Chapter 285 Special Guest
ADRIANA
I hadn’t looked at the back of the letter.
The front had been enough to stop me in place and I hadn’t thought to turn it over, and now Roy was reading what was written there and the stillness in his face was telling me everything I needed to know about what it said before he read it aloud.
“If you don’t leave tonight, get ready to bury your daughter.”
The words hit me somewhere below thought and my hands went cold and damp and the corridor seemed to lose a dimension, everything flattening slightly, the way things flattened when information arrived that the mind wasn’t quite ready to hold.
“It’s a threat,” Roy said immediately, stepping toward me. “That’s all it is — a pressure tactic designed to make you move before you can think. The moment they hurt Lana, they lose every piece of leverage they have. She is safe because she is useful, and she stops being useful the moment they harm her. They know that.” He held my gaze steadily. “I know someone in my pack who can lift prints from paper. I’ll get the letter to him tonight and push for results by tomorrow morning. Can you give me until then?”
I nodded. My legs had submitted a formal request to stop holding me up and I sat down on the floor of the corridor without fully deciding to, my back against the wall and my hands flat on the floor because I needed to feel something solid under them.
Hazel looked at me. “Adriana, someone will walk past—”
“Then they’ll see me sitting on the floor.” I pressed my palms harder against the cold stone. “I don’t care about that right now.”
Roy took the letter carefully and left to make the arrangements. Hazel looked at the space beside me for approximately two seconds and then sat down as well, which told me she had decided that practicality outweighed optics and I was not going to be left on the floor of a corridor alone.
“You’re not actually thinking about leaving,” she said. Not a question exactly but with the shape of one underneath it.
“If it would bring her home—”
“It wouldn’t.” She turned to face me directly. “Think it through. They get you out of the palace. They get Elijah destabilized. The kingdom is suddenly being run by a man who has just lost his wife and his daughter at the same time, and whoever this is steps in and takes what they want. Lana doesn’t come home — she becomes insurance.” Hazel’s voice was steady and careful. “Leaving doesn’t get Lana back. It just means they have two things instead of one.”
I knew she was right. I knew it clearly and it didn’t make the deadline less real or the image of Lana somewhere unfamiliar and frightened any easier to sit with.
“I told Leo I’d bring her home,” I said. “I told him not to blame himself and that I’d bring her back.”
“And you will.” She put her hand on my arm. “But not by doing what this letter tells you to do.”
I was still sitting with that when I heard footsteps on the stairs above us and looked up to find Elijah standing at the top of them, looking down at both of us on the floor with an expression that moved through several things quickly before settling on something steady.
Hazel was on her feet within seconds. “I’ll be downstairs,” she said, and she left with the specific efficiency of someone creating space on purpose.
Elijah came down and sat on the floor beside me without being asked or invited, and the sight of him doing it — just deciding to be where I was without making anything of it — released something in my chest that had been held very tight.
“The back of the letter,” I said.
“I figured there was something.” He looked at me. “What is it?”
“If I don’t leave tonight, she’ll kill Lana.” I held his gaze. “Roy took it for fingerprinting. He has someone who can process it quickly.” I paused. “And I said she. I think it’s a woman. A man who wanted the throne wouldn’t care whether I divorced you or not — he’d find another way to take what he wanted. Someone who specifically demands a divorce is someone who wants me out of your life personally. Not out of the kingdom. Out of your life.”
He was quiet in a way that had weight to it.
“Do you know who it might be?” I said.
He opened his mouth and then we both heard it. Hazel’s voice from the bottom of the stairs, urgent and stripped of its usual composure.
“Both of you. Downstairs. Now.”
We were on our feet and moving before she finished saying it.
Hazel met us at the door to the waiting room and looked at Elijah first, then at me, in the way she did when she was deciding how much to say in front of whom.
“You have guests,” she said. “Unannounced. A woman and a young man. She says her name is Simone and she knows you.”
Something happened to Elijah’s face. It was very brief and very controlled but I had been watching his face for fifteen years and I caught it.
The woman had her back to us when we walked in. Tall, dark hair falling almost to the hem of a dress that had made a very deliberate choice about what it wanted to draw attention to. The young man beside her was looking at his phone with the distracted patience of someone who had been brought somewhere against their preference and was managing it.
She turned when she heard us come in and when her eyes found Elijah the expression on her face shifted into something warm and immediate and entirely too familiar, and she crossed the room and put her arms around him like I wasn’t standing close enough to touch her.
“Eli. I finally found you.”