Chapter 10

ROMAN

The paperwork covered the entire desk, every sheet pulled from the trafficker's records and spread out like pieces of a puzzle that refused to fit together no matter how much I went through them. I'd been at it for two hours, and I still didn't have a name.

"Whoever paid for this knew exactly what they were doing," Gideon said from across the desk, flipping through another stack of bank statements with the kind of patience I didn't have right now. "The money went through three different accounts before it vanished. That's not some random guard trying to make a little extra cash on the side."

"No," I agreed, rubbing a hand over my jaw. "It's not."

I traced the payment trail again for what felt like the hundredth time. It started clean enough, a transfer from an account in the south, then it moved to a second account registered to a name that turned out to be fake, and then a third that led absolutely nowhere. Whoever did this had planned it carefully, covering every step like they knew someone would eventually come looking.

"You know," Gideon said, not looking up from his papers, "you've asked about her twice already today."

I didn't answer him. I kept my eyes on the documents in front of me, on the numbers and the routing codes that meant something and nothing at the same time.

"Once when you got here," he went on, clearly enjoying himself far more than the situation called for, "and once about ten minutes ago, right before you started talking about the payment trail again. Which, by the way, is definitely about her, so I'm not sure what point you were trying to make by acting like it isn't."

"I'm trying to find out who's operating on my territory without my knowledge," I said. "That's all this is."

"Sure," Gideon said sarcastically. "That's all this is."

I shot him a look that would have sent most wolves in my pack straight out the door without another word. Gideon just smirked and went back to his papers like my glare didn’t get to him. That was the problem with keeping him close for as long as I had. He knew me too well to be scared of me, and most days I didn't mind that. Today it was starting to get on my nerves.

"I don't care about her," I said, even though nobody had asked me to clarify anything.

"Didn't say you did."

"You were thinking it."

"I think a lot of things, Roman. Most of them I keep to myself." He set his stack of papers down and finally looked at me properly. "You've had a woman living in your palace for over a week now, wearing the exact type of pendant your mother wore, and you personally check on her condition with the doctor. Forgive me if my mind wanders a little."

I didn't dignify that with a response, mostly because I didn't have one that wouldn't prove his point. It wasn't about her. It was about the pendant, the photo, and the mystery of why someone would go through this much trouble just to send a pregnant woman from Silverlake straight into my hands. That was all it was.

We went back to the papers in silence after that, and for a while, the only sound in the room was pages turning and the sound of the fire in the corner. I was starting to think we'd hit a dead end entirely when Gideon suddenly went still.

"Wait," he said, pulling one sheet free from the rest. "These are guard logs. Someone signed off on the late addition to the shipment list. It’s right here."

I leaned over to look, and there it was, a name scrawled at the bottom, dated the same night Aurora would have been added to that truck.

"Marcus Fell," I read aloud. "One of the checkpoint guards."

"I know him," Gideon said, already reaching for his phone. "He’s a low-level guy, works the northern route most nights. If he logged the addition, he'd know who paid for it, or at least who handed him the paperwork."

For the first time since I'd sat down at that desk, my chest loosened a little. A name was a start. A name meant I could get answers, and getting answers meant I could finally understand what exactly was happening and why.

Gideon made the call right there in front of me, pacing near the window while he talked into the phone. I watched his face for any sign of good news, and for a few minutes, I actually let myself believe we'd caught a real break.

Then his expression changed.

"When?" he asked sharply. "No, say that again."

I stood up from the desk, watching him carefully now. "What is it?"

Gideon lowered the phone slowly, his jaw now tight. "Marcus Fell didn't show up for his shift three days ago. Nobody's seen him since. His apartment's empty. There’s no forwarding address, and no family that anyone can find either. We have absolutely nothing on him."

"Someone got to him first."

"Looks that way," Gideon said quietly. "Every record of where he might be is gone too. It's like he never existed at all."

I sat down, slower this time, and stared at the papers scattered across my desk like they might finally decide to reveal something to me. The useless trail of accounts. The guard who'd disappeared right before we could reach him. None of it added up, but it wasn’t an accident either.

"Someone knew we'd find that log eventually," I said. "They just didn't wait around to see if we would."

"Which means they've got eyes somewhere close.” Gideon sat on the edge of the desk now instead of the chair across from it. "Maybe even inside the checkpoint itself. Nobody moves a man that fast without knowing exactly when to do it."

"Or someone told them we were already asking questions."

Gideon's eyes narrowed slightly at that, the amused edge finally gone from his voice. "You think it's someone in the palace?”

"I think I don't know yet," I replied, "and it bothers me more than the guard vanishing does."

He didn't have an answer for that, which told me he was thinking the same thing I was. Ravenwood wasn't an easy place to get information out of. My people didn't talk to outsiders about me or anything that happened inside these walls.

Whoever had pulled Marcus Fell out from under us either had a very long reach, or a much closer one than either of us wanted to consider tonight.

"I'll widen the search," Gideon finally said. "I’ll do it quietly. If someone's watching, I don’t want them to know we noticed."

"Good."

He gathered the papers into a neat stack and paused at the door, glancing back at me as if he had one more thing to say and hadn't decided whether it was worth saying yet.

"For what it's worth," he finally said, "whoever went through this much trouble to make a guard disappear over one pregnant woman clearly thinks she matters a great deal. That should tell you something too."

He left before I could respond, which was probably for the best, because I didn't have an answer that would have satisfied either of us.

I sat alone with the papers a long while after that, turning the same useless names over in my head even though none of them explained why someone would risk this much just to make sure Aurora Hale ended up exactly where she was now.

Whoever they were, they weren't finished. And neither was I.