My mind couldn’t go there, at first. Even with Garrett’s comforting warmth against my back, even with the pinpricks of starlight shining in through the cracks in the roof, reminding me that I was above ground. I had to work up to it.

“There was a time when I loved being a princess,” I said. “I mean, every little girl wants to be a princess. Can you imagine actually living in a palace? The dresses? It was wonderful. Magical. As I got older, it got harder. Being a teenager’s rough anyway, but when the press are analyzing every little thing you do: have you gained weight, have you lost weight, is your make-up perfect, have you kissed a boy....my mother protected me from the worst of it but she couldn’t stop it completely. And I still got hate mail. Do you know what it’s like, at fourteen, to get a tweet saying you’re a disgusting whore and you should just fucking die? And the fan mail, some of that was even worse. Men two, three times my age who started off saying I was pretty, but then they’d get into….” I shuddered. Garrett  wrapped his arms around me, his biceps going hard against me in his rage.

“The war started when I was eighteen. We knew Garmania’s new president was a hard-liner, but we never expected them to invade. It just all happened so fast: troops swarmed across our borders, tanks rolled into our cities. Then the shelling started. At first we assumed other countries would do something. I remember my father making phone calls all through the night, talking to the UN. To Britain. France. But they didn’t want to get caught up in a foreign war. Then he called your president, begging. But he was told no.”

Garrett didn’t say anything but I could feel the wave of shame that rippled through him. I didn’t blame him, or the US. Even the countries closest to us hadn’t wanted to get involved.

“By the time we managed to counterattack, Garmania had already taken a huge portion of our country. Our army was more powerful but theirs was dug in, now. They couldn’t move forward, but we couldn’t move them back. It turned into a brutal, messy war. Towns captured and occupied. Hospitals running out of medical supplies, people starving. After nearly a year, it was still going on. We’d gone from being a rich country to one where people were sleeping in the rubble and washing in the water from broken pipes. In the cities further away from the front, people were trying to live their lives as normal: go to work, go to school... but every night there’d be air raids,  apartment blocks just... gone, hundreds of people just wiped from the face of the earth. You can’t live like that. No one can.”

I sighed. “I was working at a refugee center. Miles from the front, my parents figured it was safe and there was no way I was staying in the palace when our people were dying. But then soldiers broke through our lines and by the time we got the warning they were there, kicking down the door. A few of us managed to hide in a storeroom. But I could hear them rounding people up. Telling them to stand up against a wall and—” I swallowed. “I heard the gunshots. I heard the first bodies fall to the floor. They were going to wipe everyone out. Unless—”

I closed my eyes.

“Unless I gave them something better,” I said.

I was back there. I saw myself open the storeroom door, the woman who’d been hiding with me grabbing at my sleeve, trying to pull me back. I could feel the cracked linoleum under my feet as I walked along the hallway, trying to stop my legs from shaking. I was repeating, over and over in my head, something my father had taught me when I was very young. Being royal isn’t about doing what you want. It’s about doing what your people need.

The soldiers couldn’t hear me approaching. They were already raising their guns to execute the next batch. I had to call out to get their attention. Then I flinched as all the guns swung round to point at me. I put my hands in the air and told them who I was.

They didn’t believe me at first. I’d been helping in the kitchens and I was dressed in an apron. But then the officer in charge took a closer look at me, cursed and got on the radio. It worked: they were far too busy talking about capturing me and the promotions they’d get to worry about the remaining civilians.

They pushed me into a chair to wait. I was hoping—praying—that our army would reach us in time. I knew they must be on their way. And then, through the window, I saw distant black dots in the sky. Helicopters, racing towards us. Yes!

But there was something wrong. The noise was too loud for them to still be that far away. I twisted around….

A Garmanian helicopter was landing, right outside the refugee center. My whole body went cold, my stomach a tight, hard knot. I was marched outside. I tried to delay, to stumble and trip, but they knew they had to hurry and they all but carried me to the helicopter. I was strapped in. The helicopter lifted off just as our helicopters arrived.

The last thing I saw of my country was the horrified face of one of our pilots. He was hovering just fifty feet away, but he couldn’t fire, not with me on board. And then we were racing away towards Garmania.

They wanted to use me as a bargaining chip. But it wasn’t enough for me to just sit in a cell. They wanted me to suffer and they didn’t want anyone to know where I was, to avoid my father mounting a rescue mission. So I was taken to what I later learned was an ancient, abandoned prison, over three hundred years old. It had been built up and up over the years and I was led down into the very depths of it, where the steps changed from concrete to stone, and then to stone worn smooth through centuries of use. We were well below ground: no windows and no light, except for flashlights.

Finally, the stairs stopped and there was a silence like I’d never known, a kind of pressure in your ears from it being so quiet. I was led along a hallway and we came to a door. I’m not tall, but even for me, the top of the door was only at eye level. People were smaller, hundreds of years ago.

The soldiers opened the door. The room inside was just bare rock: it hadn’t been built, it had been carved out. The space was about the size and shape of a bathroom on a plane, but with a ceiling that meant you had to stoop.

They nodded me inside.

“No,” I said stupidly. “No, I—Not in there!” I was trying to be brave, but my voice cracked on the last word. It was the lack of windows. There wasn’t even a window in the door. The idea of being shut in there, trapped—

They pushed me inside.

I was still catching myself on the back wall, the rock scraping my palms, when the door slammed closed and the key turned. Immediately, I was in almost total darkness. There was a hair-thin slit of light at the bottom of the door and a tiny circle of light coming from the keyhole. Both were faint and growing fainter as the soldiers moved away with their flashlights. “No!” I yelled with rising panic. “No! Don’t!” I shoved my face against the door and put my eye against the keyhole, but already, I could barely make them out: they were nearly to the end of the hallway and there was another door there. “DON’T!”

They closed the door. And the darkness was suddenly total. I couldn’t see where the keyhole was, or detect anything under the door. Just... black.

I strained my ears, trying to hear over the sound of my own frantic breath. I could just make out their boots, walking away. I was beyond being brave, now, beyond pride. “Don’t leave me here!” I screamed. “Please!”

And then there was silence.