Chapter 276 Where is my Daughter?
ADRIANA
Elijah stood up from the table before I could stop him.
“Elijah—”
“I’m not doing anything.” He straightened his jacket with the deliberateness of a man putting distance between impulse and action. “I’m going to find Hazel and tell her not to let him leave.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He looked at me. “For now.”
He moved into the crowd and I watched the man in the navy suit track Elijah’s movement from across the room with the eyes of someone recalculating. He was good at this, looking without appearing to look, at adjusting his position casually when the room rearranged itself. But he wasn’t better at it than I was, and I’d been watching him for long enough now that I knew his patterns.
I leaned to Leo beside me. “The man who just spoke to us. Don’t look for him yet. But when you naturally scan the room in the next two minutes, find him and keep him in your periphery.”
“Already found him,” Leo said, without inflecting it differently from anything else he might say. “He’s near the drinks table. He’s been there since he left us.”
“Good.” I picked up my glass. “Don’t react to anything I do in the next ten minutes.”
“I won’t.”
I waited until Elijah found Hazel and the exchange between them was complete brief, low, her chin dropping slightly in acknowledgment and then I stood up and excused myself from the table and went upstairs.
I needed to change. The dress had done its work for the evening and the corset had been making increasingly non-negotiable demands on my ability to breathe for the past hour. I changed into something that would let me move properly and came back downstairs and went directly to Elijah.
“Hazel has someone on the door,” he said. “He’s not leaving.”
“The other one, the voice I heard in the bathroom giving orders, the one who orchestrated this. I don’t have a visual on him. I only have his voice.”
“Then we start with the one we have and work outward.” Elijah looked at me. “The stall vendor is still in the holding room. The man from the party will be taken downstairs quietly. If they know each other, we’ll know within five minutes of putting them in the same room.”
“Agreed.” I looked at the room one last time — at the party continuing around us, at Leo holding the table with the composure of someone well beyond his age, at Hazel positioning herself with an angle on the east door. “Go ahead. I’ll follow in ten minutes.”
Elijah moved through the room toward the exit and I watched him exchange two words with Hazel as he passed and saw Hazel change direction slightly in response. The man in the navy suit watched Elijah go and then looked at me and found me looking directly back at him, and something moved across his face that he recovered from quickly but not quite quickly enough.
I smiled pleasantly and looked away and waited exactly eight minutes and then I went upstairs to change properly and came back down through the private corridor and took the stairs to the lower level.
I heard the interrogation before I reached the room.
Elijah’s voice, controlled but with something underneath it that the man in that room would be finding very unpleasant, asking the same question in different forms. I came through the door and found the navy suit man in a chair with two guards flanking him, Elijah standing in front of him, and the evidence of several rounds of questioning already visible in the set of the man’s jaw and the sweat at his collar.
“Where is my daughter?” Elijah said.
“My King, I don’t know what you’re—”
“Where is my daughter?”
The man looked at me when I came in and I could see him trying to recalibrate. I crossed the room and stood beside Elijah and looked at the man in the chair with the specific stillness of someone who has made a decision about what they’re willing to do and is at peace with it.
“Bring the stall vendor,” I said to the nearest guard.
The guard went and came back with him, the man who had been paid to look away at the graduation, who had given me a description of the person who’d handed him the money, who had been sitting in a holding room all evening getting progressively less comfortable.
I put the two men in the same room and watched their faces.
The stall vendor looked at the man in the chair. Something registered. Not recognition exactly — something more careful than that. The look of a person who recognizes something but is trying to decide whether that recognition is visible.
It was visible.
“You know him,” I said to the stall vendor. Not a question.
The stall vendor looked at the floor.
“Look at me,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You were paid to look away while my daughter was taken from her stroller. A baby. Someone handed you money and you took it and you turned your back, and because of that, my daughter is currently somewhere I don’t know being held by people she doesn’t know.” I kept my voice completely level. “I need you to understand that the path out of this room runs directly through the truth. There is no other route. Not for you and not for him.” I looked between them. “Which one of you is going to show me which way the path goes?”
The stall vendor’s hands were shaking visibly now.
The man in the chair looked at the wall.
“My daughter is hungry,” I said. “She’s been away from me for hours and she is an infant and she is hungry and frightened and I need to get to her tonight.” My voice didn’t shake but something underneath it did. “I am asking you one more time. Where. Is. She.”
The stall vendor broke first. He always was going to — I’d known it from the moment they’d put him in the holding room and he’d been unable to meet my eyes.
“I don’t know exactly where,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But I know who organized it. And I know the building is in the eastern district. He told me it was temporary — that she’d only be there a few hours.”
“Who organized it?”
He looked at the man in the chair. The man in the chair looked back at him with an expression that was intended to be warning and arrived as confirmation.
“Him,” the stall vendor said. “He paid me. And he told me who to signal when the moment came.”
Elijah looked at the man in the chair.
The man in the chair said nothing.
“Eastern district,” Elijah said to the guards. “Every building we have access to. Start now.” He looked at me. “We’re getting her back tonight.”
“I know,” I said.
I believed it. I had to believe it, and I did, and those two things existing simultaneously were not a contradiction. They were just what it meant to be her mother in this moment in this room — the fear and the certainty, both real, both necessary, carrying me forward into whatever came next.