Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Five

A Question No One Wants To be Answered

Elianne’s POV

Gabriel came to the library the next night. And the night after that.

I didn’t invite him. He didn’t announce himself. He simply appeared at roughly the same hour, settled into the chair across from me, and we worked. I pushed a stack of documents toward him. He pushed a different stack back. We talked about trade routes and border patterns and the specific way a kingdom might quietly strangle another’s economy if it was patient enough, and we didn’t talk about anything else.

It should have felt strange. It didn’t. That was the strange part.

I was used to men who treated my intelligence as a surprise, something to be managed or redirected toward more decorative pursuits. Gabriel treated it like a resource. He handed me documents without explaining them first, waited to see what I found, then told me what he’d found, and we compared notes the way I imagined two generals might compare maps before a campaign.

It was, honestly, the best working arrangement I’d ever had.

It was also doing things to my careful detachment that I was going to need to address at some point.

* * *

I’d been watching the physician for five days before I approached him.

Master Aldric worked a predictable pattern — morning rounds, afternoon consultations, an hour in the kitchen herb garden before dinner where he was reliably alone. I’d visited three times before I said anything of substance, bringing honey from Castelane the second time, asking about the lavender on the third. Building comfort. My father had taught me that frightened men who want to tell the truth need someone to make it feel safe first.

On the fourth visit, I stood beside him in the herb garden and didn’t look at him and said, "I’m not going to ask you to write anything down. I’m not going to take this to anyone without your permission. I only want to know what you actually found."

He kept his hands moving through the lavender, steady, deliberate. Buying time. Then:

"There were marks. On His Highness’s arm. A puncture. The kind a horse’s fall doesn’t explain, not at that location, not at that angle."

The late afternoon light didn’t change. The garden didn’t shift. Nothing around me moved, but something inside me went very still.

"What kind of puncture?"

"Something administered. Not something fallen onto." He pulled a stem from the lavender bed and rolled it between his fingers, not looking at me. "I have seen this once before. A stable hand, three years ago, who died after handling a shipment of tainted feed. The same mark. The same —" He stopped. Started again. "I wrote none of this in my report."

"Who told you to change it?"

His hands went still. "I was told the cause of death had already been determined and that my role was to confirm it. I was told this plainly, by someone who made it very clear that confirmation was what was expected of me."

"Who?"

A long pause. The kind that told me everything I needed to know about how frightened he still was. "I have a family," he said quietly. "My lady, I have already said more than I should have. Please."

I let it go. Not because I wanted to, but because pushing harder would close the door entirely, and a frightened man who’d already told me this much was more useful open than shut.

"Thank you," I said. "What you’ve told me matters."

He nodded once, picked up his basket, and walked back toward the palace without looking at me. I stood in the herb garden alone for a moment and let the information settle into something solid.

Someone had poisoned Adrien. Someone with enough reach to get to the palace’s own physician and reshape his report before anyone had thought to question it. And that someone was still inside these walls, still breathing, still smiling across dinner tables.

I walked back to the palace at a measured, unremarkable pace and thought about what came next.

* * *

I told Gabriel that night.

I’d been arguing with myself about it all evening. Whether to keep this between myself and my father’s notes until I had something more solid. Whether he would believe me or manage me. Whether trusting him was smart, or whether it was the kind of mistake a grieving woman made when she confused proximity for alliance.

He was already in the library when I arrived. He looked up when I closed the door, read something in my face, and set his papers down.

"Tell me," he said.

Just that. Two words. Room to say whatever I needed to say.

I told him everything. The pattern of visits. The honey. The way I’d read Aldric’s fear and worked with it rather than against it. The mark. The administered puncture. The fact that someone had gotten to the report before anyone had thought to ask questions.

Gabriel listened without interrupting. Every time I’d spoken to a man about something that mattered, I’d spent at least part of it waiting for the interruption, the correction, the redirect toward something more manageable. It didn’t come.

When I finished, the candle between us had burned down another inch. He was looking at the table, not at me.

"Someone poisoned Adrien," he said.

"That’s what the evidence suggests."

"Someone in this palace poisoned my brother, covered it with an accident, and then made sure the one person who found the truth was too frightened to say it out loud."

"Yes."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he looked up at me, and his face had done the thing it almost never did — let something through. Rage, cold and contained, banked like a fire that intended to burn for a very long time. "If someone in this house killed him," he said, quietly, "I will find them. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care who it turns out to be."

"Even if it’s someone close to you?"

"Especially then."

I held his gaze for a moment. I’d been in rooms with men making promises before. I’d gotten good at knowing the difference between a promise made for an audience and a promise that came from somewhere real.

This one was real.

"We do this together," I said. "Quietly. We don’t go to your father until we have something that can’t be explained away. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

He extended his hand across the table. Not in the formal court fashion. Just a hand, held out, waiting.

I looked at it for a moment. Then I put mine in it.

His fingers closed around mine, brief and certain, and he let go, and we went back to the records. But something had shifted in the room, in the quality of the silence between us, and I was aware of it the way you’re aware of a door that has just quietly opened somewhere in a house you thought you knew.

Adrien was dead. Whoever had killed him was still walking free. And I had just made a pact, at midnight, across a library table, with the man I was going to marry.

I told myself that was all it was. A pact. A partnership.

I was not entirely convinced.

* * *

The physician disappeared two days later.

Not dramatically. Not a body, not a scene. He simply wasn’t at morning rounds, wasn’t in the herb garden, wasn’t anywhere I looked. A steward told me, with visible unease, that Master Aldric had been reassigned to attend a medical matter at one of the border estates. Urgently. Overnight.

No one had been told which estate. No one had thought to ask.

I stood in the empty herb garden and understood that I had made a mistake. I’d given him four days between my visit and the moment I told Gabriel. Four days during which someone had noticed a physician spending time with Adrien’s former betrothed in the kitchen garden, and drawn their own conclusions.

I’d moved too slowly. I’d been so careful about not frightening him that I’d failed to protect him at all.

I went straight to Gabriel.

"He’s gone," I said, the moment I found him. "Aldric. Reassigned overnight to a border estate no one can name. Someone knew I’d spoken to him."

Gabriel’s expression went very controlled very quickly. "You think they moved him to silence him."

"I think they moved him because he talked to me, and whoever is watching us is watching considerably more closely than either of us realized." I held his gaze. "We are not being careful enough. We need to be considerably more careful. Starting now."

He nodded, once, the same decisive nod I’d already learned meant he was done processing and had moved directly to the next thing. "I’ll find out which estate. I have men I trust. We’ll make sure he’s safe."

"And whoever sent him?"

A pause. "We add it to the list."

The list. We were building one, quietly, in the margins of library records and late-night conversations. It was growing faster than I’d expected. Whoever had killed Adrien was not finished, and they were close enough to watch us, and they had just proven they were willing to act to protect themselves.

I thought about what that meant for every person we spoke to from this point forward.

I thought about what it meant for the two of us.

I didn’t say any of that out loud. There was no point. Gabriel was already thinking the same thing; I could see it in the set of his jaw. We were already, both of us, in considerably deeper than we’d planned to be five days ago.

I didn’t regret it. That, I thought, was probably the part I should have been more worried about.