Chapter 305 The Riot
ADRIANA
I should have called Elijah the moment the crowd appeared.
That was the honest assessment I arrived at afterward, sitting in the bedroom with a doctor threading stitches through my scalp while Elijah stood in the corner looking at me with the controlled expression he wore when he was furious and had decided that the fury was not useful right now and was therefore managing it very carefully.
But I hadn’t called him because he was out with Lucien, and I hadn’t wanted to interrupt whatever fragile beginning they were constructing together with the news that his wife was standing on a balcony facing a mob.
Hazel had come to find me because the noise had reached the upper floors and she’d looked out and seen what was happening — hundreds of people in the grounds, carrying signs and torches and some of them weapons, shouting in the specific rhythm of a crowd that had been organized rather than spontaneously assembled. Someone had brought them here. Someone had given them the narrative, the timing, the specific language they were using.
“Kill the witch. Save the King.”
I had gone to the balcony because standing inside and watching through a window felt like exactly what they expected me to do. I had stepped to the edge where they could see me and the noise had peaked and intensified, and I had been about to speak when something came out of the crowd in a fast flat arc and connected with the side of my head and I stumbled back.
After that things moved quickly. Hazel was beside me immediately, pulling me inside, her hand pressed against my head, talking to me in the specific voice she used when she was managing a situation that required her to remain functional regardless of what she was feeling.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “Head wounds bleed. That doesn’t mean it’s deep.”
“I know,” I said. “Call Elijah. Tell him what’s happening. Don’t tell him I’ve been hit.”
“Adriana—”
“Hazel.”
She called him. She told him about the crowd. And then, because she was Hazel and because some calculations were more important than following instructions, she told him about the stone.
He was back within twenty minutes. I heard his car and then his voice and then his footsteps and then he was in the corridor looking at the cloth Hazel had pressed to the side of my head and doing the thing where he kept his face very still because the alternative was less controlled.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You have a cloth on your head that is red,” he said.
“Head wounds bleed. I told Hazel the same thing.”
He looked at Hazel. She looked at the ceiling.
“Go deal with the crowd,” I said. “They need to hear from you. Whatever they’ve been told about me, it needs to be addressed directly and it needs to come from you.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he went.
I went to the window and watched from a position where I could see without being seen. The crowd had quieted when a guard announced the King was coming, the specific silence of a group that had been expecting to shout and had been given something that required listening instead.
Elijah stood in front of them.
“What is the problem,” he said, and his voice carried in the way it carried when he wanted it to, which was further than seemed physically reasonable, “that has brought you to my house today in this manner? What has been done to you? What witch do you speak of?”
There was a long silence. Then a woman’s voice from somewhere in the middle of the crowd: “My King, we heard the Queen used magical powers. That she controls you. That you do everything she says because of what she’s done to you.”
“And who told you this?” he said.
Murmuring. Nobody said a name.
“I love my wife,” Elijah said. He said it simply, without performance, the way he said things he meant completely. “I listen to her counsel because she is wise and because her judgment has proven sound. I do as she advises because she is almost always right. If that is witchcraft, then I have been willingly bewitched since the day I met her and I have no complaints.” He addressed at the crowd. “The people who told you these things did so because they couldn’t get what they wanted through legitimate means. They needed you angry and pointed in a direction. I am asking you to think carefully about who benefited from your anger today and what it actually cost them.”
The crowd was very quiet.
“One of you threw a stone at my wife,” he said. The quiet tone was more effective than any volume. “She is in the house right now with stitches in her head. I am choosing to address the circumstances that brought you here rather than the individual who did it. But I will say this once: anyone who raises anything toward her in the future will not find me this measured.”
He let that sit.
“Go home,” he said. “Think about who sent you here and why. That is all I ask.”
When he came back upstairs the doctor was already there, examining the wound, and Elijah sat in the chair across from us and watched the doctor work with the expression of someone doing significant internal management.
“Three stitches,” the doctor said. “Clean, no debris. She’ll be fine.”
“I told you,” I said.
“You told me,” Elijah agreed, with the flatness of someone who had been told a thing and was not comforted by having been told it.
After the doctor left I looked at Elijah across the room.
“Someone organized that crowd,” I said. “The same person. They’ve been feeding the pack distorted information for weeks — building the narrative, waiting for the right moment to deploy it.” I touched the bandage the doctor had applied carefully. “This is them getting desperate. Things aren’t going the way they planned.”
“Roy called while I was downstairs,” Elijah said. “He has something. He’s coming tomorrow morning.”
I sat up straighter despite the specific objection my head registered. “What kind of something?”
“He said financial records. A trail that connects to what I told him.” Elijah held my gaze. “He said it’s solid.”
I looked at Lana in her cot beside the bed. She was asleep, entirely unbothered, her small chest rising and falling with the even rhythm she had when she was deeply under.
He came and sat beside me on the bed and I leaned against his shoulder and he put his arm around me carefully, avoiding the bandage, and we sat there in the quiet of the room while our daughter slept.