Chapter 284 The Full Letter
ADRIANA
Elijah read the letter twice.
It was short enough that reading it twice meant he was sitting with each line rather than moving through it quickly, and I stood in the middle of the room and watched his face work through whatever it was working through and waited for him to say something.
“You want to leave me,” he said finally.
I stared at him. “That’s what you took from that?”
“You hid it. You shoved it behind your back the moment I walked in.” He set the letter down on the bed beside him. “Were you thinking about it?”
“Elijah.” I crossed the room and stood directly in front of him so he had to look at me. “I hid it because I’d just read it and I was still processing it and you came through the door two seconds later. That’s the full explanation. There is no other explanation.” I kept my voice even. “And while we’re talking about things being hidden. Why did you tell the guards to wipe the security footage? How long were you planning to keep that from me?”
The shift in his expression was small but I knew his face well enough to catch it.
“The footage was manipulated,” he said. “Someone doctored it specifically to implicate a person I trust. If you’d seen it before I could explain the context, you would have drawn a conclusion that wasn’t accurate, and undoing that conclusion would have been harder than preventing it.” He moved to the window. “I was protecting you from reacting to something that wasn’t true.”
“By removing my ability to see it at all.”
“By buying myself time to verify it.”
“And that’s why you’ve been impossible all morning. That’s what was driving the attitude at breakfast.”
He didn’t deny it. He stood at the window with his back to me and I gave him the moment, because pushing before someone was ready to turn around never produced anything useful and I knew that about him.
When he turned back, something in his posture had changed. Not open exactly, but less defended.
“Come here,” he said.
“Tell me who was on the footage first.”
“Adriana—”
“Who was it, Elijah?”
A long pause. “Roy.”
I looked at him. “That’s why you called him back.”
“I needed to look him in the face and ask if he had enemies who knew him well enough to replicate how he moved. Someone who would know his build, his walk, his way of carrying himself through a space.” He exhaled. “He says he doesn’t know. He was genuinely shocked when I showed him.”
“Because it’s not Roy,” I said. “That footage was put there to send us in the wrong direction. Just like bringing us to that cabin was designed to move us away from the house while Lana was relocated somewhere else.” I sat down beside him on the bed. “Everything this person has done has been about misdirection. They want us chasing the wrong things.”
He was quiet.
I picked the letter up from where he’d set it down. “This letter though. This isn’t misdirection. This is the actual demand.” I turned it in my hands. “Look at how it’s written. It says divorce Elijah. Not divorce the King. Not leave the throne. Divorce Elijah — your name, not your title. Whoever wrote this knows you personally. This is intimate. This is someone who has been close to you.”
He said nothing for a long moment. Something was moving behind his eyes that I couldn’t fully read and that I noted without pressing.
“I’ll look into it,” he said finally. “Keep the letter safe. Don’t let anyone else see it.”
“Hazel,” I said. “I need Hazel’s help.”
“Fine. Only Hazel.”
He left and I sat alone and turned the letter over in my mind and thought about the demand. A political enemy wanted power. A political enemy would find a way to take the throne without caring whether I stayed or left. The demand to divorce Elijah specifically — not to abdicate, not to flee, not to surrender the kingdom — pointed to someone whose grievance was personal. Someone who wanted me out of Elijah’s life rather than out of the kingdom’s politics.
That pointed to a woman.
I didn’t have proof yet. But the feeling sat very solidly in my chest and I had learned over the years to trust that kind of certainty.
I found Hazel and Roy coming down the stairs together. Roy looked thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and there was a quality to how he was carrying himself that I recognized as grief before I understood why.
“Roy.” I came down to meet him. “How is your family? Your wife?”
The something in his bearing sharpened. “She has cancer,” he said quietly.
I had not been expecting that and it took me a moment to find words. “You should be with her. You shouldn’t be here dealing with this when she needs you at home.”
“I want to help,” he said. “And being useful is how I stay sane right now. Please let me.”
I looked at him and then at Hazel and I made the decision quickly.
“I need you both,” I said. “Elijah knows about the letter. He doesn’t need to know I’ve brought either of you in yet. Can you work with that?”
They both said yes without hesitation.
I gave Roy the letter. He and Hazel read it together and I watched their faces move through the content, and then Roy turned it over and everything in his expression went very still.
“There’s something on the back,” he said.