POV: Ferdinand King 

The screams echoing through the Southern Alliance Royal Palace were becoming harder to ignore.

Ferdinand stood at his bedroom window, staring out at the Louisiana bayou that stretched beyond the palace grounds, trying to block out the sounds of his father's latest "interrogation session" in the dungeons below. At eighteen, he'd grown up surrounded by this casual cruelty, but he'd never learned to accept it the way everyone expected him to.

A soft knock at his door made ...