Chapter 9: Blood in the Royal House
LYSANDER
The ceiling was the first thing that registered in my mind.
Clean white plaster, with crown moulding at the edges. This was a room that wore its simplicity like expensive perfume. Nothing like the ceiling in any room in Lily of the Valley. I knew those ceilings the way I knew my hands, and this was a stranger’s. I lay there, letting my eyes adjust to the unfamiliar light, and then memory crashed back in.
It didn’t return in fragments. It hit all at once.
The ball. The library. My uncle’s voice, even and deliberate, handing me the throne I had not asked for and the secret I had not wanted. The corridor after. The room. The honey scent that had preceded everything, the woman who had come through the door, and the way my wolf had simply stopped negotiating and taken over entirely.
The bite at the back of her neck.
I sat up.
My body took inventory, one sensation at a time. The rut had broken—either the suppressants had finally worked or exhaustion had finished what they couldn’t. The clarity that followed was cold, clinical, and just a little accusing. The sheets beside me were empty. The wig had vanished from the floor. Every piece of her uniform was gone, leaving nothing but the faint ghost of honey on the pillow and the ache at the base of my palm where the mate bond had knotted itself into the grain of me.
I touched the back of my neck out of reflex, then stopped.
She had run.
That was the obvious conclusion, and I let it settle before the next one surfaced. She hadn’t just run. I remembered waking—the hands, the precise pressure under my jaw, and the single word she spoke before everything went dark.
Sorry.
She had knocked me out with skill. Not instinct, but deliberate, practiced technique, aimed at a precise spot. She knew exactly what she was doing and did it cleanly. Beneath the irritation rising in my chest, I found something dangerously close to admiration.
My mate had taken me out with a nerve strike and then walked out of the room.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed.
The floor-to-ceiling windows unleashed the full assault of early morning sun, a light impossible to ignore. It sliced through the glass in long, flat panels and struck my face as I stood. I turned away, searching for my clothes. Trousers first. My shirt was near the door; a detail about last night’s sequence I refused to examine. I pulled it on, buttoning from the bottom up. I was on the third button when the bells began.
I stopped.
The royal bells of my uncle’s estate were never decorative. They didn’t ring for ceremonies or guests. There was only one reason for their particular sequence, and every wolf in the estate would know it instantly.
Death.
The full sequence tolled, each note falling into the morning with the weight of finality. I stood in a borrowed room, shirt half-buttoned, and felt the sound surge through me like a current.
Uncle Cornelius.
I was moving before the last bell had finished.
The corridor outside was alive with movement. Sentinels in full tactical gear filed past, weapons drawn, earpieces in, radiating the focused urgency of people responding to a nightmare come to life. I fell in behind them, unchallenged—either recognized or simply not the strangest sight at six in the morning.
The library was not too far.
I knew where they were going before they turned.
The library door stood open, and the light inside was all wrong. Overheads blazed, harsh and clinical, illuminating a scene, not a room. Furniture and books were scattered around. A chair near the desk lay overturned, the rug was dragged askew, and dark stains on the floor left nothing to the imagination.
My uncle was on the stretcher.
He lay flat, covered to the chest, the sheet white except where it was not. His face had taken on that color only the dead wear, the stillness of him unmistakable. I had seen dead men before. I knew the absolute stopped-ness, the way a body declared its vacancy. His face had settled into it, muscles finishing their last work hours ago.
Rigor had fully taken hold.
Hours ago.
I crossed the room before I realized I’d moved. My hand found his shoulder, registering the rigid resistance, the immobility of death. Something in my chest cracked along a fault line I hadn’t known existed.
"No," I said. The word came out quietly. Then again, louder, because quiet felt wrong for this. "No, no, no."
The sentinels nearest to me stepped back.
I looked up, and whatever was on my face made the nearest sentinel freeze, the way prey animals freeze when they sense a predator.
"What the hell happened?" My voice came out rough and low. "How does this happen? He was here. He was in this room. Where were the guards? Where was his detail? How did this happen inside his own estate?"
