I’ve no time to be shocked at the fact she’s telling these lawguards her witchname. Maybe they don’t know it’s hers. Maybe it’s just a password to them. The lawguards immediately straighten and then move away from the door to let us pass, Varia pressing through the creaky brass door, and, without any control, my feet follow her into the dimness on the other side.

I crane my head to the guards. “She’s a witc—”

Varia’s grip on my wrist is instant. “If you want your heart back, you will tell no one that I am a witch.”

My heart? Is she…is she tempting me right now? Is she being genuine? If I had my heart, I could escape her grip on me forever—I could escape the hunger. My heart is the entire reason I came to Vetris and betrayed the prince in the first place. Everything up till the moment in the clearing was for my heart.

The princess shuts the door behind us, giving a piercing smile to the guards. There’s no command on me to not say anything, but the mere chance of getting my heart back has my tongue still. Once again, I’m chained by more than chains. A prisoner in my own body.

I try not to think about it. But like all things one tries not to think about, it’s suddenly all I can think about. She could order me to do anything, and I’d be powerless. Powerless. Gods, I hate that word. It saps all the hope from me, the hunger laughing and repeating it over and over.

powerless, powerless, it taunts. just give up.

No. There has to be something I can do. There has to be some way out. And if it’s keeping my mouth shut about her being a witch, then so be it. The idea of another three years or more as a Heartless is unthinkable. I barely made it through in the woods, and that was with Crav’s and Peligli’s calming presences and with a witch who didn’t command me. I won’t be able to keep sane through something like that again, alone.

Whatever it takes, I have to get free.

The steady rhythmic drip of water grows in my ears, and my eyes adjust quickly; the inside of the wall is cavernous and long and stretches on seemingly forever, like a hollow snake laid over the horizon. Piercing white mercury lamps are riveted to the riblike brass support beams that shape the wall. An aqueduct carves through the floor, flanked on both sides by grated walkways, and by the light of the lamps I can see that over the years, the steady moisture inside this place has worn every inch of brass a brilliant viridian green.