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Her eyes moved over my face. Marta had worked in the main house since I was sixteen. She was kind when kindness didn’t require disobeying anyone, but she followed my father’s rules without question.

“You look tired.”

“The dungeon kept me awake.”

Her gaze dropped briefly toward the floor, but she didn’t comment. Everyone in the house had heard something during the night. They had also learned not to ask about what happened beneath my room.

Marta stepped aside, leaving the door open behind her.

From seven in the morning until seven at night, I could move through the approved parts of the house and gardens. My father considered that freedom. In reality, his household staff reported where I went, guards watched every exterior door, and Doña Teresa Alvarado—my governess since my mother’s death and my father’s most devoted jailer—made certain I never disappeared from sight for long.

Every night, the lock slid back into place.

“Breakfast is ready,” Marta said.

I followed her through the upper hall and down to the small breakfast room beside the covered veranda. Cool morning air drifted through the arched openings. Beyond the inner garden, the finca stretched across the lower slopes of the long-dormant San Vicente volcano, with rows of coffee plants, groves of banana trees, and cultivated fields spreading toward the foothills.

A guard stood near the garden wall with a rifle across his chest.

The view was beautiful as long as I ignored the men paid to keep me from walking into it.

Marta poured coffee while I picked at eggs, beans, fried plantains, and warm tortillas. I should’ve been hungry after the night I’d had, but I could barely force down a bite. Every time I tried, my thoughts returned to Lachlan.

Even before I saw him, the prisoner had sounded larger than life—fighting my father’s men, insulting anyone who came near him, and refusing to give them the satisfaction of sounding afraid. I’d expected the man attached to that voice to be intimidating. I hadn’t expected him to be so handsome.

He was huge even seated, his broad shoulders making the heavy wooden chair seem smaller than it was. Sweat had dampened his dark-gold hair, and rough scruff shadowed the hard line of his jaw. Bruises marked his face, and the cut on his right cheek was swollen and dirty, but none of the damage made him look defeated. If anything, it only made the restraints around his wrists seem more necessary.

Blindfolded, injured, and parched, Lachlan had still kept himself under control. He hadn’t demanded water or begged for my help. He’d lowered his voice and held still so he wouldn’t frighten me. Even then, he’d warned me about the guards instead of focusing only on his own pain and thirst.

But there was nothing harmless about Lachlan Byrnes. He was dangerous enough that my father needed chains to hold him, yet he treated me as though I were the one thing in the room he had to be careful with.

For one reckless moment, I imagined what it would be like to watch him aim all that controlled violence at the men who kept me caged.

The thought should have frightened me. It didn’t.

When I kissed him, he hadn’t reacted at all.

The memory warmed my face.

Kissing a stranger chained in my father’s dungeon had been reckless, embarrassing even, and nothing I wanted to examine too closely. Lachlan had been dropped into my life without warning, bringing powerful allies, a promise of escape, and more hope than I could handle.

That didn’t mean I trusted him. He needed the hidden passage, information about the compound, and someone willing to help him escape. His promise to take me with him might’ve been just a calculated move.

But he clearly understood the danger I’d put myself in by helping him.

My mother had taught me that men showed their true nature when they were frightened, angry, or denied what they wanted. Lachlan had been all three, and he’d still worried more about my safety than his own suffering.

My father had revealed his nature long before I was born. When my mother refused him, he kidnapped her.

He had stolen Princess Eliana from Eslovenya, hidden her inside this compound, and claimed her as his own. When she gave birth to me, something went wrong. The midwife stopped the bleeding and kept her alive, but the damage meant she could never carry another child.

Of course, my father had wanted a son.

He resented my mother for failing to give him one and treated me as both a possession and a disappointment—the royal daughter born to the princess he’d stolen, but not the male heir he believed he deserved.

When I was thirteen, my mother tried to take me away from here.

Sometimes the memory returned in pieces: the jeep sliding across loose dirt, my mother fighting the wheel, the edge of the mountain road disappearing beneath us. I never understood why the crash had taken her and left me alive with only a few minor injuries.