Read Chapter 15: The Scheming Duchess

The bolt lay on the oak table between them, its iron head still stained with the oil they’d used to preserve it. Elara had insisted on pulling it from the wall herself, gloved fingers working it free while Alaric watched the corridor. Now, in the pale morning light of his study, she turned it over and felt her stomach drop.

“This is Valdris make,” she said quietly.

Alaric’s jaw tightened. “Your family’s sigil—” he began.

“It’s stamped there, yes.” She pointed to the small, crude mark near the fletching—a hawk in flight, wings spread. Any soldier in Valdris would recognize it. “But that’s the problem. It’s too clean. Too deliberate.” She set the bolt down and met his eyes. “Whoever fired this wanted us to blame my father’s loyalists. They wanted to drive us apart before the wedding.”

“Then it’s the Duke,” Alaric said. “He knows you came to me. He knows the map is missing. And he knows a divided alliance is a dead alliance.”

She nodded slowly. “Which means he’s escalating. The assassin was meant to miss—or at least, to be survivable. If I’d died, my kingdom would blame yours. If you’d died, the wedding collapses. Either way, he wins.”

A knock at the door made them both turn. Alaric’s hand moved toward his sword hilt before a familiar voice sounded through the wood.

“Your Majesty. My Lady. I bring urgent word.”

It was Annette. Elara crossed the room and opened the door herself. The lady-in-waiting stood pale-faced in the corridor, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white.

“What is it?” Elara asked.

“It’s Lady Seraphine.” Annette’s voice cracked. “Word came from the Valdris quarter this morning. Her rooms were ransacked last night. The servants found blood on the floor, and the Duke’s men were seen leaving the area before dawn.”

Elara felt the world tilt. Seraphine—the only agent of her missing uncle Elric still in the city, the woman who had risked everything to hand her the Marlowe invitation. She’d been Elara’s tether to the loyalist cause, and now she was gone.

“The Duke took her,” Elara said, not a question.

Annette nodded. “That’s what her maid believes. She slipped out and came straight to me.”

Alaric was already at the window, staring toward the Ashford estate visible in the distance beyond the city walls. “If she talks, she implicates us both,” he said grimly. “She knows about the retreat, about the map, about everything.”

Elara forced her mind to slow. Panic was a luxury she couldn’t afford. “The Duke won’t kill her,” she said, working through it aloud. “She’s too valuable as leverage. He’ll want to interrogate her first, learn what she told us, who else might be working for my uncle.” She began pacing. “We have time. A few hours at most before he realizes she’s loyaler than he expects. But beyond that—”

“We’re not leaving her in that dungeon.” Alaric turned from the window, and there was something hard in his voice she hadn’t heard before. “Whatever comes of it.”

She studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “We need a distraction. Something to draw the Duke’s attention away from his estate.” Her eyes drifted to the window, to the distant spires of the Ashford holdings. “And I believe I have one.”

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The afternoon sun was high when Elara made her way to the courtyard where Sir Roland was exercising his mount. She had dressed with deliberate care—a riding habit of deep green that made her look every inch the princess of Valdris on a casual outing, nothing more.

Roland spotted her approach and reined in his horse, a flicker of wariness passing across his face before he masked it with a courtier’s smile. “My Lady Elara. A pleasure to see you enjoying the grounds.”

“I find exercise clears the mind,” she said, stroking the neck of her own borrowed mare. “Especially when there’s so much to think about.”

“The wedding, I imagine.” His tone was careful. “My father speaks of little else.”

Elara laughed lightly, a sound she had perfected over years of cutting through courtly tension. “Oh, the wedding is settled. I’m thinking of something far more delicate.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I’ve heard a rumor that your father is considering a match between you and Lady Mira Marlowe. Or was that just idle gossip?”

Something flickered in Roland’s eyes—surprise, then quickly suppressed anger. “My father knows nothing of such an arrangement.”

“Of course not,” Elara said smoothly. “I’m sure I misheard. Though Lady Mira did seem quite taken with you at the retreat.” She let that hang in the air, watching his knuckles whiten on the reins. Mira was Roland’s own sister, a secret he and his father worked hard to keep buried. The implication—even an accidental one—that she was a marriage prospect would be a knife in his gut.

She had him.

“I must speak with my father,” Roland said, his voice strained as he wheeled his horse around. “About, ah, estate matters.”

“Of course. Don’t let me keep you.”

He was gone in a gallop, heading toward the Ashford estate with purpose. Elara watched him ride, then turned and made her way back through the castle to where she knew Alaric would be waiting in the tunnels below.

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The tunnel mouth was hidden behind a wine rack in the cellars, too narrow for two armed men to walk abreast. Elara had to suck in her breath and press her shoulders together to squeeze through, following Alaric’s silhouette in the dim lantern light. They had mapped it the night before using Roland’s defection notes—one of many secret ways the Duke used to move through the city without being seen.

“Will Roland’s presence be enough?” she asked, her voice low.

“It will pull his personal guard to the main hall,” Alaric replied. “The disturbance you sold him is real. He’ll want his father’s ears before anyone else plants the idea of Mira in marriage. That gives us perhaps an hour before they realize it was a lie.”

“An hour is plenty.”

The tunnel ended in a low stone wall, damp with moss. Alaric pressed against a brick, and a section swung inward with a groan. They emerged into a storage cellar stacked with wine barrels and crates, the smell of old grapes thick in the air.

Voices echoed somewhere above them—the Duke’s household, moving about their business. Alaric moved with a predator’s grace, and Elara followed as quietly as she could manage, her heart hammering against her ribs. They passed a kitchen where servants argued over a burned roast, a corridor where a maid sang softly to herself, and finally reached a narrow stairwell descending into darkness.

“The holding cells are below,” Alaric whispered. “Roland’s notes indicated a private interrogation room, separate from the main dungeon. That’s where he’d put someone he doesn’t want seen.”

They descended. The air grew cold and damp, thick with the smell of mold and old blood. Elara forced herself to keep moving, to think of Seraphine’s courage at the Marlowe retreat rather than the possibility of finding her broken beyond recognition.

At the bottom of the stairs, a single torch guttered in an iron sconce. Two guards stood outside a heavy oak door, and both were dead before they could speak—Alaric’s blade taking the first through the throat while his second knife buried itself in the other’s chest. He moved with brutal efficiency, pulling the bodies into the shadows before Elara could even flinch.

She found the keys on the first guard’s belt and turned them in the lock. The door swung open.

Seraphine was chained to the far wall, her face bruised, one eye swollen shut. But her gaze was sharp when it found Elara, and there was a spark of triumph there despite the blood.

“You came,” she rasped.

Elara crossed the room in three strides, working the manacles open with shaking hands. “You told me the truth when no one else would. I wasn’t about to leave you to that.”

Seraphine’s laugh was wet and broken. “Then you’ll want to know what he asked before he started beating,” she said, gripping Elara’s arm. “The Duke isn’t working alone. He’s in league with Caldoran—their king has promised him half of Valdris and half of Aurenne if he delivers the wedding as a catastrophe. He means to partition both kingdoms between them.” She met Elara’s eyes, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “And he has enough loyal men in Aurenne’s court to do it. The wedding is the trigger. It’s all going to happen at the wedding.”