Chapter 281 Almost Impossible
ELIJAH
Since this whole thing started, I hadn’t been myself.
The last time Lana was taken I’d been unconscious, and by the time I woke up she was already back. I had heard it and it had felt distorted, muffled, arriving without the full weight of what it actually meant to live through it.
Adriana had managed it alone. Now I understood what that cost and I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she had done it without me.
It felt like a piece of me had gone missing since Lana disappeared. She was just a baby. She hadn’t done anything, she hadn’t made any enemies, she had simply been born into this family and that had been enough to make her a target and I found that particular fact almost impossible to sit with.
I hadn’t been able to fully read Adriana since it happened. At the party she had seemed composed in a way that I initially misread as indifference before I understood what it actually was, she was holding herself together with everything she had because falling apart at the party would cost us the only advantage we had. She had been right. She was usually right. It still hadn’t made it easier to watch.
When Hazel opened the door and came into the sitting room, I knew from her expression before she said a word.
“She’s crying,” she said with a small sigh.
I was on my feet before she finished the sentence.
“How long?”
“Just now. I saw her going in.”
I went upstairs and pushed the door open without knocking because this wasn’t the moment for knocking. Adriana was on the bed, and she looked up when I came in with the expression of someone who had been caught doing something they’d been trying to do in private and had run out of the energy to pretend otherwise.
I sat beside her and put my arm around her and she leaned in and I held her and let the silence exist without filling it.
“It’s my fault,” she said eventually, into my shoulder. “I should have kept her with me. I should have been more careful.”
I had known she would say this. I had been waiting for it. And I also knew that if she was blaming herself, I had no right to say anything, because I was the one who had been unconscious while my family ran the kingdom and raised my newborn daughter and survived what someone was doing to try to destroy us.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It was planned. They looked for an opportunity and they took one. That’s not the same as you failing her.”
She pulled back and looked at me. Her eyes were red and her jaw was set and she looked like someone who had decided to accept comfort only up to the point where it stopped being accurate.
“It wasn’t meant to happen,” she said. “She wasn’t meant to be taken from me. She’s just a baby and she’s been taken twice now and she’s barely old enough to sit up on her own.” Her voice cracked on the last words. “How do I keep letting this happen?”
“You don’t let it happen. Someone keeps making it happen to us.”
She was quiet for a moment. “When you were unconscious. How do you think I managed all of it? I never got to ask — how do you think I got through it?”
“I heard you,” I said. “I heard more than you know. Every night you came to sit with me. Every time you talked to me or brought Lana to lie beside me. I heard you telling her she had a father who was coming back.” I looked at her directly. “You got through it because you’re the most capable person I know. And you’ll get through this the same way.”
“And after we get her back? What stops it from happening again?”
“We find out why she keeps being targeted specifically,” I said. “And we stop it at the source.” I stood up and held my hand out. “Come on. Wash your face. I’ll meet you downstairs. We need to check those cameras and I need to know what we’re looking at.”
She took my hand and stood and I pressed my lips to her forehead and then I went.
Hazel was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
“How is she?”
“She’ll be okay.” I turned toward the security room. “Come with me. Don’t bring her yet — I want to see the footage first.”
The security room was at the front of the building near the gate, and we walked to it without speaking. When we pulled up the footage from the party, I watched it through once at normal speed.
Then Hazel pointed.
“There,” she said.
I leaned closer to the screen. A figure moving through the corridor just before Adriana came out of the bathroom. Moving carefully, deliberately, along the angle where the cameras were weakest. They knew the building and the angle of the cameras.
I looked at the way that figure moved. The build. The particular walk.
“That’s not possible,” I said.
Hazel said nothing.
“There’s no way he could have been here without me knowing.”
“I know,” she said. “But there he is.”
I stood up and stepped back from the screen. “Get me a copy of that specific section. Then delete it from the main system. Clear the whole bathroom corridor timestamp from that evening.” I kept my voice even. “If Adriana asks to see the footage, tell her there’s a system fault on that camera. She can look at everything else.”
Hazel looked at me steadily. “She’s going to find out.”
“I know. I need to verify it first before I put it in front of her.” I moved toward the door. “Contact Roy. Don’t tell him what’s happened just tell him it’s urgent and the King needs him back immediately. He’ll understand the tone.”
“And if he asks for details?”
“Tell him I’ll explain when he arrives.” I stopped at the door. “Don’t tell Adriana what we saw. If she asks about the footage, tell her to go look for herself the rest of it is intact. I just don’t want her seeing that section before I know what I’m dealing with.”
Hazel held my gaze. “You have forty-eight hours,” she said. “Then I’m telling her myself.”
“Fair,” I said.
I left the security room and stood in the corridor outside it and did not move for a full minute.
Whoever that was on the footage, they had been in my house. At my party. Walking through my corridors while my daughter’s kidnapping was already in motion. And they had known exactly where to stand to make themselves as difficult to identify as possible.
Almost. But not quite impossible.