Chapter 307 Not Much Longer
ADRIANA
Elijah said I wasn’t allowed to go.
He said it with the specific tone of someone who had already anticipated losing this argument and was registering his position for the record rather than expecting compliance. I listened to his position fully and then told Hazel to bring the car around.
“The wound—” he started.
“Is stitched and covered and not going to be affected by sitting in a car,” I said. “Clara is an hour away. She spoke to Lucy, she met the lover, she knows something and she’s been afraid to say it since Lucy died.” I looked at him. “I am the head of judicial affairs in this kingdom. This is my case and I am going to conduct it.”
He exhaled. “I’ll drive.”
“Hazel’s driving.”
“Then I’m coming.”
“Elijah.” I turned to face him. “You have Roy coming this morning with the financial records. You need to be here when he arrives.” I held his gaze. “We can’t both be gone. Stay. I’ll call you the moment I have anything.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“The headband stays on,” he said.
“The headband stays on,” I agreed.
He kissed my forehead and stepped back.
Hazel had the car ready. I got into the back with Lana because Lana was going where I went until further notice, and Hazel looked at the headband and at Lana and then at the road and started driving without commenting on either.
“She’s going to ask about the head,” Hazel said after a few minutes.
“Clara?”
“She’ll notice.”
“Let her notice,” I said. “It might actually help. A Queen showing up with stitches in her head to ask about your dead friend is a fairly compelling demonstration of how seriously the matter is being taken.”
Hazel made a sound that might have been agreement.
We drove toward the sea. The road wound out from the pack’s main territory into the broader coastal land, and at some point the salt in the air became noticeable and I rolled the window down and let the cold come in because the headband was warmer than I would have chosen and the air helped.
“I never learned to swim,” I said.
Hazel glanced in the mirror. “What?”
“The sea. I always wanted to learn and I never did. Between everything before Elijah and everything after, there was never a time that was right for it.” I looked out at the water appearing through the trees on the coast road. “I used to think about it when I was with Stacy — the idea of somewhere that was just open. No one telling you what to do or where to be.”
“You could learn now,” Hazel said.
“Maybe,” I said. “When this is over.”
We arrived at Clara’s address — a small house on the edge of the coastal town, well-kept, the kind of modest orderliness that came from someone who took care of things even when things were difficult. She was already at the door when we pulled up, which meant she’d been watching for us.
She was in her early thirties, slight, with the careful dress of someone who had prepared for this meeting because it mattered and she wanted to handle it right. She looked at the headband when I got out of the car and registered it without commenting.
I sat across from her in her small sitting room and Lana sat in my lap and looked around the space with her standard wide-eyed assessment of new environments.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I’ll be direct. Tim has been in my custody for months without a proper hearing. I am conducting one now. I need your honest account — not the abbreviated version you gave the guards. Everything.”
Clara looked at her hands. Then she looked at Lana. Something in her expression softened and shifted.
“Lucy would have liked her,” she said quietly.
“Tell me about the man she was seeing,” I said.
Clara took a breath.
“I only met him once. She brought him to a café and introduced him as a friend — but it was obvious it was more. He was well-dressed. The kind of confidence that came from money and position, not from personality.” She paused. “He looked at her like she belonged to him. Not in a loving way. In a proprietary way. I didn’t like it.”
“Did she tell you his name?”
“She called him something — a name that felt wrong for him. Too ordinary. Like something he was using rather than his own.” She paused. “I noticed something when he put his hand on the table. A tattoo on his wrist. Very small, very precise.” She looked at me. “A crown. Red.”
I held Lana a little tighter without realizing I was doing it.
“And he had a smell,” Clara continued. “I noticed it when he leaned across the table. Clinical. Like rubbing alcohol. The kind of thing that gets into your clothes from a specific environment.”
The room was very quiet.
“Clara,” I said carefully. “Did Lucy ever tell you she was afraid of him?”
“At the end,” Clara said. “In the last few weeks before she died. She called me once and she was — she was frightened in a way I hadn’t heard from her before. She said she’d found out something about him. Something she didn’t know how to handle.” Clara’s voice had gone quieter. “She said she was going to tell Tim. That she needed to tell someone and Tim was the person she trusted most.” She looked at me. “She never got the chance.”
I looked at Clara steadily. “She found out something about him and she was killed before she could tell anyone.”
“Yes,” Clara said.
I thought about Tim’s account. The phone call he had heard — he can’t find out. Not Tim couldn’t find out. The man couldn’t find out. Lucy had discovered something about her lover that put her in danger, and he had killed her to protect it.
“I’m going to need you to give a formal statement,” I said. “Everything you’ve told me, in writing, witnessed by the Beta.” I held her gaze. “And Clara — you’re not going to be in danger for telling me this. That is a promise I am making to you and intend to keep.”
Clara looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded.
I called Elijah from the car on the way back.
“The tattoo,” I said. “Red crown. The clinical smell. The description matches what Damon gave us, what Kyle told us, what the footage evidence pointed to.” I held the phone. “Lucy found out something about him and he killed her. Tim has been sitting in my cells for months for a murder committed by the person who has been behind everything else.” I paused. “Has Roy arrived?”
“He just got here,” Elijah said. “He’s waiting.”
“Don’t start without me,” I said. “I’m forty minutes out.”
“Drive carefully,” he said.
“Hazel’s driving,” I said.
“Drive carefully,” he said again, to Hazel specifically, which made her smile slightly in the mirror.
I looked out the window at the sea as we drove back, and I thought about Lucy who had found something out and paid for it, and Tim who had loved her and paid for that, and the careful patient person who had been arranging pieces for months and was finally running out of places to hide.
Not much longer now.