Kaelen’s POV

The report crumpled in my fist like it was made of nothing.

“Say that again.”

Sir Marcus stood at rigid attention. Tyler and Jack flanked him, faces carefully blank—the professional sympathy of men who’d learned not to show fear in front of their emperor.

“Your Majesty.” Marcus kept his voice level. Measured. “Every inn, waystation, and posting house within a 200-mile radius has been checked. Twice. There is no record of her passage. No one matching her description has been seen.”

The paper compressed tighter in my palm until my knuckles whitened.

“Then you weren’t looking hard enough.”

“Sire, we’ve expanded into the smaller townships. Blind searches. Door to door where feasible. But without a confirmed direction of travel—”

“I don’t want excuses, Marcus.”

The room went very still. My voice hadn’t risen. It had dropped to a deadly whisper. That was always worse, and every man in this study knew it.

“I want results. Expand the perimeter again. Double the scouts along the northern trade roads. And send word to every border garrison—discreetly. No official dispatches. Use personal couriers only.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Go.”

They filed out in silence. The heavy oak door clicked shut behind them.

I unclenched my fist. The crumpled report fell onto the desk in a misshapen ball. Ink smudged my palm—a blur of coordinates and negatives. No sighting. No trace. No lead.

Three weeks. She’d been gone three weeks, and the greatest tracking network in the empire had turned up nothing. As if she’d walked off the edge of the world and the ground had sealed itself behind her.

I pulled open the top drawer of my desk.

The letter was there. It was always there. I carried it with me during the day—folded in my breast pocket, pressed against my chest like a wound that needed constant pressure—and placed it in the drawer only when I sat down to work. Not because I wanted distance from it. Because if I held it any longer, the paper would disintegrate.

I unfolded it carefully. The creases were soft now, almost translucent from repeated handling. Her handwriting had been steady at the top—Elara’s precise, elegant script—but by the final lines, the letters blurred and staggered. Tear-warped. Ink bleeding into the fibers where drops had fallen.

Don’t look for me.

Four words. As if those four words could erase the bond that lived in my blood. As if I could simply stop.

I read the letter again. All of it. Every line I’d memorized but couldn’t stop revisiting, searching for something I’d missed—a clue, a hint, a coded location hidden between the sentences.

There was nothing. There never was.

I pressed the paper against my forehead and closed my eyes.

Where are you, Elara?

Silence answered. The mate bond—that invisible thread between us—was stretched so thin I could barely feel it anymore. Not severed. I would know if it were severed. But muted. Distant. Like hearing someone call your name through a blizzard.

A knock at the door.

I refolded the letter. Slid it under a stack of official correspondence. Straightened my posture. Set my jaw.

“Enter.”

Sir Cassian backed through the door, a cup of coffee in each hand. He turned with that easy grin of his—the one that made him look like he’d never suffered a single day in his life, even though I’d personally stitched the scar on his left shoulder after a battle that should have killed him.

“Thought you could use this.” He set one cup in front of me and dropped into the chair across the desk. “You look terrible, by the way.”

“Thank you, Cassian. Always a comfort.”

He took a long sip, watching me over the rim. His eyes were sharp. Too sharp for a man who was supposedly just here for coffee.

“So,” he said casually. “How’s Elara? And the little one—Lyra, right? Sleeping through the night yet?”

My hand found the coffee cup. I lifted it. Drank. The liquid was too hot and tasted like ash.

“Elara’s exhausted,” I said. The lie came out smooth. Practiced. I’d been telling variations of it for weeks. “New baby. You know how it is.”

“I absolutely do not know how it is, which is why I’m asking.”

“She’s barely sleeping. Lyra has her up at all hours. Valerius is adjusting.” I allowed a small, tired smile—the kind a sleep-deprived father might wear. “It’s chaos.”

“The good kind, though.” Cassian’s expression softened. Genuine warmth. It made something behind my ribs crack.

“The good kind,” I echoed.

“Tell her I said hello. And that I’m bringing that wooden horse I promised Valerius. The carver just finished it.”

“He’ll love that.”

Cassian leaned back, stretching his long legs out. “Speaking of domestic matters—Riley and I set a date.”

“For the wedding?”

“No, for our competitive pie-eating contest. Yes, for the wedding.” He shook his head, but he was grinning. That helpless, stunned grin of a man who couldn’t believe his own luck. “Six months ago, I couldn’t even tell the woman how I felt. Now I’m choosing table linens. Life is strange.”

“Congratulations.”

“You’ll stand with me, of course.”

“Of course.”

He studied me for a moment. Something flickered behind his eyes—not suspicion exactly, but the instinct of a man who’d fought beside me long enough to sense when things were wrong.

“You sure you’re all right? You’ve been locked in this study a lot lately.”

“Empire doesn’t run itself.”

“It does, actually. That’s what advisors are for.” He stood, collecting his empty cup. “Get some sleep, Kaelen. Go home to your family.”

Family.

The word drove into me like a blade between the ribs.

“I will,” I said. “Soon.”

He clapped my shoulder on his way out. The door closed. His footsteps faded down the corridor.

The mask fell.

I pressed both palms flat on the desk and leaned forward, head hanging between my shoulders. My breathing came ragged. Uneven. The muscles in my arms trembled—not from weakness, but from the effort of holding everything in for so long that the pressure had nowhere left to go.

Go home to your family.

What family? An empty house. An empty bed. A nursery that still smelled like her, that I couldn’t enter without my chest caving in. Valerius’s books stacked by the window where she’d left them. Lyra’s blanket folded over the crib rail. Everything exactly as it was the morning I woke up and they were gone.

A sound escaped my throat. Low. Barely human.

Then the communication stone on my desk flared to life.

I snatched it up.

Brenna’s voice echoed from it—tight, clipped, exhausted.

“Riverside park. By Valerius Academy. Six o’clock.”

The stone’s magic faded into silence.

—

She was already waiting when I arrived, sitting on a weathered bench overlooking the river. The academy’s stone towers rose behind the treeline. The evening light painted the water copper and gold.

I sat beside her. Neither of us spoke for a moment.

Brenna looked older than she had three weeks ago. Shadows carved beneath her eyes. Her dark hair was pulled back in a careless knot. She stared straight ahead at the water.

“Anything?” she asked.

“Nothing. Every lead has gone cold. My trackers have covered the entire radius. She’s nowhere.”

Brenna’s jaw tightened. “She planned this.”

“I know.”

“She’s smart, Kaelen. She wouldn’t go anywhere obvious. Wouldn’t take main roads. Wouldn’t use her real name.” Brenna’s voice was steady, but her hands twisted in her lap. “We’re looking in all the wrong places.”

“Then tell me the right ones.”

Silence. The river murmured past.

“We’ve been thinking like she ran from something,” Brenna said slowly. “But what if she ran to someone?”

I turned my head. “Who? She has no family. Her ties to the Valois household are severed.”

“Not family. Someone she trusts. Someone outside the empire’s reach.” Brenna’s brow furrowed. She pressed a knuckle against her lips, thinking. “There’s one name. I almost forgot—she mentioned him once, maybe twice. From her past. Before the capital. Before all of this.”

My pulse quickened. “Who?”

“Finnian Morrison.”

The name landed like a stone in still water. I knew that name. The man from the northern border. Elara’s countryman—the one connected to her homeland, to the truth of her bloodline.

Something flickered in my chest. Small. Fragile. Dangerous, because hope was the cruelest thing a desperate man could feel.

“She trusted him,” Brenna continued. “He’s one of the only people from her old life she ever spoke about without pain.”

I stood. The bench creaked.

“Then we need to find him,” I said.