The Moon She Buried

Chapter Eleven: Dorian Notices

He found out on a Wednesday, which was an inconvenient day for it.

His assistant brought the information at nine-fifteen, between the morning briefing and a call with the Hartwell Pack's trade liaison, tucked into the miscellaneous category where it had apparently been living for two days while the household staff debated among themselves whether it was significant enough to escalate. He read it twice. Then he set it down and looked at his assistant with the expression he used when he needed someone to understand that they had made an error in judgment without him having to specify the nature of the error in detail.

His assistant understood. She left quickly.

Seraphine had not been seen in seventeen days.

He sat with this information for a moment, arranging it.

Seventeen days was — not a long time, and also, he could now see in retrospect, a very long time. Seventeen days was not an absence that happened by accident. Seventeen days was a decision, deliberately made and maintained, which meant she had gone somewhere with intention and had not told him she was going, which was — he turned this over carefully, looking for the word — impertinent. It was impertinent. They had an arrangement, and the arrangement had certain understandings built into it, and one of those understandings was that she was available. Present. Where he had put her.

He was annoyed.

He was also, he acknowledged with the honest part of himself that he kept in a small, rarely-visited room, mildly unsettled. Not frightened. Mildly unsettled, which was different, which was just the reasonable response of a man whose arrangements had been disrupted without explanation.

He took his call with Hartwell's trade liaison and handled it efficiently and said nothing about any of this, because his personal arrangements were not Hartwell's business, and also because there was nothing yet to say. She had gone somewhere. He would find out where. That was the order of operations, and he was a man who respected orders of operation.

He put Marcus on it.

Marcus was his head of intelligence — not officially, officially Marcus was his chief of staff, because Dorian had opinions about the value of accurate titles when inaccurate ones were more functional — and he was thorough in the specific way of a man whose thoroughness had never been tested by its object fighting back. He gave Marcus the parameters: quietly, internally, no external queries yet, find out where she went and when.

Marcus came back in four hours with almost nothing.

She had left through the north residential corridor sometime in the night sixteen days before the quarterly function — which meant nineteen days ago now — and no one had seen her go because she had, apparently, chosen a time and a route that no one was monitoring. This was not complicated; the residential corridors ran on a reduced watch schedule after midnight because they were inside the pack's interior perimeter and the interior perimeter had never required the same coverage as the boundary. She had simply walked out during the window when no one was watching.

"Through the north corridor," Dorian said.

"Yes."

"On foot."

"There's no vehicle record. No gate log." Marcus paused. "She didn't take much. The room is — largely intact."

He thought about this. A woman who walked out at midnight on foot through an unmonitored corridor and left her room largely intact. He thought about whether this was the behavior of a woman who had been taken against her will, and concluded that it was not — it was the behavior of a woman who had chosen her moment. Which meant it was voluntary.

Which meant she had decided to leave.

He found this more difficult to accommodate than the facts strictly required. He had not considered — he genuinely had not considered — that she would decide to leave. It had not been in the architecture of his understanding of her. She was not, in his understanding of her, the kind of woman who decided things of that scale without — consulting. Without bringing it to him. That had always been how it worked. She brought things to him and he managed them, and she was grateful for the management, and everything moved forward.

She had not brought this to him.

"Continue looking," he said. "External queries now. Discreet." He paused. "I want to know where she went."

Marcus nodded and left.

Lyra found him in his study at six.

He had not gone down to dinner, which was unusual, and she had come to find out why with the particular radar she had for his moods — not empathetic, exactly, more territorial, the instinct of a woman who knew that Dorian Crest's attention was a finite resource and monitored its direction carefully.

He told her. Briefly. Seraphine appeared to have left. He was having it looked into.

Lyra's face did something that he watched with the peripheral attention he gave most things that were not the primary problem. She rearranged herself into an expression of appropriate concern very quickly, but he had seen the thing underneath it — not surprise. Or not only surprise. Something more like the alertness of a person who is receiving information they'd been waiting for without knowing they were waiting.

"She must have been frightened," Lyra said. Carefully.

"Of what," he said.

A small pause. "The situation. It was never — she must have known it wasn't permanent. Perhaps she panicked."

He looked at her. He was not sure he agreed with this reading. Seraphine had never been a woman who panicked. She had been a woman who went quiet, which was different. Quiet women did not panic. They — he turned this over. They planned.

But that was Lyra's read and it was probably the simple one, the true one, and he was overcomplicating it because it was easier than acknowledging that a woman he'd considered deeply familiar had done something he had entirely failed to anticipate.

"Where would she go," he said. Not quite to Lyra. More to the room.

"Her family?" Lyra said. "She has a brother, doesn't she? The Vale boy."

"Cassian Vale." He nodded slowly. That was the obvious option. The family. She would have gone back to what she knew, probably, to territory that was familiar, to the structure she'd grown up in. That was what frightened women did. He would have Marcus check the Vale family territory in the morning.

The thing in his chest that was not quite fear settled slightly.

Yes. That was the most likely reading. She had panicked, perhaps, or tired of waiting for the conversation he'd been meaning to have, and she'd gone back to her family. He would find her there. He would have the conversation he'd been planning — the reasonable settlement, the clear terms, the recognition of what she'd contributed — and she would be relieved, probably, to have it finally said, and the whole matter would close cleanly.

He went down to dinner.

Marcus's report came back three days later.

Cassian Vale had not seen his sister in over a year. He had said this with what Marcus described as genuine bewilderment, and also something else — a sharpness, an edge — that Marcus had noted but could not characterize.

She was not with her family.

Dorian read this in his study in the morning and felt the thing in his chest that was not quite fear do something different. It did not settle. It opened, slightly, like a door that had been pushed against a draft.

He was not afraid. He categorized this carefully. He was not afraid of Seraphine — she was a quiet woman with no rank and no official pack standing and no resources beyond what he had provided, and whatever she had decided to do with herself was ultimately a small matter because she was, ultimately, a small matter, and he should not let the disruption to his arrangements make it feel larger than it was.

He put the report down and looked at his grounds through the study window. Frost again this morning. The Crest Pack territory immaculate in the grey November light, manicured and deliberate, exactly the way power was supposed to look.

He thought about the room Marcus had said was largely intact. The things she hadn't taken. He tried to remember what she owned, what he'd given her, what was in that room. He found that he could not inventory it precisely. He had not been in that room in — he thought about it. He had not been in that room in a very long time.

He realized he didn't know what she'd done with her days.

Not specifically. Not in the granular way of a person who has paid attention to another person's life. He knew the shape of it — the quarterly functions, the dinners when he wanted company, the particular quality of her presence that was quiet and warm and didn't ask for things. He knew the outline. He did not know what she did between the outlines.

He had not thought there was anything between the outlines.

He sat with this for a moment. Then he put it in the small, rarely-visited room and closed the door, because looking at it more directly was not useful and he had a full day.

He told Marcus to expand the search. All territories, discreet, no Ashvale contacts yet — he would not go near Ashvale, there was no reason to go near Ashvale, it was the last place she would have gone.

He went to his nine o'clock meeting and did not think about her again until evening, when the thought arrived that he still did not know who she had been in the hours between the outlines, and by then it was too late for the thought to be useful, and he let it go.

He was very good at letting things go.