Before he could answer, she was already running back for the opening.
Behind her, she heard a low, distant rumble, like something large was stirring from the depths of the fortress. She knew she didn’t want to be there when it arrived.
She flung her body out the entrance, but when she reached it, something blocked her from exiting. Something unseen to her eyes. She slammed against a wall of nothing instead, and staggered back.
“What have you done?” she demanded, breathless. Leighton wouldn’t meet her eyes, so she banged on the nothingness between them and shouted louder. “What have you done!”
The fox squealed outside.
“Deal with the Animali, Micah!” Leighton commanded, and in one fell swoop, Micah grabbed the fox by the scruff of its neck and disappeared from sight.
Kestrel screamed after them. She banged harder on the barrier, the edges of her hands smarting with each impact, but it seemed like nothing would break it. She was trapped. Caught between two monsters—the one she thought she knew, and the one lurking somewhere behind her.
“I know who you are,” Leighton said to the ground. Gone was his gleaming façade. Had he always sounded so deadly? So sinister? “I know the magic that courses through your veins.”
“Magic? I have no magic,” Kestrel growled, giving the unseeable barrier another pounding of her fist.
Leighton held up the ring, as if that was proof enough. The clear blue turned almost opaque in the moonlight. “You do. It’s why you wear this. Your mother’s ring.”
Kestrel was about to protest, but then she jerked back, brow furrowing. “How did you know that belonged to my mother?”
She racked her brain, trying to remember if she had told Leighton about her ring yet, how it had belonged to her mother long ago before Thom had given it to her. Despite the dozens ofconversations they’d had over the past few days though, she couldn’t recall it ever coming up.
Perhaps even more unsettling was what he was claiming the ring did.
To stifle magic. Kestrel didn’t have any magic though. She would know by now.
Then again, she always wore that ring. It had been a gift from Thom. A piece of her mother that he had told her to always keep close so that she might keep her mother’s memory close as well.
Could that have been yet another one of his many lies?
“I know more about you than you might know about yourself, and for that, I am sorry,” Leighton continued, his voice starting to shake. “We have spent many years searching for your mother so that she might remove the curse she placed upon my father. I was sent to Mutiny Bay because we heard rumors that Darius Graeme had been spotted there. I was meant to arrest and question him for intel on the Corrupt Queen. But then I found you as well. I noticed your ring in the alleyway, and I knew—I knew that meant you had not only her blood, but also her magic.”
Booming strides thudded down the hall behind Kestrel, still a distance away but rapidly approaching. She couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t make sense of what the prince was telling her, especially with the impending danger creeping up behind her. There was no time to sort through the details—who her mother was, how she’d been played this whole time by both Thom and Leighton, and likely the other brothers as well.
“Let me go,” she begged him. “Please.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. Only you can do that now.”
Horrified, she stared at him. She wanted to scream. To cry. To beg for an alternative. But she would not give him the pleasure.
Besides, she could tell from the conviction in his tone that he wasn’t going to let her go.
Kestrel was yet again trapped behind stone walls, and her only chance of escape fell onto her.
“Tell me what I need to do.”
It was only then that he finally met her gaze. “It’s simple, really. Your magic will save him. I know it will.”
Kestrel realized then who else must’ve been trapped inside these walls.
The beast bounding toward her was Leighton’s father. The King of Irongate. Which meant Leighton’s entire story about needing to prove himself to his people had been a lie. He wasn’t here to slay a monster. He was here to force Kestrel to cure a curse that she knew hardly anything about.
Her chest ached like it had been torn apart.
“I don’t know how to end his curse,” she told Leighton, choking on tears. “I didn’t even know I had magic.”
The thrashing beast was nearing now. Stones and rubble wobbled on the ground around her.
