Chapter 18 The Theft
Bella’s POV
Something was off with the servants.
Not all at once. In pieces, the way most things revealed themselves to me. A maid who had always been chatty had gone quiet. Two kitchen staff who had warmed up slightly over the past week were suddenly elsewhere when I came in for breakfast. The small, accumulated friendliness I had been carefully not counting on had cooled overnight.
It wasn’t dramatic. That was almost what made it noticeable.
On the third day, I started paying closer attention.
Who moved through my hallway and when. Which rooms they came out of. I left my door cracked twice when I was supposed to be inside reading, and I listened to the sounds of the manor rearranging itself around me.
By the third evening, I had a shape. Not a name yet. Just a shape.
Someone had been in my room.
Not ransacking, nothing visibly wrong, nothing obviously moved. But things had been put back with a neatness that wasn’t mine. My neatness ran to functional, not symmetrical. Whoever had replaced things was tidier than me and trying not to show it.
I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about it. The candle on the nightstand had burned low. The room smelled faintly of melted wax and old stone.
The inspection was tomorrow. I had overheard the warden confirming it with the head of staff in the lower hall two days ago. Routine, quarterly. Every room in the manor.
Including mine.
I thought about Kattie’s face the evening she had walked back into the hall, the way her eyes had found me across the room with the particular stillness of someone running a quiet calculation.
Then I stood up and went through my room properly.
It didn’t take long.
They were in the bottom of the wardrobe, wrapped in cloth and tucked beneath a folded blanket I never used, sitting at the wrong end of the shelf. Three items. Small, distinct, clearly not mine. I recognized the seal on one of them from the dining hall display case, which I had spent considerable time studying in my first week out of sheer boredom.
My hands went still for a moment before I rewrapped them carefully.
Oh Kattie, I thought, not without a certain tired admiration. You really committed.
I sat with the cloth parcel in my lap and worked through my options.
Take them straight to Rhys, which meant asking him to believe me, still a complicated request given where we currently stood. Get rid of them entirely, which left no proof of anything. Or the third option, the one that made me smile a little.
She had put them here. I could put them somewhere else just as easily.
\-----
I moved through the manor at half past midnight.
No candle — the torchlight from the corridor sconces was enough if you moved slowly and kept close to the wall. Kattie’s room was on the upper west hall. I’d passed it enough times to register the door.
It was unlocked. That said something about how safe she felt here.
I was inside for less than four minutes. The wardrobe smelled of cedar and something floral — her, I assumed. I placed the items at the back, tucked just securely enough that a thorough search would find them and a glance wouldn’t.
Then I went back to bed and slept without any trouble at all.
\-----
The warden arrived mid-morning.
A compact, serious man with a leather-bound record book and the energy of someone who neither expected nor tolerated surprises. He moved through the upper floor with two assistants, room by room, methodical and unhurried.
I positioned myself near my door when he reached it.
He went through the room efficiently. Wardrobe, shelf, the chest at the foot of the bed. My pulse stayed even. I had nothing in here, I knew I had nothing in here, but still, waiting while someone searched your space had a particular wrongness to it that wasn’t easy to sit through.
They found nothing unusual.
His expression didn’t flicker. He made a note and moved on.
Kattie appeared at the end of the corridor about ten minutes later. Composed, unhurried, the easy confidence of someone with absolutely nothing on her mind. She was wearing pale grey. It suited her.
Then our eyes met briefly.
She smiled. I smiled back.
The warden reached her door.
She stepped aside with a gracious gesture, of course, I have nothing to hide without needing to say it out loud. A well-practiced move.
The assistants went in first. The warden followed.
The corridor had accumulated people while we waited. Servants, a couple of senior warriors passing through, Elder Mara who had joined the inspection two floors back. The air had taken on the particular quality of a room full of people trying to seem uninterested.
Kattie’s smile held for approximately ninety seconds.
Then one of the assistants stepped back to the doorway and said something low to the warden.
Not clearly. But enough.
The warden called Kattie in.
She went. Her posture, to her credit, gave nothing away.
When she came back out, the composure was still there, but it was working harder than before. A subtle tension in the line of her jaw, quickly smoothed.
“There seems to be a misunderstanding,” she said, to the corridor in general.
“The items match the record,” the warden said.
“I understand that.” Her eyes moved, just briefly, just a fraction, to me. Then back to the warden. “I’m simply saying I don’t know how they got there.” A short pause. “The same way, I imagine, that someone might not know how things got anywhere unexpected.”
The corridor went quiet.
She said it with such measured evenness that half the people there probably weren’t sure what she meant.
I understood perfectly.
“A full search was conducted,” the warden said, with the tone of a man done with ambiguity. “The items were found in this location.”
“Then there will need to be an investigation into how that happened.” Kattie nodded, unhurried. “As I intend to conduct myself.”
She was cleared before the end of the afternoon. Her rank made that almost inevitable, and I had known it would be. The items were returned, the record corrected, and Elder Mara’s expression did a very interesting thing I filed away for later.
The balance had shifted. Not dramatically. But the pack had seen something today, and they would think about it.
That was enough.
\-----
She found me in the lower corridor an hour after the warden left.
I heard her footsteps and didn’t turn around immediately. When I did, she was already close, closer than I expected. The corridor was empty. Just the two of us.
The warm, easy expression she wore in public was gone. Not replaced by anger, not by anything theatrical. Just gone. What was underneath was quieter than I had anticipated.
She looked tired.
Not the exhausted kind. The other kind, the tiredness I recognized from mirrors, the kind that lives in a person who has been holding something for a very long time without putting it down.
For one strange second I almost felt something close to understanding.
Then she spoke.
“You’re smarter than I gave you credit for.” Flat. Honest. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
She held my gaze, and something in how she stood shifted slightly, a small settling, like she had made a decision before she came down here.
“I’ve loved Rhys since I was fifteen years old,” she said quietly. “Not positioned myself. Not decided to. Loved him. Every version of him. The difficult ones, the broken ones, the ones nobody else wanted to stand next to.” A pause. “So understand me when I tell you that I am not going to stop. Not until you go back to wherever you came from.”
No performance. No venom. Just the plain shape of it, laid out simply.
“I’m not going anywhere either,” I said.
Something moved across her face, brief and unreadable. Not surprise. Something older than that.
“I know,” she said. “That’s the problem I intend to solve.”
She held my gaze one second longer, making sure I understood she meant it exactly as much as it sounded. Then she walked past me down the corridor, smooth and unhurried, and the warmth slid back into her posture like a coat picked up off the floor.
I stood there and let the quiet settle around me.
She had just told me the absolute truth. Probably the first time she had done that since I arrived.
Somehow that was more unsettling than anything else she had done so far.