Chapter 22

Kael's POV

I didn't sleep much that night, turning over the sound of that door closing again and again in my mind, trying to convince myself it had been nothing more than a servant caught out later than they should have been, though the careful, deliberate quiet of the retreat told a different story, one I didn't much like the shape of.

By morning I'd made a decision, and I found Soren in the training yard before the sun had fully cleared the eastern wall, already moving through drills with two of the younger guards, though he broke off the moment he saw my face.

"That's not your usual morning expression," he said, waving the guards off to give us privacy. "What happened?"

I told him about the garden, about the figure in the archway, about the scent of court robes that could have belonged to half the elders in the castle, and watched his easy expression sharpen into something more serious as I spoke.

"You think it was Mathis."

"I think it's a possibility I can't afford to ignore, not after everything Vesna warned Elara about." I rubbed a hand over my face, exhaustion from the sleepless night catching up with me all at once. "I need you to watch him quietly.

I don't want accusations without proof, not against a man who's served this court since before I inherited the throne, but I won't ignore a threat simply because it's inconvenient to believe it's real."

"I'll watch him," Soren agreed. "Though for what it's worth, if it was Mathis in that garden, I doubt he was there by accident.

The man doesn't wander anywhere without a reason. Ask yourself what reason he'd have to be near that particular archway, at that particular hour, unless he already suspected you and Elara would be there."

The thought had already occurred to me, sitting cold and uncomfortable in the back of my mind since the moment that door clicked shut, and I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether Mathis's careful counsel over the years had always been as loyal as I'd assumed, or whether I'd simply never had a reason before now to look closely enough to question it.

I found Elara in the library later that morning, and though she offered me a smile when I entered, I could see the same tension I felt sitting behind her eyes, the warmth of the night before tempered now by the same uneasy question neither of us had wanted to voice out loud in the garden.

"Did you sleep at all," she asked.

"Not much." I sat across from her, taking her hand automatically, needing the small steadiness of it. "I asked Soren to watch Mathis Quietly, for now.

I don't want to accuse him of anything without cause, but I won't pretend I didn't feel something wrong about that garden."

"I keep telling myself it might have been nothing," Elara said. "A servant, someone passing through who had no idea we were even there.

But then I remember Vesna's warning, about people smiling wide while hiding what they actually feel, and it stops feeling like nothing at all."

"We'll be careful," I said. "More careful than we have been. I won't let anyone use what we have against either of us, not after everything it took to get here."

She nodded, though I could see the worry hadn't fully left her, and I hated that even a moment as simple and pure as the one we'd shared in the garden now carried a shadow neither of us had asked for, a reminder that our happiness existed inside a court full of people who might see it as a threat rather than something worth celebrating.

The rest of the day passed in the careful rhythm we'd fallen into over the past weeks, court business in the mornings, quiet hours with Nyra and her endless texts in the afternoons, though I found my attention drifting more than once toward the doorway, toward the halls beyond it, watching for anything that might explain who had stood in that archway the night before.

It was Nyra, oddly enough, who gave us our first real answer, though not until three days later, arriving in the small sitting room where Elara and I had settled after dinner with an expression I'd learned to associate with news I wasn't going to like.

"I found something," she said, closing the door carefully behind her before crossing the room.

"Or rather, one of the younger healers found it and brought it to me, unsure what to make of it.

A page, torn from one of the older archive texts. The same section I pulled Wren's records from months ago."

"Torn how," I asked, already feeling the tension gathering tight across my shoulders.

"Deliberately. Recently, judging by the fresh edge of the tear." Nyra set a folded piece of parchment on the table between us, and I recognized the handwriting immediately as belonging to the same old text Nyra had shown us that very first week, detailing Wren's history, the way her bond had been deliberately sabotaged by political enemies who understood exactly what losing her would cost the Lycan lord she'd loved.

"Someone removed this page after I'd already read it once, likely hoping I wouldn't remember well enough to notice it was missing."

"What does it say," Elara asked, leaning forward.

"It details exactly how Wren's enemies separated her from her bonded Lycan lord," Nyra said grimly. "Not through violence, not at first.

Through manipulation. Convincing the court around them that the bond was unstable, dangerous, likely to fail regardless, planting enough doubt among the people who mattered that when the final push came, few were willing to defend the match at all." Her eyes moved to me, heavy with implication.

"Whoever tore this page clearly didn't want either of you reading it and recognizing the pattern before it's already been set in motion against you."

The room went quiet, the weight of the implication settling over all three of us, and I felt Elara's hand find mine beneath the table, gripping tight.

"Mathis," I said quietly, though it wasn't quite a question anymore, more a confirmation of something I'd already begun to suspect. "He's had access to that archive for decades. He'd know exactly which records mattered enough to remove."

"I can't prove it was him," Nyra said carefully. "Not yet. But I'd start watching every piece of counsel he offers you from this point forward with considerably more suspicion than you have been."

I looked at Elara, and the fear in her eyes wasn't the same fear I'd seen in the forest that first night, wasn't the flinching, uncertain fear of a woman used to being small. It was sharper now, steadier, the fear of someone who understood exactly what she was up against and had already decided she wasn't going to let it win.

"Then we don't wait for him to make the next move," she said. "We make ours first."