of lost time here, a flashback there, nightmares nearly every night.

"Jiron," Luis said again. "I don't think keeping you quiet is the answer."

Neither did I, but I wasn't having anyone else hear me cry out. The king had more than enough shit to deal with for me to add mine, and the guards' bedchamber we occupied was too close to his own rooms to hope my screams wouldn't make their way to him just as his consort's frequently drifted in here. The pair of them liked to play particularly rough.

"I appreciate what you're doing for me," I told my friend, watching Luis' expression twist between half a dozen emotions as he tried to work out if he was helping or not. "It won't be for much longer."

I hope.

"Better not be," he retorted, stretching out on his bed with his hands tucked casually beneath his head, his hair pulled loose from its ties. "The rest of us need our beauty sleep if we have any chance of snagging ourselves someone as young and pretty as you have."

My fingers fumbled at the shirt I was pulling over my head. Dios damn it, the simple reference to the boy's existence stripped away every layer of professionalism and calm I'd carefully built up over the years. "We're not...Wyatt's not..."

"Uh huh." Luis closed his eyes. "Then you won't mind if I relax after my long shift by jerking off to the fantasy of all that blonde hair wrapped around my fist as he sucks me off?"

White hot fury surged through me, and the other guard grunted as my tossed pillow hit him squarely in the stomach. I fought the urge to follow it over there and wipe the smirk from his smug face.

"Fuck off , Luis."

He just laughed.

*