Pain jerked Aki awake. After Virtuoso had left, Aki had squeezed through the crooked, narrow opening into her tiny cell. She’d collapsed on the bed, a wooden pallet and lumpy sack of straw, and smeared a thick layer of seaweed salve on her burns. After that, everything was a haze as she tumbled in and out of consciousness.

It had probably been a few days since Gin had held a bucket of acid over her head and Virtuoso had beaten her. Aki’s hands flew instinctively to her tender cheek. The touch sent a searing firebrand of agony through her skin, and she cried out.

Was this how she would die? Was this the price—the years—she’d paid summoning Sola before?

Aki tried to sit up, and the room spun around her. Only her right eye would open, her left swollen shut from Virtuoso’s attack.

Of course, Virtuoso had done that on her brother’s orders, and as bad as the beating was, it had been a lot less than what he’d wanted her to do.

Gin . . . What have you become?

Where was the boy who used to go fishing with Aki in the palace moat? Who used to make sure he’d be the first to wish her happy birthday at the exact moment of her birth and then laugh when his turn came nine minutes later? How had he turned into a man who could inflict acid torture on his sister’s face?

Sobs shook Aki’s body.

She cried over the loss of her brother. Over her pain and imprisonment. Over the darkness of Kichona’s future.

When the tears ran out, she stared at the rock walls.

“What am I doing, just waiting for the League of Rogues to save me?” Aki didn’t know what had become of them. She only hoped they were still out there, putting up a fight against Gin. But even if that were true, they probably had more urgent things to deal with than rescuing her.

“Is this really how Father raised me? To be a helpless princess?”

She stood up, brushed off the dust from the taiga uniform she was still wearing—there was no change of clothing in her cell—and tugged on the fabric to pull out the wrinkles as best she could. It didn’t do much, but smoothing the uniform made her feel a little better about herself. A little more like a warrior.

Now, how to get out of this prison? Obviously not through the acid falls.

She explored every nook and cranny in her small cave, the grotto, and the crevice that connected the two. There was no way out.

But then Aki smiled for the first time since she’d regained consciousness: when she’d fallen near the water, the ground hadn’t been solid stone. It was hard-packed clay.

I could make my own way out.