Alexander
We finished up our training session and I walked back to our room at the far end of the West Wing slowly, thinking carefully about what I was going to say to Fiona.
I could not accuse her outright. But how could I even bring it up without accusing her? What was the first thing I could say to start the conversation? It seemed like a no-win situation.
But just as I was approaching our room, the door opened and she came out.
She turned in my direction, but did not see me, masked as I happened to be under the dark of a heavy shadow. And she was in a hurry.
Fiona locked the door behind her and turned in the opposite direction. I saw, to my surprise, an envelope in her hand. She hurried away, light-footed, and I followed her at a distance.
The accomplice was waiting for her just before a sharp turn in the corridor would start leading back to the palace proper. I saw the man before she did, though I was far behind her. Fiona may have been a skilled fighter, but she had never seen battle. Had never known the need to be on your guard at every moment, to peer deep into shadows, never letting yourself trust anyone or anything—even your own eyes.
Fiona nearly jumped out of her skin when the man emerged from the shadow. Actually, it looked like she came very close to taking him out. But she stopped herself before she could trip his heel, and silently passed the envelope over to the dark figure instead.
He disappeared back into darkness in the next second, leaving Fiona to whirl around and retreat in the direction of our bedroom. I fled before she could stumble upon me in the dark, too. I could not go straight to our room. That’s where she was heading. I ducked around a corner and let her pass me by.
We spent that night lying side by side in bed, with an undeniable but unspeakable tension filling the room around us. I did not know what was going on inside Fiona’s head. But a whirlwind of thoughts, doubts, fears, and imagined scenarios was tearing around inside mine.
I got up at first light and dressed quickly. Fiona was still in bed, quiet and unmoving though I suspected she was awake and had been, just like me, all night long.
I called Kayden and told him to meet me in the courtyard. He arrived minutes later, jogging over with messy hair and a dark stubble beard.
“Have a late night last night?” I asked.
He gave me a blank look and shrugged, not following where I was going with this.
“Did you know you had an audience? When you were out here having sex with Nina last night?”
Kayden’s face turned pale and he dropped his eyes to the ground. “Shit…” he murmured under his breath. “Ugh, God, I’m so sorry Alexander.”
I waved a hand at him. Reprimanding Kayden for indiscreet behavior was not my priority right now.
“Just answer a few questions for me,” I said, and he nodded. “What was Nina doing here?”
“Oh,” he said, looking surprised by my question. “Fiona invited her over for breakfast yesterday, and I drove her here. I guess we, uh, just kind of lost track of time after that. I took her back home before pm training.”
I nodded slowly, looking into the distance. The morning sky was lightening, getting brighter by the second. Soon the rest of the men would be joining us here for our morning workout.
I pulled the letter out of my pocket and passed it to Kayden. He may as well see it and know everything that I knew. My beta was not just my second in command, after all—Kayden was pretty much the only person in the world I felt certain I could trust to have my back.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, scanning the letter with wide eyes.
“Have you seen it before?”
Kayden looked up at me, his face a portrait of shock. “No. What the hell is this? Is this real?”
I threw my hands up. “Best I can tell, yes. And you asked where I got it from? One of our men, the perv who was watching you with Nina, said he found it in the pocket of her shorts when he went to steal her panties.”
Kayden’s jaw dropped. He looked at the letter in his hand, back up to me, and then out at the distant spot where the events in question had taken place some twelve hours or so ago. My usually well-spoken friend was at a total loss for words.
“Listen,” I told him. “I just need to figure out what the hell is going on, and I need your help.”
“Of course.” Kayden passed the letter back to me and stood back, ready to listen.
I started Kayden running drills with the rest of the men, while I took the soldier who had found the letter aside to interview him on the subject one more time.
I put the man in a room downstairs and kept him waiting a while, to see if he would start getting anxious. Like someone with a secret is apt to do.
But when I entered the room a little over half an hour later, I could not read his energy right away. He was borderline. Not quite antsy with obvious guilt. But there was something off. I just could not place what it was.
“Tell me one more time about the letter you found,” I instructed him.
“Not much I could tell you, boss. I’ve forgotten everything I saw in it.” He smiled up at me, pleased with himself for remembering my line.
I was not amused. “Tell me again,” I repeated, “how you found the letter. And why you picked it up.”
He nodded respectfully then and did what I asked of him. Told me the story just the same as he had the night before. Only this time, he peppered in some additional, wholly unnecessary details about Nina in the process.
“And you were alone when you found them?” I looked the soldier square in the eye and saw him hesitate when I asked this. “You weren’t alone. Who was with you?”
He scratched his head nervously and cleared his throat. “The new recruit,” he said. “We were out smoking in the parking lot. Went out to get a pack of cigarettes from my truck. We were walking back across the courtyard when we saw them.”
I dismissed the man quickly and pulled the recruit in. He was sweaty and breathless from the training Kayden was running in my absence. We went through the whole thing. I asked pointed questions, trying to find what I was missing. There was a hole in the story somewhere. Something that did not make sense.
But the young man answered all my questions easily. He corroborated every bit of the other soldier’s story, much to my displeasure.
Because the picture that their story painted was not a pretty one.
It was a picture in which my supposedly devoted fiancée was enlisting her friends to help her hide secrets from me. The same fiancée that I had seen hand-delivering a letter to a shadowy figure the night before, following the exact instructions laid out by her father in his letter inviting her into a conspiracy against me.
