Naked Truth

Naked Truth
Amval

After days and days of loneliness, pacing the confines of this mine and trying to convince myself the chart I scratched on the ground is nonsense again, someone finally speaks to me.

“Amval?” Cirocco says through the mind-link.

I leap to my feet. “Where are you?”

“At the edge of the range,” he replies. “I don’t have long—”

“Then, I’ll meet you.” I know that he’s just here to tell me something, or he wouldn’t have called from the edge of the range, but I am clawing at the walls. I need to see someone else, not just hear their voice from a distance. So I shed my clothes, slip out of the rockslide, and shift while ignoring Cirocco’s objections. Two more days remain until the wedding. One conversation is all I need to remain sane until then.

I hope

At my insistence, Cirocco tells me where he is. I dart through the hills, following the pattern of Joli’s footsteps I remember to avoid setting off her traps. He occupies the nearest zig-zagging path down the cliff face, almost equidistant from the mine and the palace. His wolf has always been a little bit lighter than mine, chestnut brown rather than walnut but just as broad. I barrel toward him, a grin splitting my lupine mouth, and bark in greeting.

Despite everything, he crouches playfully. Excitement surges through me.

“Do you have a minute for a run?” I ask.

“Just a minute.” He turns and bolts down the cliff path toward the beach below. I surge behind him. If the path was a little wider, I could pass him. I’ve always been just a little bit faster. But, just like at the Festival of First Wind, I don’t mind letting him win this time. He’s lost enough.

We tumble onto the sand, kicking up sprays. The length of the beach stretches before us, and I watch him look down it, likely imagining a true race.

“Message first,” he says, reluctantly straightening. “Ingrid made me promise.”

Anything Ingrid has to say, I need to know. I squash the rush of excitement at seeing anyone and nod for him to continue.

“She’s getting a bit worn down,” he says. “So, tomorrow night, she wants—”

A scarred, coppery-tan wolf lunges out of a cave in the cliff and slams into Cirocco. I whip around as two more wolves barrel out of the same cave toward me.

He was followed.

I run at the two attacking wolves, forcing them to dodge or take the full weight of my shoulder. They both scatter. To my left, I see Cirocco struggling to his feet against the lead wolf, teeth flashing in the moonlight. I whirl on one of the two I separated, my claws out. One paw scrapes over his chest, but he tucks his head before I can reach his throat. Cirocco’s enemy yelps as he lands a bite.

Teeth sink into my flank—the third wolf, forgotten in my focus. I snarl and try to turn, but he remains attached. With my screaming, injured leg, I kick at him until my foot finds home and then turn back to the one in front of me.

Cirocco scorches out of nowhere, tackling the wolf about to try to rip out my throat. His attacker scrambles to find his footing in the sand. He rolls away with the one who would have killed me, leaving me with the remaining two again. My back leg weeps blood, moving slower every time I give it a direction, but I ignore Cirocco’s former target to deal with the wolf behind me. Bloody saliva drips from his lips. I rake out with my claws, not at his throat but at his front legs. He topples, and I pounce, slicing neatly through the important muscles that would let him regain his feet.

Behind me, Cirocco whines. My stomach drops. That’s not all pain—there is a note of submission that makes me sick. I turn to see him pinned beneath the wolf he saved me from, teeth at his throat. Yield or die.

I try to charge the distance and save him, but the coppery-tan wolf shoulders me out of the way and digs his claws into the wound on my back leg. I scream and fall.

That wolf shifts into Corwyn, who smirks down at me with such cocky disdain I can almost forget the pain barreling through my leg and the threat leveled against Cirocco just to knock the look off his face.

“I told them,” he says. “Damon, knock this bastard out.”

The world goes black around me.



I wake up to the symphony of agony in my head and leg. They shriek in mocking harmony as I struggle to sit up and figure out where I am.

Human hands push me upright. The silver manacle rattling around my wrist would explain that—Corwyn forced me to shift back. I pull on the thin, brown robe they left me achingly and look around.

Thick, craggy bluestone. Even thicker bars. I should have recognized it by the salt and mildew smell alone.

I’m in the dungeon.

My stomach drops. I stumble for the door, but the chain attached to my manacle yanks me back. My fingers just barely brush the bars, nowhere near the heavy padlock holding them shut. The wedding is in two days, and our plan doesn’t work without both Ingrid and me.

