Chapter 182 The One Survivor
ADRIANA
The house was exactly as I remembered it.
I had only been here once before, years ago, passing through the market district with Elijah on one of the days he had insisted on walking through the pack together rather than receiving reports about it secondhand.
We had stopped at a stall selling fresh fruits and the woman running it had been warm and no-nonsense and had pressed an apple into Elijah’s hand with the cheerful authority of someone who had decided he needed feeding regardless of his title, and he had eaten it without objection, which had made me love him slightly more than I already did.
I had not remembered whose house it was until I stood at the door.
She opened it and recognized me at the same moment I recognized her, and the small smile that crossed her face was the smile of someone who is surprised and also, beneath the surprise, genuinely glad.
“Luna.” She curtsied.
“Please.” I touched her arm. “I didn’t realize this was your home. I would have come sooner if I’d known.”
We went inside. The sitting room was the same as it had been years ago in the way that rooms are when they belong to someone who knows what they like and has arranged their life accordingly. The photographs on the walls were new — they had not been there before, or perhaps I had simply not noticed them. A girl at various ages. School pictures, a birthday, a day at what looked like a river with her trousers rolled up to her knees and a laugh on her face that was entirely unguarded.
“I adopted her three years ago,” the woman said, following my gaze. “I was lonely and she needed somewhere. The goddess arranged it.” She moved toward the kitchen. “Cookies? I still make them.”
“I would be very grateful.”
While she was in the kitchen I studied the photographs. The more recent pictures showed that relaxation clearly.
The cookies were warm and I ate one immediately, which made the woman smile.
“When did she go missing?” I asked.
“Four months ago. She went to the fields with three friends from school. They were going to have a picnic, it was a Saturday, she had no lessons, I had given my permission.” She sat across from me with her own cup. “None of them came home. I went looking that night as soon as I realized and I found nothing. I searched for days. I asked everyone I could find. I tried to come to the palace.”
I waited.
“The guards at the gate turned us away the first time. We came back with more parents. There were eight of us by then and we got inside but the Beta said the King was occupied and we were not to disturb him. We asked to see the Luna instead and he said that wasn’t possible and sent us out.” Her voice was even, factual, carrying no particular bitterness, which somehow made it worse. “We tried twice more after that. The second time we didn’t get past the gate.”
I held the anger that moved through me and did not let it change my expression, because what this woman needed from me was presence and action, not evidence of my feelings about a man who had failed her.
“On behalf of the King and myself,” I said, “I want to apologize. We did not know. I want you to understand that. If either of us had known, we would have acted immediately. What happened at the gate was a failure of this palace’s responsibility to its people and it will not happen again.”
She looked at me and I could see her deciding whether to believe it, which was fair.
“I know that,” she said finally. “I’ve always believed in you and the King. I just didn’t know how to reach you.”
“You can reach me directly. That is a standing offer and I mean it.” I paused. “Is Brianna willing to speak with me? Only if she’s ready.”
“She asked me to tell you she was ready before you even arrived. She’s been waiting.”
The girl who came out of the back room was smaller than she appeared in the photographs, which happened sometimes when trauma had compressed someone into themselves.
She curtsied and I asked her not to and she sat down across from me with her hands folded in her lap.
“I want to thank you for talking to me,” I said. “And I want you to know that you can stop at any point. There’s nothing you have to say today if you’re not ready for it.”
“I’m ready,” she said. Her voice was steady.
“Tell me what you remember.”
They had been taken in the fields by a group of men, she estimated twelve or fifteen, though in the fear of the moment her count might not be reliable. The men had not spoken to them initially, they simply rounded them up. They had been moved at night, covered, for what felt like several hours.
“They hit us,” she said, without particular emotion. “If you didn’t move fast enough or follow an instruction. One of the younger girls got hurt badly because she fell and couldn’t get up quickly and the guard hit her with the gun.” She paused. “But they didn’t assault us. They were keeping us for something and they didn’t want us damaged.”
“Did you see anything that suggested what that something was?”
She thought about it.
“Near the end, before they released me, a man came through who was different from the guards. He was old. He walked through the room and looked at all of us and he didn’t touch anyone but he was evaluating something. Like he was looking for something or someone.” She frowned. “He spent more time with some of the girls than others. The stronger ones. The ones who had developed early.”
I swallowed a lump that formed in my throat.
“And then they let you go?”
“They put a covering over my head again and walked me to a border and told me to walk north. They said if I spoke about what I had seen before I reached the palace, they would take me again.” Her jaw was set. “I came straight here.”
I looked at this girl who had been fourteen years old when she was taken, who had spent four months in a stone room surviving on paste and crusts and the company of other children in the same situation, and who had walked out of there and come directly home and told her mother everything and asked to speak to the Luna.
“You are very brave,” I said.
“I want them to come home,” she said. “All of them. That’s the only reason I’m talking.”
I thought about Leo in that room.
“One more question,” I said. “Were there any boys in the room with you?”
She looked at me.
“One,” she said. “He arrived near the end of my time there. They took him to the Alpha — the man running the facility — separately, almost immediately. He looked—” She paused. “He looked like he knew what he was doing.”
Something settled in my chest. Confirmation and fear and relief all arriving simultaneously.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve helped us considerably.”
She nodded. Then, with the directness that had been consistent throughout: “Will you get them home?”
“Yes,” I said.
I meant it with everything I had.