ALPHA LOGAN

Chapter 7

The door to the healer's chamber was locked from the inside.

Elena knocked twice, glanced down the corridor to make sure no one had followed her, and knocked a third time before Master Aldous finally opened it. He was an old man, thin, with careful hands that had treated Cassius through years of illness before the king's death.

"Princess," he said, surprised. "You should have sent word ahead."

"I did not want anyone to know I was coming." Elena stepped inside and pushed back her sleeve, showing him the two small marks on her wrist. "Tell me what this is."

Aldous took her hand and examined the wound closely, turning it toward the candlelight, pressing gently at the skin around it. He was quiet for a long moment, longer than Elena liked.

"It is nothing," he said finally. "A scratch, perhaps from a thorn in the garden. It will heal within days."

"A thorn does not leave two matching punctures," Elena said. "I have seen animal bites before, Master Aldous. This is one of them."

"I assure you, Princess, there is no cause for concern."

Elena studied his face carefully. His hands, usually steady, were not steady now. His eyes would not hold hers the way they always had before.

"You are lying to me," she said quietly.

"I am telling you what I see," Aldous said, releasing her hand and stepping back toward his shelves of herbs and vials, busying himself with nothing in particular. "You are the future queen of this kingdom. I would not withhold anything that threatened your health."

"Would you not?" Elena's voice hardened. "Or has someone already spoken to you before I did?"

Aldous did not answer that. He kept his back to her, arranging jars that did not need arranging, and Elena understood then that pressing further would gain her nothing except confirmation that fear, not ignorance, was keeping his mouth shut.

She left without another word, more certain than ever that something was wrong, and more alone in knowing it than she wanted to admit.

******

Logan spent that same morning somewhere far less comfortable than a healer's chamber.

He knelt beside the body of the man he had killed in the courtyard days earlier, now laid out in the palace's cold storage room, waiting for burial that kept getting delayed by court politics no one bothered explaining to him. His ribs still ached with every movement, but he forced himself through the search anyway, checking pockets, seams, the lining of the man's boots.

His fingers found something small and hard sewn into the collar of the attacker's coat. He tore the stitching open and pulled out a tiny silver token, no larger than a coin, stamped with a symbol he did not recognize. Two crossed blades beneath a closed eye.

He turned it over in his hand, frowning, when a familiar voice spoke from the doorway.

"You should not be down here alone."

Logan looked up. Finnian stood in the entrance, a stable hand Logan had known since his first days of freedom, one of the few people in the palace who had never treated him like a stranger wearing a stolen title.

"I needed answers nobody upstairs seems willing to give me," Logan said, holding up the token. "Do you know this mark?"

Finnian stepped closer, took the token from Logan's palm, and went very still.

"Where did you find this?"

"Sewn into his collar." Logan nodded toward the body. "You recognize it."

Finnian lowered his voice, glancing back toward the doorway before answering. "I served in Lord Garrick's household for two years before I came here. Men who carried tokens like this were not ordinary guards. They were his private hand. The ones he used for tasks he did not want traced back to his name."

Logan's jaw tightened. "Garrick sent the assassin."

"I did not say that." Finnian pressed the token back into Logan's hand. "I said the men who carried tokens like this once served him. Whether he still commands them now, I cannot say. But I would not carry that around in the open, not until you know who else might recognize it."

Logan closed his fist around the small piece of silver. It was not proof enough to accuse a lord of anything in open court, but it was more than he had possessed an hour ago, and it confirmed what he had already suspected since the beating in the training yard. Someone close to the throne wanted him gone, and they were not being careful enough to hide every trace of it.

"There is something else," Finnian said, quieter now. "Word among the guards is that the attacker's task was never simply to kill you."

Logan looked up sharply. "Then what was it?"

"To make it look as though you killed the king yourself," Finnian said. "The poison in his mouth, the timing of the attack so soon after Cassius's death, even the way he was positioned in your chamber. It was meant to be discovered as evidence, not just an assassination. If you had died fighting him, the court would have called it justice. A guilty man silenced before he could be questioned."

Logan sat back against the cold stone wall, the full weight of it settling over him. He had assumed someone wanted him dead simply to clear the throne for another claimant. It had not occurred to him that his death alone was not the goal. His death, wrapped in the appearance of guilt, would have destroyed everything Cassius built in a single night, and Elena along with it.

"Someone wants me remembered as a murderer," Logan said quietly. "Not just removed. Ruined."

"That is what it looks like," Finnian said. "I am sorry I do not have more than that."

"You have given me enough to start with." Logan closed his hand tighter around the token. "Thank you, Finnian. Truly."

Finnian nodded once and slipped back out of the room, leaving Logan alone with the body and a silver coin that connected a dead assassin to a man who sat in open court every day, smiling at Elena as though he had never once wished her husband dead.

******

Logan returned to his chamber near midday, exhausted, his ribs burning with every step, the silver token still clutched in his palm like the only solid thing he had found in weeks of uncertainty.

He pushed the door open and stopped.

A guard stood near his bed, another beside the window, both of them looking at him with expressions that were not friendly.

"What is this?" Logan asked.

"We received word to search your chamber," the first guard said. "Orders from Lord Garrick himself, following the attack in the courtyard. He wished to ensure no further weapons were hidden here that might endanger the palace."

"There is nothing hidden here," Logan said. "I own nothing beyond what I am wearing."

The second guard knelt beside the bed and reached beneath the frame. When his hand came back out, he was holding a thin blade wrapped in dark cloth, its edge coated with a faint, oily sheen that Logan recognized immediately.

The same poison that had killed two assassins already, sitting in his own room, hidden beneath his own bed.

"Explain this," the first guard said, his hand moving toward the hilt of his sword.

Logan stared at the blade, understanding instantly that someone had placed it there while he was gone, someone who had known exactly where to look and exactly when his chamber would be empty.

The silver token in his other hand suddenly felt very small against the weight of what was now standing in front of him.