Chapter 181 Misconduct
ADRIANA
I found Elijah in the eastern corridor at mid-morning, standing with three guards and going over something with a map spread against the wall, and I touched his back as I passed and kept walking. He knew what it meant, that I needed him when he was finished. It wasn’t urgent but it was important.
He came within ten minutes.
He looked better than he had yesterday but the color was back in his face and the wound had closed cleanly and he was moving without the care that had been there in the first days after the attack.
“Sit down,” I said.
He looked at me with the slight expression he wore when I said things that were also things he would say, the recognition of a shared quality.
He sat.
“You need to slow down,” I said. “I know you’re not going to stop entirely, I’m not asking you to stop. I’m asking you to stop pretending that recovering from an injury and running a kingdom simultaneously at full pace is something your body can sustain. It can’t. And if you collapse, you’re not useful to Leo or to this pack or to me.”
“I’m not going to collapse.”
“You thought you weren’t going to get stabbed either.”
He conceded this with a slight tilt of his head.
“I have information,” I said. “And I need your head working properly to hear it.”
Martine brought the full files — everything I had gathered over the past several days, the original files on the three girls and everything the guards had turned up since I had redirected the first troop.
I had spent the previous night organizing it into something that told a coherent story rather than a collection of separate incidents, and I watched Elijah’s face as he went through it, reading his expression the way I had learned to read it over years of this partnership.
The change came when he reached the section connecting the pattern of the older kidnappings to the attack on the road.
He looked up at me.
“The timing,” he said.
“Yes. The kidnappings began six months before the attack. Whatever this is, it’s been building for most of this year. The children aren’t incidental, they’re part of the same operation.”
“Why children?”
“That’s the question I can’t answer yet. It’s not information, they know nothing strategic. It’s not leverage in any conventional sense, and no contact has been made, no demands presented.” I paused. “But there’s something else. The access problem.”
He was already thinking about it. I could see it.
“Rogues can’t enter this pack undetected,” he said. “Not in groups. Not repeatedly. The scent alone—”
“Either someone is suppressing it or someone is letting them through. One of those requires significant power. The other requires someone inside our security structure with the access and willingness to open a door.”
He was quiet.
“I know you trust the men around you,” I said. “I’m not asking you to stop trusting them. I’m asking you to consider that trust and loyalty are not the same thing, and that someone who has been trusted for a long time is the most valuable person to someone trying to compromise a pack from the inside.”
He set the files down on the table between us.
“You think it’s someone close to me.”
“I think the information about your route to Golden Blade left a very small circle. You told me. The elders were informed. A small number of senior guards were briefed.” I held his gaze. “That’s all. And someone in that circle made a decision.”
He was silent for a long moment.
I let him sit in it, because this was not a thing I could move him through faster than he could move himself. Elijah trusted with the particular depth of someone who had been betrayed before and had decided to trust anyway, which meant that discovering a betrayal cost him more than it cost people who held everyone at distance as a precaution.
“The children first,” he said finally. “Whatever else is true, those families have been waiting long enough.”
“I have guards on it. I’ll keep coordinating.”
“I’ll have Hazel look into the circle.”
I noticed the deliberate omission of Shawn from that sentence and did not comment on it, because we both knew why and saying it would require a conversation about Shawn that I was going to have with Elijah directly and fully, but not today when there were more urgent things requiring his attention.
He stood up and I stood with him and he looked at me with the expression he had when he was about to say something that he had been sitting with for a while.
“You’ve been running this while I was recovering,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The throne room, the troop redirection, the file investigation.”
“Yes.”
“Shawn came to me this morning,” he said. “He had complaints about your conduct.”
I kept my expression even.
“Did he now?”
“He said you had been insubordinate and were overstepping your authority in his capacity as Beta.” A pause. “He also said you struck him.”
“I did,” I said.
Elijah looked at me.
“He was in the corridor following me,” I said. “He told me I was just a woman and that you relied on me inappropriately. He also confirmed that he had been turning the missing children’s parents away from the gate for months, including turning them away from direct requests to see me.”
“Those families,” he said, his voice taking an edge. “They came here and he sent them away.”
“Repeatedly.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“I’ll deal with Shawn,” he said.
“I know you will.”
He left and I watched him go and then turned back to the files on the table and kept working. There was a girl who had returned to her family in the pack, the first of the missing to come back, and I had sent word that I would come to see her as soon as I could. She was the only direct source of information we had about what was happening to these children, and I intended to use that conversation carefully and well.
I thought about Leo.
He was in there somewhere, in whatever facility held these children, with the training Elijah had given him and the particular quality of steadiness he had developed over fifteen years of becoming himself. He would be assessing. He would be mapping. He would be doing everything his father had taught him and a few things he had figured out himself.
He was going to be alright.
I was going to make sure of it.