“I’m tired of this, Ethan. Do you think I want to do this to you? We’re family.”
“You care not for me. You only care for yourself.”
“Give me the crystals.”
“No.”
Elijah’s eyebrow twitched. “You leave me no choice. You want a stage for your theatrics? Fine. I’ll give you the grandest stage of all.”
He took a prisoner’s hood and fit it over my head, before he summoned the guards to pick me up. They each took an arm, and my toes dragged behind me on the floor. I was carried upward, through many flights of stairs and out of the belly of the castle.
As we ascended to the top-level, I commented, “You’re getting a real kick out of this, aren’t you?”
Elijah’s voice was cruel. “We warned you what would happen if your mate revealed that video. You’ve dug your grave. Now you can lie in it.”
I heard the roar of the crowd, and the doors to the great balcony opened. I felt the winter wind bluster against me, stinging my cuts as I was dragged before the people. Steward Soloman’s words rang in my ears.
“We have determined that the video was the work of none other than the city’s menace, the Phantom.”
The guards forced me to stand. Elijah’s voice boomed outward for all to hear. “People of Malovia, I promise you that our nation shall receive justice, for we have found the perpetrator of these horrid crimes!”
Elijah yanked the hood off my face. I flinched at the sunlight that shone harshly into my eyes, and the people gasped. It was a tumultuous, wrenching sound that stuttered my heart and made my gut cave in. I saw the expressions of shock, the self-righteous anger, the uncanny fear, and knew I had played my own part in this.
The game was over. I had finally, unequivocally, met my end.
Elijah’s voice was triumphant as he proclaimed, “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the true identity of the Phantom— my own dear cousin, Prince Ethan Nowak of the Arcanea.”
Ethan’s trial begins in The Griffin Knight: Hidden Legends’ University of Sorcery, Book Four.
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I’d believed I’d die many times, but in this particular circumstance, I’d never been so convinced my fate was sealed.
I shivered on the cold stone floor and laid my back against the wall, trying to gain a bit of warmth from the dirty straw they’d supplied as my bed. The puddle in the corner that had formed from the water dripping from the ceiling had frozen over to ice. Even the rats, numerous as they were in this dungeon, had remained curled in their nests on this particularly cold day.
I’d never felt more chilled in my life than I did in that winter cell below the royal palace. The noxite cuffs around my ankles and wrists prevented me from using any magic, from changing into my wolven form, or from using my shifter heat to warm my body.
I was alone now. All the other prisoners had been moved to different buildings, so I’d have no one to talk to. As Elijah put it, no one to help me escape.
After spending a lonely Christmas and the last two weeks in this damp prison cell, I was at my wit’s end. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I’d been tossed down here. Elijah had declared my betrayal to the crown to all of Malovia, then thrown me in a prison cell without any more word of my fate except that there would be a public trial, and justice would be delivered.
I wasn’t sure when I’d be called in to court. Elijah was keeping my trial date a secret, no doubt to torment me, as I was certain.
I didn’t even know what day it was. I’d lost track when they began withholding food in an attempt to get me to confess.
I wouldn’t admit to anything I’d done, whether it was true or not. A confession would only make it that much easier for my cousin to execute me, and although I knew there wasn’t much hope in avoiding my fate, I wanted to make the process as difficult as possible for him.
The guards had stopped torturing me a few days into my imprisonment. It was clear to them I wasn’t going