Prison Princess

Prison Princess


CoraLee June Rebecca Royce


Prison Princess
Copyright © 2020 by June Publishing & RARE Publishing
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Editing by Helayna Trask with Polished Perfection & Heather Long
Cover design by Christian Bentulan
Created with Vellum


To everyone looking for a second chance.


Contents
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Thank you for reading!
About the Author
Also by CoraLee June
About the Author
Also By Rebecca Royce
Paranormal Prison Series


About the Book
Imprisoned, tormented and forgotten...
I’ve never seen the outside of these four walls. I was born in Nightmare Penitentiary, and I’ll probably die here too.
Or so I thought.
When an assassin captures me, I realize I’m far more powerful than anyone knows. I’m a princess. A Druid. The last of my kind. I command the earth and the moon speaks to me. There is royal blood running through these veins.
Tasked with bringing me back to my family, my captor is stuck by my side. The more time we spend together, the more I learn about the birthright stolen from me and the enemy who stole it. And the longer I’m with my assassin, the more my heart softens.
I never imagined that a harsh, lonely man would bring help. I never thought that leaving Nightmare would put me on a much different path. A path full of hope. Of freedom. Of love. A path that leads to accepting my birthright, with an assassin by my side.
But the future is blurry. There are two roads. One leads to happiness—to love. The other leads to demise. And even I can’t see which one wins.


Chapter One
Thirty minutes.
Thirty fucking minutes.
The guard’s shift change had a thirty-minute window—just long enough for me to slip out of my magically bound cell of steel and explore the outdoor bathhouse. I silently waited for my moment, aching to reach out and rattle the barred door of my cage, even though I knew the pain wasn’t worth the momentary satisfaction. These walls were spelled to recognize disobedience. We were corralled like cattle waiting for slaughter, and one toe out of line would create a chasm of torture to burst through our bodies.
I learned a long time ago to follow the rules, but every now and then, I couldn’t help myself.
Thirty minutes wasn’t a lot of time, but it was better than nothing. I’d been looking forward to the illusion of freedom since I first noticed that there was a gap in the watchman’s schedule. After two days of observing the consistent disruption in routine, I decided that an unguided stroll was worth the risk. The desperation within me was an unfamiliar sensation. I was so used to the seclusion, control, and loneliness that I didn’t know what I was missing.
But not anymore.
Usually, there was always someone positioned outside my cell. I was never alone, always stuck under the watchful eye of the Nightmare’s finest guards. The men and women were always stationed exactly four feet from my door and rarely spoke to me. They simply stood there with their arms crossed over their chest and their beady eyes focused solely on my cell. I considered myself a boring subject and figured they spent their shift counting down the seconds until they could move along in their rotation. But unlike them, I was always stuck here.
I’d heard at breakfast two days before that one of my least favorite guards—a gruff, huffing sort of man named Boo—was out with a cracked skull. Some gossiping goblins told me about Boo’s fight with a nine-foot troll on the more dangerous fourth level. Trolls were nasty creatures, and anything they touched became resistant to magic. Keeping them controlled here was exceptionally difficult, and their resistance to magic made the guard’s injury nearly impossible for the healers to fix.
While Boo was out recovering, his spot on the schedule was left unattended. It was kismet. Divine intervention. This prison was a well-oiled machine, but occasionally things slipped through the cracks, which meant I’d have thirty entire minutes to explore. Thirty minutes alone. Thirty minutes to feel something outside of my mundane life here at Nightmare Penitentiary. I planned to use every damn second.
Nightmare Penitentiary was both a mystery to me and a home. The vast, complex building housed supernaturals of every walk of life. It had various levels and wards, each with their own secrets and dangers. The air smelled like stunted, stale magic and blood. I didn’t grow up listening to lullabies and nursery rhymes. I was raised on the sounds of siren screams and tortured cries.
These concrete walls were all I’d ever known. I was the pulse of the prison, a permanent resident kept buried in the heart of isolation. I didn’t understand my purpose or why I was here. I’d committed no crime. I’d done nothing wrong. I was born in this Nightmare, and I’d probably die here, too.
I paced my cell while casually watching my current guard, Dolorian, out of the corner of my eye. He was a portly shifter with wispy hair on his cheeks and deep burgundy eyes. His black uniform was snug on his round body, and his hands looked big enough to crush my skull in his fist. He was busy digging his finger so far up his crooked, round nose that he was probably poking what few brain cells he had. It was entertaining to watch.
I silently counted in my head. There were no clocks here. They didn’t want us aware of powerful concepts like seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years. They kept us under their thumb by giving us as few allowances