“Cirocco?” I call through the mind-link. I can’t see him, but these cells are bored into the rock, bars only at the front. He could be next to me, and I’d have no idea.

“Here,” he groans. “Alive, but hurting. I thought you—”

He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. He’s already been to my funeral once.

“Alive, but hurting,” I repeat. “Cor—”

“All right,” a woman says, her voice echoing off the stone so I can’t identify it. “I’m impressed.”

Kaloni strides past the bars of my cell, and my heart skips a beat. A pair of soldiers, Yasa and Pak, follow in her footsteps.

“Release him,” she says.

And there it is. The moment I’ve been waiting for. The proof Kaloni isn’t behind this so much as forced into it, the line she will not cross, no matter what they hold over her head.

But Yasa and Pak march past me, and a different cell door creaks open. I suppose they’re freeing Cirocco first. That’s not an issue. I struggle closer to the door. I should be ready when they come for me.

Kaloni tsks. “Two days isn’t much time for that bruising to go down.”

“Then you shouldn’t have sent people to attack me,” Cirocco replies stiffly. “Ingrid is going to know.”

“You’re not going to see her until the wedding has already started.” She snaps her fingers. “Get him upstairs. Quietly.”

Yasa leads a heavily bruised Cirocco past my cell. I press as close to the door as the manacle allows.

“Why are you still going through with the wedding?” I ask.

Kaloni steps back into view of my cell and looks at me. “What do you mean?”

“Corwyn is going to know you’re not obeying his blackmail anymore when he discovers we’re not here,” I say. “So why bother with the wedding?”

She smiles very slowly. Hungrily. “Goddess above, you think Corwyn is in charge here?”

This time, my heart doesn’t just skip a beat. It stops beating altogether. “Who is?”

“Me.” She grins. “I told the council I could gain control over Lightning Cape by myself, and I very nearly have. Corwyn is a loan, a spare body for the jobs that weren’t worth my time.”

I sink to the floor. Ingrid was right. Kaloni betrayed us. No blackmail. No excuses. Just simple abandonment of every principle I thought she believed in.

“You had me assassinated,” I say numbly.

“Well, I tried.” She frowns. “How did you escape?”

“Yalim is dutiful, but he’s not—no.” I shake my head. It seems I saved that man’s life, and I am not going to give that up now. “I’m not answering your questions. You should answer mine.”

She cocks her head thoughtfully. “Your impression of Mother was always better. You don’t have Father’s… intimidating tone.”

I grit my teeth. “That was not an impression. That was your older brother telling you how wrong you are. How did this happen? When did I lose you?”

“My older brother?” She laughs. “I led this family more than you did, more often than not.”

“You kept the peace, but—”

“I managed everyone while Mother and Father trained you to lead.” She sneers at me. “And you couldn’t even learn to do that.”

I stare up into her face and realize, with icy clarity, how my sister really feels about me.

“How long?” I ask.

“Astralis contacted me—”

I shake my head. “How long have you hated me?”

She leans against the bars, her face cast in half-light that makes her look like a stranger. “Since the day we retook the palace. Father gave that speech, standing on the throne, and I realized that in a few decades, you would be saying the exact same words unless I wrote something else for you.”

The day we retook the palace. The happiest day of my life, before I met Ingrid.

I wish I could argue with Kaloni, but I remember making sure a scribe took down every word of Father’s speech. I knew I was going to need it someday.

“So you decided to kill me?” I ask. “Kill them? Ruin the lives of our siblings? All because I was too much like Mother and Father for your liking?”

“No.” She crouches, her eye-level with me. “That would be cruel. I did it because Lightning Cape deserves better. We deserve to be the heart of a new world, not another stumbling kingdom, ripe for whoever next decides to conquer us. You would have made us weak. Susceptible. With me—and Astralis—we can be strong.”

I stare into her eyes, an amber mirror of my own. Part of me wants to see a bonfire of power-hunger and greed so obvious I should feel like a fool for having missed it. I want to see a stranger.

Instead, my sister looks back at me. The one who kept the peace between our siblings at any cost. The one who always needed to prove herself, winning every bet and competition. The one who stood beside and behind me while my parents trained me for the throne.

I couldn’t find something Kaloni was hiding from me for Astralis to blackmail her with because she hasn’t been hiding anything but how truly far she will go.

“I’ll make certain my next assassination attempt takes,” she says as she stands. “After the wedding, of course. I want to see your face when your mate marries someone else first.”