Chapter 271 Don't Take the Blame
ELIJAH
“Where are you? Are you hurt?” I asked, still frantically looking around for him.
“I’m not hurt. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. She was right there and I just turned around for one second to get money for the water because it was hot and she needed—” He stopped. “She was gone. I turned back and she was just gone.”
I spotted him across the courtyard on the ground, knees pulled up, phone pressed to his ear, his graduation uniform dirt-marked from where he’d been searching.
I moved to him fast.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps and the expression on his face — my fifteen-year-old son, who had held this family together for seven months while I was gone, who had done everything right — was the expression of someone who believed they had committed an unforgivable failure.
I crouched in front of him. “Get up,” I said, and pulled him to his feet myself. “Get up. This is not your fault.”
“I turned away for one second—”
“Get up.” I held his arms until he was standing. “Someone planned this. This was not an accident and it was not your carelessness.” I looked at his face. “You did not lose your sister. Someone took her.”
I turned to the nearest guard.
“Lock down the venue. Nobody leaves. The Princess is missing and I want every person on these grounds held until further notice.” I looked at another guard. “Send a car for the Queen. Tell her it’s urgent. Don’t give her details over the phone, wait until she’s home.” I looked at Leo. “Come with me.”
Leo wiped his face with the back of his hand and straightened his uniform and walked beside me, and I kept my own face absolutely composed because that was what he needed to see right now.
Adriana was going to need to see the same thing. That was going to be considerably harder to maintain.
ADRIANA
The guard who came to my car was trying very hard to look like nothing was wrong, which was the first indication that something was wrong.
I’d been in the house for forty minutes by then. The party preparations were in their final stages. The caterers moving through the ground floor, the florists finishing the arrangements on the tables, Hazel coordinating the last details with the specific efficiency she brought to everything.
I’d settled the twins upstairs and Lorain had gone with them, and I was back downstairs looking at my phone wondering why Elijah hadn’t sent a message yet when the guard arrived.
He could barely meet my eyes, and it wasn't out of respect. I knew this look. It was fear. Absolute terror.
I pushed the voice in my head already conjuring up multiple worst case scenarios.
“My Queen. The King asks that you remain here. He’ll bring the Prince and the Princess shortly.”
I looked at him. “What’s happening?”
“He’s — they’re taking photographs. With a lot of people. He didn’t want you to wait.”
The explanation was slightly too smooth that it sounded rehearsed.
I looked at him for another second, and then I said: “Fine,” and went back inside, because pushing him wasn’t going to give me the information I needed and creating alarm in the house while I had a party setup in progress and no actual information wasn’t useful either.
I checked on the twins who were now wrestling on the bed in the way they weren’t supposed to, and Lorain was sitting in the chair reading as she has learned to ignore their antics. I closed the door and went downstairs and checked my phone again.
Nothing from Elijah.
I noticed then the text from the unknown number. I’d seen it earlier and dismissed it as misdirected. I opened it now.
It took me a moment to process what I was reading. Then I put the phone face-down on the table and stood very still for a count of five breaths and thought through what I knew and what I didn’t know and what the most useful response to both was.
I heard the car before I saw the lights. The twins heard it too, I heard them come tumbling out of their room overhead because Elijah had promised to take them somewhere before the party, and they had been calculating this possibility since we got home. I heard Lorain tell them to slow down and heard them not slowing down, and then I heard the crash.
I was already moving toward the kitchen, my knees weak and legs shaky.
The metal serving platters from the side table were spread across the newly mopped floor and the twins were in the middle of them and Lorain was on her feet beside them. One of the platters had caught her arm on the way down.
“Up,” I said. “Both of you, up. Lorain, come here.”
She came over without protest and extended her arm. The cut was superficial but still bleeding, and she was watching it with analytical focus.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“A little,” she said. “Not badly.”
“Liar,” Elijah junior said from behind me.
“I’m not lying, I just have a higher threshold.” She turned her head to look at him with perfectly calibrated older-sibling composure.
I got the first aid kit and cleaned the wound while the twins stood nearby with the chastened posture of people who understood they were adjacent to a consequence they’d caused but had decided silence was the best policy. Lorain didn’t flinch when the antiseptic made contact, which told me she was exactly as stoic as she’d claimed.
“Back upstairs,” I said to the twins. “Both of you. Right now.”
“But Dad—”
“Upstairs.”
My tone left no room for argument. Which finally made them concede.
I was finishing the bandage on Lorain’s arm when Elijah came through the front door with guards behind him. Not two guards. Eight. And Leo behind him, in his graduation uniform, eyes red, jaw set.
No Lana.
I looked at Elijah across the entrance hall and he looked back at me and in the space of that look I understood everything I needed to understand before he said a word.
“Lorain,” I said, without looking away from Elijah. “Go upstairs and stay with your brothers.”
She looked at Leo’s face. She looked at mine. She went without asking.
The guards cleared the space and then it was just the four of us. Elijah, Leo, Hazel who had appeared from somewhere, and me. The room was very quiet.
“What happened?” It took everything in me to keep my voice leveled.
Leo stepped forward from behind Elijah when his father was done explaining the situation.
“Mum.” His voice was held together by something thin. “I had her. I was holding her. I just needed to pay for the water and I put her down for one second and—”
“Leo.” I crossed to him and put both hands on his face.
I didn’t know where I was getting the strength from, but there was just a part of me that said not to panic. And I listened to her.
“Look at me.” I waited until he did. “This was not your carelessness. Whoever did this planned it. They were watching for an opportunity and they took one.” I held his gaze. “Do you understand me?”
He pressed his lips together and nodded.
“You are the Crown Prince,” I said. “You do not carry blame that doesn’t belong to you. What you do is help me get her back.” I let him go and turned to Elijah. “Lock down the kingdom. Every person who was at that venue gets questioned. I don’t care how long it takes. The man at the water stall where Leo was standing, I want him brought here directly. And quietly, nobody outside this house knows that Lana is missing. Nobody panics, nobody speculates, nobody talks.”
Elijah held my gaze. “The party—”
“Continues,” I said.
He stared at me.
“We’ll discuss it,” I said. “Get the stall owner first.”