Chapter 7

Blood at the Border.

Wasn’t but an hour after Kaelan rode out that I started pacing my own room like it was a cage somebody’d locked me in, which I guess in a way it was, since he’d told me plain to stay put and I didn’t have it in me yet to just outright ignore that.

Stay inside the estate. That’s what he’d said. Whatever happens next, you stay here.

Trouble was, Luna apparently didn’t come with knowing one single thing about what was actually happening. Nobody came to tell me anything. Word trickled in through the halls in bits and pieces, servants whispering to each other, guards moving in and out of the courtyard with grim faces, and me stuck up in my room like some ornament nobody thought worth including in the actual business of running this territory.

Sat with that awhile, letting it turn sour in me. Then I thought about Bellamon’s shipment routes, about how I’d caught that flaw sitting right there in plain sight just from paying attention, and figured maybe paying attention was exactly what I ought to be doing right then too, instead of wearing a groove in my own floor.

Found Nessa down near the kitchens, helping haul extra supplies toward the infirmary in case wounded men started coming back that night. She looked tired already, sleeves pushed up, hair coming loose from its pin.

“What do you know,” I asked her, quietly, “about the northern post? Who runs the patrols up there?”

She glanced around before answering, out of habit more than real worry, I think. “Small garrison. Wasn’t ever supposed to need much more than that neither it’s tucked back off the main roads, hard to reach unless you already know the paths in. That’s what made it safe, mostly. Nobody could find it easy who didn’t already know where to look.”

That snagged at something in me right off. “So whoever hit it knew where to look.”

Nessa stopped what she was doing and looked at me properly. “Guess they must’ve.”

Word kept trickling in as the night wore on, secondhand through returning riders, guards passing messages up the chain faster than anybody bothered slowing down to explain them to me directly. I caught what I could catch. The post had burned. Casualties, more than first thought. And Kaelan, once he’d got there and got eyes on the wreckage himself, had apparently gone quiet and hard in a way that scared his own men worse than shouting would’ve, according to one young warrior who came through looking half sick about something he wouldn’t quite say straight out.

I cornered him before he could disappear toward the infirmary. “What is it? What’d he find up there?”

The kid couldn’t have been much older than me, honestly hesitated. “Wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

“I’m his Luna,” I said, and I hated how strange that still felt coming out my own mouth. I hated it more that I was using it like a key to a door that shouldn’t have needed one. “Tell me.”

He caved, quick, the way people mostly did once you gave them permission to talk instead of making them find the nerve on their own. “The patrol schedule was wrong. Post wasn’t manned the way it should’ve been that night half the usual guard had been pulled back two days prior, reassigned somewhere else on account of some order that came down through the usual channels.” He swallowed. “Except the Alpha never gave that order. Nobody up the chain seems to know who did.”

Somebody had moved the guards off that post before the attack ever happened. Somebody who knew the schedule well enough, and had enough standing, to give an order that got followed without anybody questioning it.

I didn’t sleep much that night, if I’m honest, kept turning it all over, that half-shut door back in Chapter 3 coming back to me clear as nothing can keep pretending the border’s secure, not with what we know now and feeling sicker the longer I sat with it. Wasn’t just talking, whatever those two voices had been discussing. It wasn’t just gossip or worry. Somebody inside this house had known something was coming, or worse, had helped make it happen.

Around dawn, unable to lie still any longer, I got up and started walking the halls, quiet, telling myself I was just restless and not that I was looking for anything in particular. Wasn’t strictly true. I found myself drifting toward the wing where Kaelan kept his study, the same room he’d called me into before the ceremony, thinking maybe there’d be something there, some record of the patrol orders, something that might tell me who’d actually sent that reassignment.

The door was open. Shouldn’t have been. Kaelan kept that room locked when he wasn’t in it, Mira had told me that early on, made a point of it even, said nobody went in there without his say-so, not even senior staff.

I pushed it open slowly.

Nothing looked disturbed at first glance, desk still neat, maps still pinned exactly as they’d always been. But there, on the floor near the window, half-tucked under the edge of a rug like somebody’d kicked it there in a hurry and not noticed, was a scrap of paper. Torn, like it’d come loose from something bigger.

I picked it up. Half a sentence, a few words, nothing that made full sense on its own, something about timing, something about the western gate, a fragment of a name I couldn’t make out clean, the ink smudged where whoever wrote it had folded it wet.

I didn’t need the whole thing to understand what it meant.

Somebody had been in this room. Somebody who wasn’t Kaelan, wasn’t me, wasn’t likely anybody with a clear reason to be standing where I was standing right then before the sun was even properly up.

And whoever it was hadn’t come through the door. I’d just walked through that lock, when I checked it after, wasn’t broken or forced at all, not one mark on it. Meant whoever left that scrap either had a key, or had never needed the door in the first place, because they were already trusted enough in this house to be handed one.

My stomach went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the early hour.

Somebody close to Kaelan close enough to have access to his own private study, close enough that nobody thought to question them being there was involved in whatever had happened at that border post. And if they could get into this room without so much as a scratch on the lock, there wasn’t anywhere in this estate that felt safe from them. Not the council chamber. Not the halls. Maybe not even the rooms I slept in myself.

I stood there a long minute with that torn scrap in my hand, listening to the house wake up slow around me, servants starting their morning work, unaware, and thought about how close that half-shut door conversation had been to where I was standing now.

Somebody in this house was working against him. And they weren’t some outsider sneaking in over the walls.

They were already inside. Already trusted. Already close enough to touch the things that mattered most to him.

And I had absolutely no idea who. please rate this chapter according to the prompt