Chapter 209 Another Girl
ADRIANA
Hazel had been right, which she reminded me of exactly once and then had the grace never to mention again.
Lana arrived on a Thursday morning three weeks early, which meant the entire plan I had assembled for her arrival was irrelevant and she came the way she apparently intended to do everything — on her own terms and ahead of schedule. She was small and loud and she came out with Elijah’s nose, which I told him about immediately and which made him laugh in a way I hadn’t heard from him in months, the genuine kind that comes from somewhere below the controlled surface.
“According to my family history,” he said, sitting on the edge of my bed and holding her with the careful totality of a man who has done this before and still treats it like something that could dissolve if handled carelessly, “a girl hasn’t been born into this line in generations. And now we have two.”
“That seems like an exaggeration.”
“Ask my mother. She said the same thing before I could.” He looked up from Lana’s face. “You gave me another daughter. Do you know what that means?”
“You’re going to spoil her completely.”
“Absolutely.”
“So you weren’t a special father before?” Leo said from the doorway, with the specific deadpan delivery he had inherited directly from Elijah and which was becoming more refined with age.
Elijah didn’t even look up. “Go away, I can see you whenever I want.”
“That’s actually insulting.”
“Leo.” I held out my other arm. “Come here.”
He came and sat beside me and looked at his sister with the expression he got when something mattered and he didn’t want to make a production of it. The twins were pressed against my other side making the particular sounds of children who are trying very hard not to ask to hold her yet.
There was a small shift near the foot of the bed and Lorain edged closer, quieter than the others, her eyes fixed on the baby in a way that was almost reverent.
“Is she… staying?” she asked, as if there was a version of the world where the answer might be no.
I smiled despite everything. “She is.”
Lorain nodded once, absorbing that, and then leaned carefully against Elijah’s arm to look at Lana’s face, her fingers curling into the fabric of his sleeve instead of reaching out.
“She’s tiny,” she said softly.
“You were smaller,” Elijah replied without missing a beat.
Lorain looked at him, faintly suspicious of that, then back at the baby, her expression settling into something quietly pleased. Not displaced. Not uncertain. Just… like there was now more of something she already had.
A guard came to the door and Elijah handed Lana back to me and went out, and I watched his face change as he listened to whatever was being said. He came back in just long enough to catch Hazel’s eye and tilt his head toward the corridor, and she followed him out, and Aiden was close behind.
I sat there holding my daughter and looking at the door.
“Leo,” I said quietly.
He looked at me.
“Stay here with them.”
I passed Lana to the nurse and got up, which my body objected to with considerable force, and went to the door. I wasn’t supposed to be on my feet yet but I wasn’t going to sit in a room not knowing what had happened. I pulled the door mostly closed behind me.
Hazel was coming back down the corridor alone.
“What happened?” I said.
She stopped in front of me and something in her face told me before she opened her mouth that this was not a small thing.
“It’s Martine,” she said. “She was found this morning.”
The name sat in the air between us.
“Found,” I repeated.
“She’s gone, Adriana. Her body was found this morning near the south quarter. She was—” Hazel paused. “It was violent. Someone who knew her did this.”
My hand found the wall.
I had been trying to reach Martine since I got back. Had asked guards to look for her, had sent messages that didn’t return, had told myself she was somewhere in the city and would surface when she was ready. She had been sniffling the last time I saw her, standing at the bottom of the stairs, and I had noticed and filed it away and not followed up because there was always something more urgent. After all the things came out about Landon, she was still not found.
“She was barely twenty-three,” I said.
“I know.”
“How?” My voice came out harder than I intended. “Who did this to her?”
Hazel looked at me steadily. “Her husband.”
“She was married?”
“Her parents sold her into it to clear a debt. She never talked about it.” Hazel’s jaw was tight. “The neighbors suspected him for some time but no one said anything.”
“Who is he?”
Hazel held my gaze. “Mark.”
The corridor was very quiet.
Mark. Who had been in the cells awaiting execution. Who Elijah had kept alive briefly because of Lana’s birth, intending to deal with it properly within days.
“He escaped,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Elijah had pushed the execution forward and Mark had help from inside. One of the guards let him go.”
Something cold and complete settled in me. I had been gentle with this. I had tried to handle it through proper channels, had let Elijah manage the timeline, had told myself there was no rush. And in that space Martine had been murdered and her killer had walked out of a cell and was currently free.
Not anymore.
“Find out which guard opened that cell,” I said. “Find out tonight. I don’t care what it takes.” I looked at Hazel directly. “And find Mark. No one in this palace rests until he is found. Not the guards, not the security teams, nobody. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And Hazel, Martine deserves better than a rushed burial. I want her family found, wherever they are. She deserves someone to mourn her properly.”
Hazel nodded and left.
I stood in the corridor for a moment and then went back into the room and closed the door and stood there looking at my children, who were exactly as I had left them. Leo holds Lana with enormous concentrated care, the twins asleep against each other on the chair in the corner, Lorain still sitting close, watching.
I crossed the room and took Lana back and sat and held her.
Martine had been in this house because someone had sold her. She had stood in corridors and carried files and sniffled at the bottom of staircases and I had noticed and not asked. She had been twenty-three years old and she had deserved better from the world and certainly better from me, and none of that was fixable now.
What I could do was make sure the man who killed her didn’t get to disappear into the world as if she hadn’t mattered.
Lana made a small sound against my chest and I pressed my lips to her forehead.