Chapter 28 018

Chapter 28 018
Chapter 28
Daphne's POV

I sat with that for a long time.

The tea went cold beside me and I didn't notice until I picked it up and the chill of it registered through the cup. I set it back down. The garden was very still around me, the silver morning holding its breath in the particular way of places that have just received information and haven't yet decided what to do with it.

She had been at the gate.

Yesterday morning. Which meant she had been here before the letter arrived, possibly while I was still in the garden doing the first of the cutting back, possibly while he was standing beside me looking at the rose canes and asking questions about what the season would bring. She had been at the east gate while I was inside these walls and a young guard had looked at her eyes and seen mine in them and the senior guard had moved her along and no one had said anything until Mrs. Dorothy said something, quietly, on her way out of a garden, as though the information were a small thing she was leaving behind rather than the thing it actually was.

I thought about the letter again. The handwriting. The careful excision of feeling from every line.

She had written it and delivered it and then stood at the gate the same morning. Either the letter had been written before she came, prepared in advance and carried with her, or someone else had delivered it on her behalf while she stood at the gate doing something else entirely. Watching. Assessing. Trying to see something from the outside that she could not see from a letter's worth of distance.

Either possibility said something about her that I was not sure I was ready to hear.

I took the supplement without thinking about it, a motion so habitual now that my body did it independently of my attention, and stood up from the bench and went inside.

I needed to find him.

He was not in the corridor and not in the east dining room, which I had learned was where he sometimes took breakfast when the morning was busy and he needed the smaller space. I walked the length of the ground floor corridor without finding him and then stood at the bottom of the main staircase and thought about where a man with his kind of responsibility went when there was something to deal with.

The answer was obvious.

I found the study on the second floor. The door was not fully closed — open perhaps three inches, enough that I could hear voices inside before I knocked. Two voices. His and Edgar's, low and rapid in the way of two people working through something with the efficiency of long familiarity.

I knocked on the door frame.

A brief silence inside.

"Come in," he said.

I pushed the door open. Edgar was standing near the window with a leather folder in his hands, the kind that suggested documentation rather than casual notes. He looked at me with the measured expression he had worn since the first time I had seen him — not unfriendly exactly, but careful, reserving something, the expression of a man who trusted slowly and with reason.

Caspian was behind the desk. He looked at my face when I came in the way he always looked at my face, reading the surface before asking about what was underneath it.

"Mrs. Dorothy told me something this morning," I said. "About the gate."

Something moved between the two men — not a look exactly, more like a mutual acknowledgment of information already shared.

"Edgar found out last night," he said. "I was going to come to you this morning."

"She was here," I said.

"Yes."

I came further into the room and stood in front of the desk and looked at him steadily. "What else did Edgar find."

He glanced at Edgar, who opened the leather folder and looked at the top page with the expression of someone about to read something they have already read enough times to have memorised.

"The woman at the gate spoke to the guard for approximately four minutes," Edgar said. "She asked whether a girl named Daphne had been brought to this compound in the last month. The guard told her he couldn't discuss who was or wasn't in residence. She didn't argue. She gave him the letter and asked him to make sure it reached you and then she left." He paused. "He described her as calm. Composed. Not distressed."

"Not distressed," I repeated.

"His word," Edgar said.

I thought about what it meant to stand at the gate of a compound where your daughter was being kept and not be distressed. Either she was someone with a very high threshold for distress, which was possible. Or she was someone with a very specific objective and the composure of someone who had been working toward it long enough that the emotion had been managed out of it.

Neither version was entirely comforting.

"There's more," Edgar said. He looked at Caspian briefly.

"Tell her," he said.

Edgar looked back at the folder. "The woman at the gate was recognised by one of our senior border wolves. Not her face. Her scent." He paused. "She carries the bloodline marker of the Silverfang Pack."

The room was quiet.

Silverfang. My grandfather's pack. Alpha Quintus, who had a cruel plan and a political marriage waiting for me, who had sent me away at twelve to Blood Moon with a bag of money and no explanation. His pack's scent marker on a woman who claimed to be my mother, who had apparently been alive my entire life, who had found me here within weeks of my arrival.

I looked at Caspian.

"She's connected to my grandfather," I said.

"It appears so," he said. His voice was even but I could see what was underneath it — the same thing I was feeling, the careful and necessary process of revising what you thought you understood when the new information won't fit the old shape.

"Which means my grandfather may know exactly where I am," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"And that my mother finding me here may not have been as independent as the letter suggested."

He held my gaze across the desk.

"No," he said quietly. "It may not have been."

I stood in the study with the morning light coming through the window behind Edgar and the fire going in the grate and the leather folder full of careful findings sitting on the desk between us, and felt the familiar architecture of a managed situation taking shape around me — the scaffolding of other people's plans, erected quietly, around a person who was supposed to move within them without quite seeing them for what they were.

I had lived inside that architecture my entire life.

I recognised the feeling of it the way you recognise a house you grew up in, even when the furniture has been rearranged.

"What do you want to do," he said.

The question landed differently than it might have a month ago. Not what should be done. Not what will we do. What do you want to do. My want, solicited first, as the relevant starting point.

I looked at him across the desk.

"I want to meet her," I said. "On my terms. In a place I choose, with you present." I paused. "And I want to know, before she says a single word to me, how long she has been in contact with my grandfather and why."

He nodded slowly.

"Then that's what we'll do," he said.