Then, as those words came, it crushed me all at once. I had been the one to request a private meeting with him in the library, which only the retainer assigned to him was allowed to enter. And as for the detail which happened to be his retainer... she had been with me. Fuck!
One of the lead sentinels present, a broad-shouldered woman with captain’s insignia on her collar, held her position and met my eyes with the kind of careful steadiness that came from training rather than comfort.
"Alpha Lysander," she said. "We found the culprit."
She turned and nodded once.
The sentinels to her left parted.
The mate bond burned alive as they did.
The retainer was on her knees in the center of the cleared space, wrists bound behind her, rope wound from her forearms to her elbows in overlapping loops. The rope was dark and wet against her skin, and I knew wolfsbane-soaked restraints by sight. The places where the fibers touched her skin were visibly raw, the flesh mottled and red in lines that tracked every point of contact, and she was holding herself with the rigid, controlled stillness of someone managing a level of pain they were refusing to perform. Her head was up. Her eyes found mine immediately.
The wig was gone.
The semi-short platinum hair was loose around her shoulders, unmistakable in the harsh overhead light, and the sentinels around her had the look of people who had been told they were handling something dangerous and had believed it.
My wolf woke up before I finished the thought.
The bond snapped taut between us, that hook-and-hold I’d first felt in the corridor last night. It cared nothing for the scene, the evidence, or the captain’s careful authority. It cared only that she was kneeling on the library floor, wolfsbane burning into her wrists.
I kept my face where it was.
"She infiltrated the royal house under false documentation," the captain said. Her voice was measured, the recitation of someone reporting facts they had verified. "She entered service presenting as male, and with an identity entirely fabricated. We have no record of her under any registry." She held out an evidence bag. Inside it, sealed in clear plastic, was a handgun. "The weapon was found in her hand. The King’s wound is consistent with the caliber."
I looked at the gun.
I looked at her.
She watched me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher—pain working across her features, but control layered over it. Beneath that control, though, was something urgent and something afraid, and that was not the shape of guilt. I’d seen enough people try to hide guilt to know the difference.
This was not that.
"The rope," I said. "Take it off."
The captain’s expression shifted. "Alpha Lysander, protocol requires—"
"She is burning," I said evenly. I did not raise my voice. "Remove the restraints."
Silence followed as they decided whether to obey or defy. While that call was being mentally made, I reached toward the bond.
It was instinct, not decision—like reaching for a wall in the dark. I’d never done it on purpose before. Last night, my wolf had found her without my say-so; now I reached deliberately, and the connection was immediate, vivid, like pressing a thumb to a bruise. Her mind was closed, not broadcasting, but fear has its own texture, even behind walls. What I felt from her wasn’t the fear of being caught. It was fear of something else. Something she’d seen. Something she carried.
She was scared of me.
I walked to her.
The sentinels around her held their positions, but none of them stepped in front of me, because none of them were going to step in front of me, and everyone in the room understood that without it needing to be said. I crouched in front of her and looked at her face directly, close enough that there was no performance available to either of us.
"Did you do this?" I said.
She held my gaze. Her jaw was set, and her breathing was controlled, even as her wrists were burning. She made a conscious effort to look me directly in the eyes, and she shook her head.
I felt the truth of it through the bond like a clean note struck on metal. Clear and singular and without interference.
I straightened up.
"Release her," I said. "She’s innocent."
The captain started to speak. "Alpha Lysander, the evidence—"
"The evidence was placed." I turned to face the room. "She didn’t do this."
Nobody moved immediately. The sentinels looked at their captain, and their captain looked at me, and the silence in the library had the particular texture of a room full of people doing rapid calculations about authority and consequence and which one outweighed the other right now.
"I do not think I can do that, Alpha Lysander. Only a—"
She did not get to finish when a voice came from the doorway behind me.
Familiar and unhurried. Carrying the specific weight of someone who had never needed to raise it to be heard.
"And who are you," the voice said, "to make that decision?"
I turned around slowly.
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