Chapter 255 I'll Write Back
ADRIANA
The doctors arrived back two days later and I knew before they spoke that something had changed.
Seven months of medical visits had taught me the difference between the face of someone delivering the same information in a new format and the face of someone delivering genuinely new information.
I stepped back and let them in without preamble.
We moved to Elijah’s room together. Lana was in the corner chair with the night nurse — she’d developed the habit of being brought here in the mornings, and she slept more easily in this room than anywhere else in the house, which I’d stopped trying to understand and started simply allowing. She looked at the doctors as they came in with the focused attention she gave to anything new, then lost interest and went back to whatever internal world she occupied.
“What did you find?” I asked straight to the point. I’d been filled with anxiety for waiting for so long, I just needed to know the answer at the moment.
The taller doctor opened the file. “The King’s general condition remains stable. His organ function, cardiovascular health, wound recovery are all consistent with previous assessments. His physical health, in isolation, is good.” He paused. “However, the full panel identified something the previous assessments did not.”
My breath got stuck in my throat. Even my heart stopped beating.
“There is a compound present in his bloodstream that should not be there. It’s synthetic, not naturally occurring, and the concentration levels indicate sustained repeated exposure rather than a single incident. It’s an ongoing administration over a significant period.” He looked at me directly. “My Queen, someone is introducing a toxin into the King’s system. That is almost certainly the reason he hasn’t regained consciousness.”
I heard a loud ringing in my ear which kept getting louder and louder as the words he said registered in my brain.
I looked at Elijah across the space, the stillness that I had spent seven months interpreting as mysterious, as medically unexplained, as something that would resolve in its own time, and understood that it hadn’t been any of those things. It had been deliberate. Sustained. Someone had been standing in this room or near this room, regularly, intentionally, keeping him under.
“Is there an antidote,” I said. It came out flatter than I intended, all the emotion compressed into the effort of staying functional.
“Yes. We can begin treatment immediately and given his otherwise strong physical baseline, we would expect to see response relatively quickly.” He paused. “However, My Queen, if the source of the toxin is not identified and removed, the treatment will ultimately be ineffective. We would be treating an ongoing exposure. The antidote cannot outpace continuous administration.”
“Start the treatment today,” I said. “I will handle the source.”
After they left, I sat beside Elijah’s bed for a long time without moving or speaking. Lana made small sounds from the corner. The machines ran their quiet loops. I looked at my husband’s face and thought about the months of this — months of being told stable, recovering, no explanation — and felt fury burning in my chest.
Then I got up and got my notebook.
The list of people with consistent access to this room was not long. That was both reassuring and disturbing — reassuring because it narrowed the field, disturbing because everyone on the list was someone I had reason to trust. The two maids assigned to Elijah’s care. The two guards outside the door. The two at the stairwell. The day nurse. The night nurse. The doctor. Hazel. Leo. Myself.
I crossed off the obvious ones. The list that remained was still uncomfortable.
Hazel arrived while I was working through it, read my face, and sat down without being asked.
I told her everything. I watched her process it in stages, the initial shock, compressed quickly into something harder and more focused, the way she always processed things that required action rather than feeling.
“We cannot tell any of them,” she said immediately.
“I know.”
“The moment they know we’ve identified the toxin, they stop administering it. And stopping is not the same as being caught. We lose our only advantage.”
I looked at the list, my mind still running. “The treatment starts today and we watch. Every person on this list gets observed without knowing it. We look for changes in behavior, in routine, in access patterns.”
Hazel took the notebook and looked at the names. She stopped at one.
“The previous doctor,” she said. “I’ve never met him.”
I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I have never been in this room at the same time as him. Not once in seven months.” She looked up. “Have you thought about that?”
I had not thought about that. I had assumed, without examining the assumption, that his visits and Hazel’s presence in the room had simply not overlapped because of timing. But seven months was a long time for two patterns not to intersect even once.
“Find me a photograph,” I said. “Before today. I want to know what he looks like.”
She was already reaching for her phone when the knock came at the door. A guard, with an envelope.
“This was found at the gate, My Queen. No one saw who left it.”
I took it and turned it over.
My hands froze on the red crown seal pressed into dark wax.
I opened it and read it and then passed it to Hazel without speaking.
He had the boys. Kyle, Collins, Miller. He’d found them wherever I’d sent them, which meant he’d been looking, which meant he’d known they existed as a risk. The letter was short and precise and designed to make me feel that no distance I put between the people I was protecting and the person hunting them was sufficient.
Hazel set it down. “He wants you to be reactive.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to be?”
“Since he so badly wants my attention. I want him to know he has it.” I picked up my pen. “I’ll write back.”