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“Prince Killian, please do not interfere further,” Mistress Ethel said, her voice hard. “I’ve indulged your fancy and allowed you to lead the interrogation in front of everyone.”

Killian let out a cold chuckle. “Allow? Choose your next words carefully, Lady Ethel.”

Mistress Ethel sucked in a breath, wariness and anger flashing in her silver eyes.

“We all have duties to the realm. You should know that better than the rest, Your Grace,” she said, her voice growing indignant with a hint of irony that spelled she knew something about Killian the rest of us didn’t. “Little Bob is a criminal who hides a deep, dark secret. I intend to use every means at my disposal to extract it to protect the realm. We believe that he’s a disguised agent of the dark force the oracle said would be coming.”

The bitch meant to torture me, but she had no idea whom she was dealing with. After I’d escaped my father, I’d vowed to allow no one to lay a hand on me. Torture me, and I’d drain her magic and leave her a shriveled shell.

I homed my gaze in on her as Sy marked her as prey.

But we must learn about this oracle, Sy said. If there’s prophecy about Ruin and us, we must find out what it is, even if we’ll have to stay in her prison.

“I’m not done. I haven’t got to the best part yet,” Killian said harshly. “You want to know the dark secret of this squire?” He turned to me, his lips curled up in a cruel smile, his eyes burning with ruthlessness and dark lightning. “Let me show it to you, and then it’s for me to decide what to do with Barbie.”

I’d said my name was Bobbi, yet he insisted on calling me Barbie.

What was he going to show them?

My pulse raced wildly. Fear bubbled up like lava, closing my airway.

My darkest fear was that Ruin would find me. Next to it was for anyone to uncover that I was Ruin’s daughter—the damned princess who could siphon magic, drain the land, and feed all the magic she had no right to take and steal to the eater of worlds. And if my father fully recovered and manifested in his original dark glory, there’d be no more worlds left in the end.

“No!” I uttered as I threw out my hands to rip away the whirling darkness that caged me, to drain it and take it into myself, and then I’d toss it at everyone to clear a path to escape.

Nothing happened.

I widened my eyes, remembering that I’d tried to siphon his power last time and I hadn’t been able to, though I hadn’t really tried, for fear of exposing myself.

But nothing could hold me back now.

I called my own kind of siphoning dark wind and unleashed it, but Killian’s darkness still wheeled around me, sealing me inside. It dawned on me that I’d finally met my kryptonite.

The chaos prince stepped closer, his intense gaze pinning me. I glared at him, spitting mad.

“It’ll be over soon, Barbie,” he purred.

Was he going to end me? Could he?

At his closeness, my heart fluttered wildly. My skin tightened as my body ached for him, craving for him to be closer. While I was terrified of what he was going to do to me, my body felt electrified, the need for his pure male flesh and his touch searing a path in my bloodstream.

Then his starlight washed over me, warm and cool at the same time.

I stared at him in confusion, until I felt it turning to invisible fingers that caressed my flesh from the column of my neck down to my breasts, slowly sliding further down.

My back arched at the sensation, a moan nearly escaping me.

Pleasure, anger, humiliation, lust, and fear blended into a cocktail, until I couldn’t tell which emotion dominated them all. I had no means to counter his kind of magic, and I didn’t want to. All I knew was that I was at his mercy.

But then I decided not to roll over.

I pulled out Deathsong from the sheath on my thigh and waved it at the heir of the House of Chaos.

“If I go down,” I pulled my lips back and roared, “I’ll go with a bang! I’ll open you up and see how black your heart is.”

“That’s a bad idea, and you can’t mean that, sweetheart,” he purred and lunged.

I stabbed the lethal dagger forged by my father toward Killian’s chest, but he sidestepped, lightning quick, his darkness and starlight surging with him as he counterattacked. Next thing I knew, he had my dagger in his large hand.