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Then she turned him against me.

I’d been alone for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to be around another girl my own age. Marcela shared my first name, laughed at the same things I did, and spoke to me as though I were a friend instead of the fragile child my father claimed I was whenever he justified keeping me locked away for my own good. She told me that she understood what it was like to live under an overprotective parent’s control. Within days, we were sneaking into the gardens to talk and sharing secrets I’d never trusted anyone enough to say aloud.

Or so I thought.

Marcela asked careful questions and made them sound like concern. She wanted to know whether I ever imagined leaving, then encouraged me to talk about the life I might find waiting outside the compound. I’d confessed to her how badly I wanted to run away.

Then she shared every word with my father, twisted my loneliness into an escape plot, and convinced him I’d been studying the compound so I could betray him.

My father answered by tightening the cage around me while she stole my identity and used it to claim every freedom he’d denied me.

She took Delgado as her surname and went wherever Father sent her—university campuses, courthouses, government offices, and private events—playing the daughter he wanted the world to see: educated, polished, submissive when obedience gained her access, and ruthless when someone stood in her way. She used my identity to lure ambitious young women with promises of opportunity, then delivered them into my father’s hands. The name Isabella Delgado was now attached to lies, sex trafficking, and crimes I’d never committed.

But Isabella Marcela Reyes was not Ciro Delgado’s daughter.

I was.

She’d taken the names Isabella and Delgado for herself, but our middle names still exposed the truth. Eliana was my mother’s name and my link to Eslovenya’s royal house. Marcela belonged to the woman she’d been before ambition convinced her that my name offered a better life.

I was my father’s captive, born inside Finca La Cruzona and kept here ever since because he counted me among the things he owned. The old coffee estate spread across the volcanic slopes of San Vicente, its luxurious main house and manicured gardens sealed behind high concrete walls, armed guard posts, and acres of working farmland.

For the last five years, Marcela had lived in the world as Isabella Delgado.

Beyond these walls, I didn’t exist.

She had my name, my father’s protection, and the freedom to destroy my future.

I had his blood, a locked bedroom, and a dungeon beneath my bed to remind me what happened to anyone who tried to escape him.

A shout rose through the floor, followed by lowered voices I couldn’t quite make out.

Dark curiosity pulled me out of bed. This prisoner sounded nothing like the men my father usually brought home.

I needed to hear more. Information had kept me alive inside these walls far longer than ignorance ever could. This room was a gilded cage, but I used it to my advantage, taking whatever knowledge the vent carried up. Years ago, I’d taught myself to shut away the part of myself that recoiled at every scream—the nightmares, the guilt, the useless urge to help men I couldn’t reach. I hadn’t stopped caring. I simply couldn’t afford to feel any of it while they suffered beyond my reach. I kept my sympathy away because compassion without the power to act only gave my father another way to torture me.

My father had filled the room with carved furniture, fine linens, books he approved, and jewelry I had nowhere to wear. Every detail had been chosen for the daughter of a princess. Even the lock on the outside of the door was polished brass.

The carved walnut vanity against the opposite wall had belonged to my mother. A tall mirror rose from its center, with smaller hinged mirrors on either side. Silver-backed brushes, crystal perfume bottles, cosmetics, and small velvet jewelry boxes covered the surface—remnants of the beautiful princess she’d once been.

I sat on the cushioned stool and leaned toward the ornate wrought-iron grate set into the floor beside the wall.

The voices came through more clearly here, although I still couldn’t make out every word, so I pulled the stool closer. Beneath the grate, a narrow brick-lined shaft dropped into one of the finca’s original coffee-storage cellars. My father had converted the old bean-drying chamber into a room built for torture, but the vent still funneled every voice, blow, and scream into my bedroom. It offered no view of what happened there, but that had never been its purpose.

My mother, Princess Eliana Sofija Dravik, had tried to escape my father. After her death, he’d moved me into this room so that I could hear every death cry. The stale air and odors rising from the vent were merely another part of his cruelty.

He believed the beauty of the room excused the lock on the door. The screams rising through the grate made sure I never mistook comfort for freedom and reminded me what would happen if I forgot.

No one crossed Ciro Delgado and lived.

A barked order came from below.

“Bring the chair over.”

The chair’s feet ground across the concrete and stopped with a hard thud as boots shifted and several men grunted with exertion.

“Keep him down.”

“I have his shoulders.”