Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Three

A Bargain Wearing a Crown

Elianne’s POV

My father arrived the morning after the funeral with mud on his boots and a look on his face that told me someone had already gotten to him.

He took one look at me in the doorway and said, "You know."

"I found out last night."

"From Gabriel himself?"

"In the garden." I stepped back to let him in. "He came to tell me personally. Which I think was supposed to count as a kindness."

My father’s expression was the one he reserved for unsatisfactory trade terms. "And did it?"

I thought about Gabriel’s jaw, and the tell I’d spotted, and the way he’d said my name. "Ask me again in a month."

* * *

He waited until we were alone in the small study — the one that had been Adrien’s, which neither of us mentioned — before he said the thing he’d come to say.

"I can make this difficult for them."

I looked up. "What?"

"Castelane has leverage enough to demand a different match. It would cost us, but it could be done." He was watching me with the particular attention he usually reserved for the other side of a negotiation. "I’m asking you, Elianne. Do you want this? Because I will stand in the way of it if you don’t."

It was the kindest thing he’d ever offered me. A choice. An actual choice, not dressed up as anything else.

I thought about Aldric the physician. The mark on Adrien’s arm. The way his hands wouldn’t stop shaking when he told me.

"I think Adrien was murdered," I said.

The room went very still.

"Say that again."

"A puncture wound. The physician found it and put nothing in his report because someone got to him first. Someone with enough influence to tell the crown’s own medical staff what the cause of death was going to be before the examination was finished." I held my father’s gaze and watched him do what he always did with bad information — absorb it, turn it, start building toward the next question. "If I leave, I lose any chance of finding out who did it. I lose access to the palace, the staff, the records. I lose the only position from which I can actually ask questions."

"And if you stay?"

"If I stay, I marry Gabriel de Valmonde, which is not what I planned for my life. But I’m close enough to whatever happened here to matter. And Adrien deserves better than a word like accident covering up whatever actually killed him."

* * *

My father was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I started wondering if I’d miscalculated. Then:

"You sound like your grandmother."

"You say that every time I do something that unsettles you."

"Because it’s true every time." He looked at me with something that wasn’t quite approval but was close enough to make my chest ache a little. "She outlived three husbands and every man who ever underestimated her."

"Is that a warning? For me or for them?"

"Both." He stood. "I’ll support the match. But you write to me, Elianne. Plainly, and often. And you tell me the moment any of this stops being something you can manage alone."

"I won’t be alone," I said.

He raised an eyebrow. "No?"

I thought about Gabriel, standing in the dead garden, looking like a man who’d been holding something back for considerably longer than tonight. "No."

My father studied me for a moment with the expression I’d never been able to read entirely. Then he nodded, once, picked up his hat, and left me to the rest of it.

* * *

The official announcement came three days later in the great hall, with the entire court arranged in rows like an audience that had already decided what to think. The king spoke about duty and continuity. I stood beside Gabriel and felt every eye in the room land on us at once.

I heard the whispers start before the king finished speaking. The woman who buried one prince and is already marrying the next.

I kept my chin level and my face still and gave them nothing.

Beside me, Gabriel was doing exactly the same thing. And then, just once, his eyes moved sideways to find mine in the crowd. Less than a second. But long enough that I caught it, and he knew I caught it, and neither of us looked away quite as quickly as we probably should have.

That was the moment I understood that this marriage was going to be considerably more complicated than an alliance.

And possibly, in ways I wasn’t ready to examine, considerably more than that.

* * *

That night I lay awake and made a list.

Not of everything that frightened me, though that list would have been long enough. Of everything I actually knew. The physician’s hands. The mark on Adrien’s arm. The fact that someone had reached the medical report before anyone had thought to ask who was authorized to do so.

Renaud had been the one to find me after the clearing, I remembered. The one who’d told me the physicians would handle everything and that there was no need to trouble myself with the details. I’d thought it was kindness at the time. I’d been too raw to question it.

I questioned it now.

I thought about the way he’d pressed my hand, briefly, before leaving. The way he’d said, These are the unpleasant details that no one needs lingering in their memory of him. As though he’d already known what those details were. As though he’d already decided what the official version would say before the examination was over.

Maybe I was wrong. Grief did strange things to the way a person read a room. I’d been kneeling in cold mud twenty minutes before that conversation and I was not, by any reasonable assessment, at my most rational.

But I’d spent my whole life in rooms where men decided what the story was going to be before anyone had finished telling it. I knew what that felt like from the inside.

I got up. Lit a candle. Found paper.

I started writing down everything I’d noticed, in order, with the date beside each entry. My father had taught me that evidence doesn’t become evidence until someone decides to treat it as such.

Fine. I’d treat it as such.

Gabriel de Valmonde was going to marry me in the spring. And whether he liked it or not, he was going to find himself married to a woman who had already decided, one sleepless night at a time, that she was not going to let whoever had killed Adrien stay comfortable.

The candle burned low. I kept writing. Outside, the palace settled into its late-night quiet, and somewhere in it, I was willing to bet, a man who thought he’d gotten away clean was sleeping soundly without the faintest idea that the grieving fiancée three corridors away had already started building a case against him.