HER STOLEN CROWN

Chapter 8 Missandei's POV

I was given a room, an actual room, with a real door and a small window that looked out over the kitchen garden, and I didn't know what to do with the strangeness of it.

Priya found me there the next morning, a stack of folded uniforms in her arms and an expression that hovered somewhere between relief and disbelief. "I heard what happened," she said, setting the uniforms on the end of the bed. "I heard it about six different ways before someone finally told me the true one."

"Which version did you hear first?"

"That you'd been executed." Her voice cracked slightly on the word. "I didn't sleep at all last night."

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it, though I didn't know what else there was to say to that.

Priya shook her head, waving the apology away, and sat beside me on the edge of the bed like we used to when we were both exhausted from a full day of scrubbing floors. "You don't have to be sorry. I'm just glad you're not dead." She glanced toward the door, lowering her voice out of old habit. "Is it true, then. That the Alpha himself stopped it."

"It's true."

"And that you're staying here now. In the mansion. Under his household."

"Also true," I said, though saying it out loud still felt unreal, like a sentence borrowed from someone else's life.

Priya studied me for a long moment, the way she used to study a pot on the stove when she suspected it was about to boil over. "Missandei. Why would he do that."

I didn't have an answer for her either. I'd spent most of the night lying awake in my new bed, staring at an actual ceiling instead of the cracked ceiling of my old closet, turning the question over and over without finding anything that made sense of it. He'd said he had his reasons. He'd said he would explain them when he could. Neither of those things told me anything.

"I don't know," I admitted. "But I intend to find out."

Before Priya could answer, a bell rang somewhere below us, sharp and insistent, the kind of sound that meant every servant in the mansion needed to drop what they were doing immediately.

"That's the arrival bell," Priya said, already on her feet. "Someone important's here."

We made our way down together, joining the rest of the household staff lining the entrance hall in two neat rows, the way we always did for visiting nobility. I kept my eyes down out of habit, though I noticed several of the other maids glancing at me sideways, whispering behind their hands. Word had clearly traveled fast.

The doors opened, and a young woman swept in like she already owned every stone of the mansion, trailed by a small retinue of attendants carrying trunks stitched with a crest I didn't recognize. She was beautiful in the deliberate way nobility often was, dark hair pinned in an elaborate style, a gown the color of wine, every movement practiced until it looked effortless.

"Lady Vivienne Ashcombe," Cook murmured beside me, barely moving her lips. "Duke Reyner's daughter. Word is she's here to be presented as the Alpha's intended Luna."

Something in my chest went tight and cold at that, though I told myself it had nothing to do with anything real. Of course a man like Asher would have a Luna waiting for him. Alphas didn't choose maids. They chose women like the one gliding across the entrance hall now, chin lifted, eyes sweeping the row of servants with the mild disinterest of someone counting furniture.

Her eyes stopped on me.

Only for a second. Long enough for something to flicker across her face, quick and assessing, before she smoothed it away into polite disinterest again. I didn't understand it yet, that look, but I felt it settle into my stomach like a stone anyway.

"You," she said, addressing the row of us without addressing anyone in particular. "Which one of you is assigned to my rooms."

Silence. Nobody answered, because nobody had been assigned yet, her arrival evidently having outpaced the arrangements for it.

"I asked a question," she said, sharper now, and I watched Greta step forward quickly, already stammering an apology and volunteering names, mine among them, before I'd even opened my mouth to object.

"This one will do," Vivienne said, and I realized with a sinking feeling that she meant me. "Bring my trunks up. And do try not to break anything on the way."

I bent to lift the nearest trunk without a word, because five years of training didn't disappear overnight, no matter what had happened at the execution block the night before. It was heavier than it looked, and I struggled with it up the first flight of stairs, Vivienne trailing behind me at an unhurried pace, watching.

"So you're the one," she said, once we were far enough from the others that no one would overhear.

I didn't answer, not sure what question she thought she was asking.

"The thief," she clarified, a faint smile touching her mouth. "The one who nearly lost her head yesterday and somehow ended up with a room in the mansion instead. How fortunate for you."

"I didn't steal anything," I said, before I could stop myself.

"I didn't ask if you did." Her eyes traveled over me slowly, cataloguing, the way you'd examine something you were deciding whether to keep or throw away. "I asked because I'm curious what exactly made the alpha decide a servant deserved that kind of mercy on the very day he was crowned. It seems like a strange thing to spend a first impression on."

I said nothing, focusing instead on the trunk in my arms, on the stairs still ahead of us, on anything that wasn't the careful, probing way she was looking at me.

"We'll be seeing quite a lot of each other," Vivienne said, coming to a stop outside a set of doors near the end of the hallway, the finest guest rooms in the mansion. "I do hope you're better at your job than you were at hiding whatever it is you did to end up in that man's good graces."

She pushed the door open and stepped inside without waiting for a response, leaving me standing in the hallway with her trunk in my arms and a cold, certain feeling that I had just made an enemy far more dangerous than anything a council of elders could sentence me to.