Chapter 179 Throne Room
ADRIANA
The files kept me up until nearly three in the morning.
I had gone through each one individually, which took longer than reading them as a stack would have but felt necessary. Each file was a person. A name, an age, a last confirmed location, a description of what they had been wearing. Some of them had photographs attached, school pictures mostly. It broke my heart more.
They were babies. Fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old, and they were all simply gone.
I kept returning to the same question and finding the same absence of answer. What did someone want with teenagers from a Lycan pack? If it was information they were after, these children were the wrong targets, they knew pack rhythms and gossip and the locations of things, but nothing strategic, nothing that would be worth the effort of organized repeated abduction. If it was leverage, they would have made contact by now and demanded something. Neither purpose fit the pattern.
The only teenager in this pack who carried genuinely sensitive knowledge was Leo, and Leo had not been taken.
Unless the selection wasn’t about knowledge at all.
I made a note and set it beside the files and told myself I would think more clearly about it in the morning.
The other thing I kept circling was the question of how. Our security had been rebuilt and reinforced over the years following the Cult conflict. Not just the structures of it but the culture. We had guards who understood what they were watching for, border protocols that accounted for the different ways that threats might arrive in wolf and Lycan territory.
Rogues had a scent that was unmistakable to anyone with functional senses, it would trigger an alert long before any physical breach. For groups of them to be entering the pack repeatedly, taking children, and leaving without detection required either a failure of protocol so significant it was difficult to believe, or something else.
I put that note beside the first one.
Martine appeared in the doorway.
“Luna, the first troop has returned.”
I set the files aside and followed her to the throne room.
There was still a moment, every time I sat on the throne without Elijah present, where I registered the history of objections that had been raised to exactly this. The elders, years ago, with their outrage at the idea of a woman — a pregnant woman, which had apparently been a separate category of offense — occupying the throne as though it were simply a chair.
Elijah had been magnificent about it. He’d stood in front of the assembled council and said with calm certainty that her judgment was his judgment and her authority was his authority, and anyone who wished to debate that was welcome to bring their argument to him directly.
No one had brought their argument to him directly.
I sat and looked at the men assembled before me.
“Report.”
The senior guard stepped forward. “We searched the forest thoroughly, Luna. The extended perimeter and neighboring territory boundary, the full route between the attack site and the pack. We found nothing. No trail, no camp, no evidence of continued presence.”
“I expected that,” I said. “Thank you. You’ve been working through the night and I appreciate it.”
The men shifted slightly, which I had learned meant they had something to say that they weren’t sure was welcome.
“Speak,” I said.
“The Crown Prince, Luna. We’d like to stay on it. He’s—”
“The future of the kingdom,” I finished. “Yes. I know.” I looked at them, this group of men who had chosen to stay rather than rest, who were standing here past midnight out of genuine loyalty to a boy they had watched grow up. “You can’t find him if you’re exhausted and you can’t find him if you search only where you’ve already searched. I’m redirecting your troops.”
I looked at Martine, who had the files ready before I had to ask.
“These are children from this pack who have been missing since the beginning of the year. Averaging ten per month, every month, all of them are teenagers and they seem to be taken from the same general area. I want you working this alongside the other troops. Go into the pack, speak to the families, look for the patterns I’m not seeing from the files alone.” I held the senior guard’s gaze. “These families have been waiting for help for months. Give them the same commitment you’re giving to the prince.”
He nodded. “Yes, Luna.”
After they left, I sat alone. The palace was still, like someone pretending to sleep while actually holding its breath. Somewhere in the east wing, Elijah was probably asleep too, the twins were in their room with the night nurse, and the shape of my family was all present and accounted for except for the one who wasn’t.
Leo was somewhere I couldn’t reach him, in a situation I couldn’t fully map, in the hands of people whose motivations I was still working to understand. He had been trained for this. I knew that. Elijah had been deliberate and thorough about it, had prepared Leo for the reality that being the heir meant being a target, and had given him the tools to stay steady when things went wrong. I trusted that preparation.
It was still my son.
I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor and did not need to look to know who they belonged to. There was only one person in this palace whose footsteps communicated that particular combination of purpose and entitlement. Shawn appeared in the doorway.
He looked at me on the throne and his face did the thing it always did — a flicker of something he had never quite learned to fully conceal before the more managed expression settled over it.
“Shouldn’t you be with the Alpha? And what exactly are you doing on the throne?”
I looked at him for a long moment.
“Keep in mind,” I said, “that you are speaking to your Queen. And that I have had a very long night and a very limited supply of patience and I am currently sitting on the throne because I have pack business to attend to, which is more than I can say for you.” I kept my voice level. “Is there something you need, Beta, or did you come here specifically to ask questions you already know the answers to?”
He held my gaze.
“The Crown Prince is missing,” he said. “This is a crisis requiring the Alpha’s direct—”
“The Alpha is recovering from injuries sustained in an attack that you failed to prevent.” I let that land. “And the Alpha’s wife is handling it. Go back to your duties, Shawn. The ones you actually perform.”
I left him standing in the throne room and walked back through the corridor toward our room.
Elijah was asleep. The steady rise and fall of his chest gave me some relief. He needed the rest and he needed to trust me to hold things while he recovered, which was something we had both learned to do for each other overtime.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the notes I had brought back with me.
The pattern. The scent problem. The question of access.
I would figure it out. I had figured out harder things than this.
I lay down beside my husband and looked at the ceiling and thought about Leo until I finally, somewhere past four in the morning, fell asleep.