SWNOVELS : Chapter 80
I closed the door behind Kayden and let my polite mask slip off my face, frowning. Our conversation had been very enlightening but also very heavy. I wondered if Alexander had ever actually grieved his mother, or if he had only been distracting himself for the past decade. It was sad to think about holding onto pain like that for so long.
He’d lost a part of himself when she died. That much was clear. And right at a time when the other part of him, what Alexander had referred to when last we spoke as “the absolute worst of him,” was needed most. He’d leaned into his role as Alpha when it was
required and when it was also all he felt he had left.
And he won a war as a result.
Kayden was very earnest in insisting that Alexander was not heartless. I wondered what Alexander himself thought about that rumor. Whether he would deny it, like his friend did. I somehow doubted that he would.
I for one did not believe it. Not entirely, at least.
I knew that Kayden was right – people love to talk.
They say all kinds of horrible things. I remembered Baron’s words, the ones he spat at me when I caught him screwing his mistress on the night before our wedding. He said he hated me for being cold. That I had no emotion, and it made me unlovable.
And Baron wasn’t the first person to say something like that about me. I knew very well how lots of people saw me. But I would rather be cold and intimidating
than insignificant and disregarded. And I was groomed my entire life to be a perfect Luna. I knew my Alpha prince fiancé had certainly been raised and trained to fit the role he was born into, as well.
Maybe Alexander and I had more in common than I realized. Not really in a way that made it easy for us to be together. But at least I felt like I was starting to understand him.
I had changed into a simple, comfortable dress after waking up from my nap. I needed to pick out something better for our dinner date. Suddenly I was eager for him to return. I ran my hands along the edges of the garments in my closet, thinking about what he seemed to like seeing me in best. I picked out a soft blue dress with a low, square neckline that showed a fair amount of my breasts, a white gold necklace, and diamond earrings.
And I decided I was going to be kinder to him tonight.
I was running out of anger to keep me going on the other route, anyway. I ran a bath with lavender salts and took my phone with me to soak in the tub.
I texted Alexander to let him know I was up and received his note. I wanted to ask when to expect him back, but thought better of it. I just sent my agreement to his invitation and hoped he would offer that information himself in response.
Alexander
“As far as I can tell, this woman ceased to exist the day that your mother died,” my PI was telling me.
“That was the last time any of the palace staff – the handful of them that I could find who were working at the time, at least – ever saw her there. She’s never registered a vehicle or leased or bought a residence, at least not with her legal name, since then either. No
employment, criminal or medical records that I can find. Either Iris died the day your mother did, or she’s been living as a ghost ever since.”
Alexander
“As far as I can tell, this woman ceased to exist the day that your mother died,” my PI was telling me.
“That was the last time any of the palace staff – the handful of them that I could find who were working at the time, at least – ever saw her there. She’s never registered a vehicle or leased or bought a residence, at least not with her legal name, since then either. No employment, criminal or medical records that I can find. Either Iris died the day your mother did, or she’s been living as a ghost ever since.”
“And her family never reported her disappearance?”
“No family,” he answered. He produced a file folder
from his desk drawer and passed it to me. “No father on her birth record. Mother died when she was nine, had no siblings, maternal grandparents deceased before Iris was born.”
The folder contained only a few slips of paper: a photocopy of Iris’s birth certificate, and death records for her mother and grandparents.
“And how does someone get away with that – living as a ghost?” I asked. “How do you survive in this world without leaving any trace of your existence?”
The PI drummed his fingers on his desk, considering something carefully. “You’d need a lot of help,” he said at last.
I frowned. If Iris had no family, who would have been helping her remain in hiding all these years? Her being dead was, unfortunately, sounding more and
“Tell me what you remember about the maid,” Conrad said, flipping the folder closed. I’d brought the records from the PI over to my uncle’s place, even though there was not much in there that helped us. “You said you were familiar with her.”
“Mother was very fond of Iris. She had her around all the time.” I thought back as best I could. “I suppose she and I chatted fairly often, just idle conversations though. She was soft-spoken, mild-mannered. Kind of excruciatingly innocent. She seemed to have trouble looking me in the eye.”
Conrad rolled his head in my direction, arching an eyebrow dramatically. As if to say: lots of women get shy around you.
Suddenly I remembered something. A scene flashed
before my eyes: the very last time I had spoken with Iris, right as I was about to leave to go to battle. I remembered every word of the conversation in an instant.
It was terrible that I had to go to war, Iris said. But, she admitted shyly, she did envy that I would see the world as I traveled.
I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell her that the parts of the world I was about to see were not the good ones.
I would not be visiting tourist sites after all, or anywhere any living creature would envy. I’d be in earthen trenches, stuffing my ears with cotton to keep
roaches from crawling inside them in the rare hours that I slept. Enduring the elements without a roof over my head. Going without a bath for months on end, my filthy hair matting, at times, into dark dreadlocks soaked through with mud and the black blood of vampires.
Sweet Iris was most definitely not a girl with whom a gentleman would chat about such gruesome realities.
It didn’t surprise me when she told me, that day, that the only places she had ever been were the tiny nearby village where she was born and then, after being hired to serve my mother, the insular world that existed within the palace walls.
And she said one other thing. The thing that now felt very important.
“I always wished to see the moors,” she said. “If I ever
do travel, that’s where I will go.”
If Iris survived – if Scarlet didn’t get to her first –
maybe that’s where she would have gone after fleeing the palace.
The moors were at the furthest opposite end of the continent. There was no way to drive through the mountains that divided that region of vast, largely uninhabited moorland from the rest of the country, and to travel there and back by either train or plane could take days.
If Iris was there, I needed to find her. I needed her testimony behind me when I exposed Scarlet as my mother’s killer.
I got a sharp, stabbing pain in the center of my chest when I thought about leaving Fiona, though. I didn’t know how I was going to do that. Especially not now,
while I was still trying to make amends.
I would just have to figure something out.
Kayden called as I was driving back to the palace.
“Did you check on Fiona?” I asked first.
“Yeah. And she looks good,” he said. “I only talked to her for a few minutes, but I think she’s fine, Alex. She seems okay.”
“Good. Listen, I’ve got another update about the other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll fill you in on the details later, but you and I are going to take another trip. A longer one this time, I’m afraid.”
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