MINA
Beyond the rusted bars of my cell, two guards are playing a game with flat, colorful plastic pebbles. It isn't proper chess—it's a street version they call Hounds and Hares—and the men are moving their pieces with a gleeful, slack-jawed focus that makes me sick.
These are fully grown warriors, men who should be maintaining the strict discipline of the palace's inner security, yet they are laughing like deranged children, slamming their plastic pebbles onto a wooden crate, throwing petty bets, and nearly coming to blows over a bad move.
On any normal occasion, I would have already utilized this scene.
I would have weaponized the atmosphere of their carelessness to orchestrate an escape. It wouldn't be hard. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I used my wits and the sheer stupidity of men to slip out of a tight knot.
My fingers twitch faintly against my knee at the old, familiar itch of it—the urge to calculate, to charm, to slip loose the way I always have.
