Missing Bride

Kenna’s POV

I stood in the doorway a full ten seconds before my mind caught up to what my eyes were already telling me, the window lock undone, the small chair by the vanity pushed in neatly, like nobody had left in a hurry at all. Like somebody had left carefully.

“Jenna?” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

No answer, I checked the closet. I checked behind the dressing screen. 

My heart was climbing into my throat by the time I ran back into the hall, and I grabbed the first maid I saw by the sleeve.

“Have you seen Jenna? She’s not in her chamber….”

The words weren’t even fully out before the house turned into something I didn’t recognize. Doors slamming, voices rising over each other. Someone screamed for the guards. 

Within minutes the entire pack had folded in on itself, guests and servants and council members all funneling toward the west wing, and I was swept along in the current of it, still holding the shawl I’d been folding when I noticed she was gone.

I didn’t understand, not yet, that being the one who noticed would matter more than anything else that happened that day.

“She was HERE.” My stepmother’s voice cracked through the hallway like a whip. 

“She was getting DRESSED, someone TOOK her, or she was FRIGHTENED away, and I want to know who let this happen..”

Her eyes landed on me. I felt it before I understood it, the exact moment the room’s fear needed somewhere to go, and I was standing close enough to catch it.

“You.” She crossed the hall in three strides. “You were with her. You did her hair. You were the last one in that room.”

“I left to fold linens, I didn’t..”

“Where is my daughter?”

“I don’t know…”

The slap came before I finished the sentence. My head snapped sideways. The hallway rang with it, that flat, wet crack of a palm against a cheek, and for a moment I couldn’t hear anything at all except the ringing in my own skull. 

My hand came up to my face on instinct. My eyes burned, but I didn’t cry. I had promised myself years ago I would never give this family the satisfaction of watching me cry.

“Elaine.” My father’s voice came, not gentle, never gentle but sharp with something closer to irritation than concern. 

He didn’t look at me either. He looked past me, at the empty dressing room, at the wedding gown still hanging untouched in its case, like the sight of it personally offended him.

 “What happened?”

“Ask her .” My stepmother’s finger pointed toward me, shaking. 

“She’s always hated Jenna. Everyone’s always favored Jenna, and she’s had to stand in her shadow her whole miserable life, you think she wouldn’t do something like this?”

“I didn’t do anything.” My voice cracked despite myself. “I found the room empty. I called for help. I would never hurt her, she’s my sister.”

“She is not your sister.” My father’s eyes finally found mine, and there was nothing in them I recognized as fatherhood. 

Only fury, only the cold calculation of a man watching his most important alliance collapse in real time. 

“You are a stain on this family that I was too weak to scrub out at birth, and if you had anything to do with this..”

“Alpha Roland.” A guard’s voice, urgent, cutting through. 

“We found something.”

He held out a folded piece of parchment, and the hallway went silent as my father tore it open. I watched his face change as he read it, watched the fury curdle into something colder, something closer to fear.

He didn’t share it out loud. He didn’t have to. Words moved through a crowd like that faster than sound.

The wrong Luna is about to wear the crown.

By the time I heard the actual words, whispered from servant to servant down the hallway, my stepmother had already found her next target.

“She left that,” she hissed, loud enough for the whole corridor to hear.

 “Kenna wrote that. She’s been jealous of Jenna since the day their father acknowledged her,  everyone knows it, everyone’s seen it.”

“I can’t even write in Jenna’s hand,” I said, and immediately regretted how small it sounded, how much like an excuse instead of a defense.

Nobody was listening anyway. I watched it happen in real time, the way a story doesn’t need to be true to spread, only convenient. 

By the time the council arrived a half hour later, the household had already decided what had happened here, and I was standing in the middle of it wearing the guilt like a collar I hadn’t asked for.

I kept looking at the dressing room. Kept thinking about the chair pushed in too neatly, the window latch that hadn’t been forced, the complete absence of anything that looked like a struggle or an escape. 

Nobody else seemed to notice. Nobody else was looking.

Then the room went cold in a different way, and I knew without turning around that he’d arrived.

Jace didn’t run. He didn’t call her name. He walked into that chaos the way he walked into everything, spine straight, expression unreadable, already three steps ahead of everyone else in the room. 

His eyes swept the scene once. The dress. The note now clutched in my father’s hand. Me, standing apart from everyone else with a red mark blooming across my cheek that he didn’t appear to notice or care about.

“How long has she been missing,” he said. Not a question. A demand, flat and precise, already moving toward whatever calculation was running behind his eyes.

“Since this morning,” someone answered. “Perhaps longer.”

“The Tezla envoys arrive within the hour.” He said it like an accusation aimed at the room itself, like Jenna’s disappearance was an inconvenience scheduled at the worst possible time rather than a tragedy.

 “If this reaches them before we have an answer..”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. I understood, watching him, that whatever fear lived behind that composed face wasn’t fear for Jenna at all. It was fear for a treaty, a border, a war that would cost more than one missing bride was worth.

Nobody in that hallway was afraid for her. They were afraid of what her absence would cost them.

I was still holding my stinging cheek when the council doors opened and the eldest of them, a gray, thin-mouthed man I had only ever seen from a distance, stepped forward with a voice that silenced the entire corridor.

“If no Luna is crowned before moonrise,” he said, “the treaty dissolves. And Babcock will have war with Tezla before the week is through.”

Silence swallowed the hallway whole. Then, one by one, I felt it happen, heads turning, eyes sliding toward me, my stepmother’s mouth curving into something that wasn’t quite a smile, my father’s gaze sharpening with an idea I could see forming before he even said it aloud.

Every single person in that corridor was looking at my direction.