Chapter 227 Black Cloak
ADRIANA
I was moving before the guard finished his sentence.
Hazel was right behind me, her hand already on her phone, barking instructions to someone on the other end as we took the stairs down to the lower level. The corridor lights were harsh and too bright and our footsteps echoed off the walls in a way that made the whole thing feel more urgent than it already was.
“What exactly did they find?” I asked without slowing down.
“Unresponsive in the cell. No visible injuries. The guard on the previous shift confirmed he was alive at midday changeover.”
“So it happened between midday and the evening shift.”
“That’s what the timeline suggests.”
I didn’t say anything else until we reached the block. The dungeons had been expanded since the last time I’d been down here — broader corridors, better lighting, more space between the cells. Elijah had approved that renovation. I remembered seeing the paperwork. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time.
We stopped in front of cell fifty.
No blood. That was the first thing I registered. A prisoner found dead in a cell with no blood and no visible wound and no obvious explanation. The man was on the floor, eyes wide open, body swollen in a way that told me everything I needed to know before I even crouched down beside him. His skin was red and mottled, lips cracked at the corners, body bloated like something that had been worked on from the inside.
I leaned in close.
Almonds.
I stood back up slowly and turned to Hazel.
“Flashlight.”
One of the guards produced it immediately. I shone it across his face, around his mouth, his nostrils. The small pale crystals were clustered at the edges, barely visible unless you knew what you were looking for.
Cyanide. Fast-acting, almost untraceable if you didn’t know the smell, and absolutely not something a man in a sealed cell could get his hands on without help.
Someone had brought it to him. Someone he’d opened his mouth for, either voluntarily or not.
I handed the flashlight back and straightened up. “Who was the last person confirmed to see him alive?”
A guard stepped forward. Young, trying hard not to look at the body on the floor. “My Queen. That was me. I checked the cells at midday before handing over to the next shift. He was sitting up. He’d eaten. He looked fine.” He swallowed. “When I came back for the evening round, I found him like this. I raised the alarm right away.”
“You’re the one who found him both times.”
“Yes, My Queen. I check every cell at the start and end of every shift. Standard procedure.”
I looked around the cell. At the floor, the walls, the small barred window set too high to reach. No container, no paper, no packaging, nothing that could have carried cyanide in here. Someone had delivered it already unwrapped, already ready, which meant they’d either come in person or had someone on the inside pass it through the bars.
“How many guards were stationed in this block between midday and the evening shift?”
“Six, My Queen. Two at the entrance, two at the corridor gate, two walking the floor.”
“And not one of them saw anything out of the ordinary.” My eyes moved around every one of them.
Nobody answered that. The silence was its own answer.
“Move every prisoner out of this block tonight,” I said. “Seal this cell. I don’t want anyone in here until I say otherwise. The six guards from the midday shift get separated right now and questioned individually before any of them have a chance to compare stories. Nobody talks to anybody else first. Is that understood?”
A chorus of yes, My Queen. The guards began moving.
Hazel fell in beside me as we stepped back into the corridor.
“He didn’t come in through any of the doors,” I said quietly. “Six guards across three positions and nobody saw anything. Either one of them is lying, or there’s another way in.”
“Both things can be true,” Hazel said.
“I know. Pull the maintenance layouts for this building. I want every access point that isn’t a standard door or window identified before morning.” I stopped walking. “And bring me the two prisoners from the adjacent cells. One at a time. Separately.”
The first prisoner had nothing. He was half-asleep, probably genuinely useless. The second one was a man named Damien, and the moment he walked in I could see from the set of his jaw and the calculated way his eyes moved that he’d already decided he had leverage and was planning to use it.
“I saw something,” he said. His arms were crossed. His chin was slightly raised. “But information costs.”
I looked at Hazel. She leaned in close to my ear. “Treason.”
I looked back at Damien.
“I’m not giving you your freedom,” I said. “Whatever you’re about to ask for, that’s not it.” I kept my voice completely even. “What I can tell you is that your execution is scheduled for six weeks from now, and I can move it considerably closer if you’d prefer to keep wasting my time.”
He looked at me for a long moment, trying to decide if I was bluffing.
I pulled Hazel’s knife from her belt, turned my wrist, and threw it. It caught the air beside his ear close enough that he felt the displacement and hit the wall behind him with a clean thud. He dropped into a crouch and came back up with wide eyes and the specific color of someone who had just reconsidered their strategy entirely.
“I didn’t miss,” I said. “Start talking. You have five minutes.”
That did it.
“A man in a dark cloak had come down through the ceiling, through one of the maintenance shafts.” Damien said, which explained the six guards seeing nothing because none of them had thought to look up.
He’d been at the cell for less than five minutes. Damien hadn’t seen his face but he’d been close enough to hear.
The prisoner in cell fifty had said he’d failed. That going back meant his death and his family’s suffering. The cloaked man had said very little. Two words that Damien caught before the conversation dropped too low to follow.
Only way.
“The cloaked man’s clothing,” I said. “Anything you noticed.”
Damien thought about it. I could see him actually thinking, not performing it. “All black. But his cloak shifted for a second when he moved. There was something on his shirt underneath. A symbol. Red. Shaped like a crown.”
I kept my face neutral.
The same mark that had been on the shooter’s jacket at the Moonlight Celebration. The same mark I’d photographed and circulated and was still waiting on an identification for.
“Take him back,” I said. “Damien — I’ll look at your case. Not as payment. Because if something is wrong there, I want to know about it.”
He didn’t say anything. The guards walked him out with his hand pressed to the side of his face where the air from the knife had moved.
Hazel handed me her phone without being asked. The camera roll was already open, the photograph of the jacket symbol on screen.
“Run it again,” I said. “Wider search this time. Cross-reference with known pack insignia, Lycan guild markings, and any criminal organization flags in the kingdom database.”
I looked back at the sealed cell behind us.
Whoever they were, they were cleaning up. Which meant they were afraid of what he could have told me.
Which meant there was still something to find.