Chapter 259 Fresh Arrangement
ADRIANA
We drove to Damon’s former pack in three vehicles, myself, Hazel, and eight guards split between the cars, moving without lights once we got close to the territory border.
We were not planning on alerting whoever the guilty party was before they were apprehended.
The woods at the edge of the pack were dense in the way that suggests nobody has managed it in a while. Thick undergrowth, vines crossing the paths, the canopy blocking enough moonlight to make the torches necessary.
We moved through it in a formation that kept the perimeter covered, and I stayed in the middle of the group because Hazel had insisted and I hadn’t had the energy to fight her on it tonight.
We found the house after twenty minutes of searching.
It was deep in the tree line — small, functional, completely unremarkable except for the chimney that was putting out a thin line of smoke. Someone was home. Or had been home very recently.
I signaled the guards. They fanned out, surrounding the building quietly, taking positions at every exit simultaneously. Hazel went in first with two guards and I followed with two more, and we moved through the front door fast and hard and found…nothing.
The room was pretty much empty, the furniture was moved and some were turned over. Like someone was trying to move things around in a rush.
The residual warmth in the air from a fire that had been left to die down, two cups on the table that still had liquid in them. Someone had left in a hurry, probably not very long ago.
“Search every room,” I ordered. “Floor to ceiling. Nothing is too small.”
The guards moved through the space methodically and I stood in the center of the main room and tried to read what the space was telling me. He’d known we were coming. Not guessed, known.
Which meant the house was already confirmed, there was surveillance somewhere in our building and he had access to it, and whatever we’d said or done in the hours before leaving had reached him in time to clear out.
The guards came back with what they’d found spread on the table in front of me.
Rope, heavy, cut lengths of it, the kind used for restraint. A syringe, capped, with a small amount of dark liquid still visible inside. I looked at it without touching it and thought about the blood, the pint every three days, the medical dependency that had driven an entire chain of arrangements. A pen, unremarkable. A single dried feather. A box of matches, several already used.
“Bag the syringe separately,” I said. “Everything else into evidence bags. Don’t leave anything behind.”
There was a note on the kitchen counter. Short, handwritten, clearly left for me specifically.
‘You must think I’m stupid. I’m always ahead of you. Kyle is going to pay for what he did.’
I read it twice and put it in my pocket without any emotion.
We drove back in the same way we’d gotten in, and by the time we reached home the sun had been down for hours. I was moving through the entrance hall toward the stairs when a guard came around the corner at pace and I turned on instinct and hit him squarely in the stomach before my brain had caught up with my body.
He doubled over.
“I’m so sorry,” I said immediately, reaching for him. “Are you hurt? I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”
“Fine, My Queen.” He straightened with effort and a strained smile. “The original doctor is upstairs. He arrived while you were out and asked to see the King.”
I went up immediately.
He was in Elijah’s room when I arrived, the doctor who had been treating him for seven months, standing at the bedside with a syringe in his hand and the IV line in his other. He looked up when I came in.
“My Queen. I thought I’d check in. I had some concerns about his brain activity readings from the last report.”
“What did you just inject?” I looked at the syringe.
“Just a mild cardiac stimulant. Something to encourage response.” He set it down on the tray. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about,” I repeated. “You injected something into my husband without telling me what it was or asking my permission, and when I ask you directly, you tell me not to worry about it.”
He looked momentarily flustered in the way of someone who had not expected pushback on something they’d done many times before without question. “It’s standard—”
“Don’t administer anything else to him without my explicit approval first. Are we clear?” I held his gaze. “Everything goes through me. In writing. Before you do it.”
He left shortly after, and I felt something cold settling in my chest. He’d come here while I was gone. He’d had the room to himself for however long before the guard came to find me. And whatever he’d injected had gone directly into the IV before I arrived to stop it.
I called the new doctors immediately and described exactly what I’d seen. They told me to monitor the readings and they would be here first thing in the morning.
I didn’t sleep that night. I kept waking and checking my phone, and it was somewhere past two in the morning when a message came through that made me sit up fully and turn on the light.
A photograph. Kyle’s body on a stone floor, a pool of dark blood around him, his throat cut cleanly.
I swallowed, knowing I won't get rid of that image for a while. Then I got up and went to find Hazel on weak knees.
She was in the garden, which was where she went when she couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to be in a room. She was moving through a training sequence alone in the dark, methodical and focused, and she stopped when she heard me coming.
I held up the phone without speaking.
She took it from me and looked at the screen for a long moment.
“This is my fault,” I said. “I told him Kyle was worthless to me. I told him he could do what he wanted with them. I was trying to remove the leverage and instead I—”
“Stop.” She handed the phone back. “You made a strategic decision with the information you had. You couldn’t have known he’d respond to it this quickly or this way.”
“I should have protected them better.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I promised Kyle I would.”
“I know.” She didn’t try to argue me out of it. “Collins and Miller are still out there. We focus on them now.”
We went inside and back to the board, and I messaged Leo to come down because I needed his eyes on this, and he appeared within ten minutes still in his clothes, which meant he hadn’t slept either.
We started over. Everything on the board, every connection, every confirmed fact — from the beginning, with fresh arrangement, looking for the thing we’d been looking at sideways and missing.