Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 23: What Eren knows

~LYRA’S POV~

I walked into the session already somewhere else in my head.

Eren’s strategy sessions had a rhythm to them by now, maps first, then troop positioning, then the broader political questions he liked to frame as puzzles rather than problems. I liked them, usually. They were the one part of my training that felt less like being shaped into something and more like being trusted to think.

But today I sat down across from him and the maps on the table might as well have been blank.

He let it go for the first ten minutes. Asked me something about the western alliance routes, got a half-answer that was probably technically correct and completely hollow, and moved on without comment. Asked me about the troop rotation proposal Ryland had put forward last week. I gave him something that resembled an opinion.

Then he stopped mid-sentence.

He just looked at me. Not with impatience, not with concern exactly, just that particular stillness he had, the kind that made you feel like he was actually seeing you and not just waiting for you to finish talking.

"Where are you right now?" he said.

"I’m here," I said. "Sorry, I’m just..."

"Lyra."

I stopped.

The deflection was already formed. Fine, just tired, let’s keep going, I’m sorry, let me focus. I had the whole thing ready to go.

I didn’t say it.

Because the thing about Eren was exactly this, he didn’t flinch, and he didn’t panic, and he had never once run to Ryland with something I’d told him before I was ready for Ryland to know it. He had a way of receiving information without turning it into a crisis, which made him the only person in my life right now that I could tell this to without immediately having to manage their reaction on top of managing my own.

So I told him.

I laid it out the same way I’d organised it in my head, carefully, in sequence, without dramatising any of it. The physical aches I couldn’t trace back to training. The jaw tension. Ryland referencing a conversation I’d gone to him for that I had no memory of. The midnight walk I apparently took past his study door and spoke to him through and came back from thirty minutes later, none of which I could find a single fragment of in my own recollection. The kitchen maid. The inventory I’d run, day by day.

The gaps. What they looked like. How they sat.

Eren listened the whole way through without interrupting once. He didn’t shift in his seat. He didn’t change expression in any way that I could read as alarm. He just listened, with the full attention of someone who understood that the most useful thing he could offer right now was to hear it completely before he said anything.

When I finished, he asked one question.

"When did you first notice it?"

"Yesterday," I said. "When Ryland mentioned the study. But I don’t know when it actually started.

He nodded, slowly, once. Then he started walking me backward.

"Five days ago," he said. "Talk me through that day."

I could. Morning to night, I had it in full training with Kael in the early afternoon, the council briefing document Ryland had asked me to review, dinner, the conversation by the fire, sleep. Clear. All of it clear.

"Four days ago."

I opened my mouth to answer and stopped.

I reached back and found the beginning of the day, breakfast, I thought, or maybe I skipped it, and then nothing. A wall. The same clean absence I’d found when I’d done this alone in my room.

"I can’t..." I started.

"Three days ago."

Nothing.

"Two days ago."

"It’s all blurred," I said. "From four days back, it’s all just, gone."

Eren said, almost to himself,

"Four days ago." His expression didn’t alarm me, but it did something. It went somewhere private for a moment, the way his face sometimes did when he was making a connection he wasn’t ready to share yet. Like a door closing quietly in a room full of other open doors.

"Any idea what could have caused it?" he said.

"No." I watched him. "Do you?"

He looked at me for a moment without answering. Then he stood and moved to the window, which was what he did when he was thinking and needed to not be looked at directly while he did it.

"Talk to Ryland," he said.

"There may be someone in Silverclaw with the right knowledge to look at this properly. A healer with the right background, or an elder who’s seen something like it before." He turned back. "I can’t do much from where I’m standing right now. But I’ll look into it on my end."

"What does that mean, look into it?"

"It means I have access to sources you don’t," he said. Not dismissively. Just factually. "Give me a little time."

"Eren." I kept my voice even. "What do you think it is?

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I have a thought," he said carefully. "But I’d rather be sure before I say it out loud. Saying it before I’m sure doesn’t help you, it just gives you something to worry about that might turn out to be wrong."

It wasn’t a dismissal. I knew the difference with him by now. It was a door he wasn’t opening yet, and he wasn’t opening it because he’d decided not to, not because he didn’t trust me with what was behind it. There was a difference and with Eren it mattered.

"Alright," I said.

"Go to Ryland," he said again. "Today, not tomorrow."

—

~EREN’S POV~

I stood at the window long after she was gone.

Four days ago.

I ran the number over again, because I needed it to sit still in my mind so I could look at it properly. Four days ago was the same stretch of time Ryland had mentioned at our last meeting.

I moved away from the window and pulled the secondary text from the shelf I kept locked, the one with the older material that I didn’t leave accessible. I’d read the relevant passages twice before but I wanted to read them again now, with a specific question rather than general interest.

She had gaps. And her body was somewhere she didn’t know about during those hours.