Free Web NovelChapter 85: Chapter 85 The Toughest One
_Author’s POV_
Alice had a great deal of time to think.
The house arrest gave her that. The restricted rooms, the limited movement, the guards rotating outside her door in shifts that never left a gap long enough to be useful. She had spent the first week being angry about the walls and the second week doing something more productive with the anger. freēwēbnovel.com
She had started planning.
The physician visited every three days. Alice had been monitoring his expressions carefully since the first visit, watching how he received information, what made him write things down and what made him pause. She understood how medical people thought. They were trained to believe what patients told them about their own bodies because the body’s interior was not visible from the outside and patients were the primary source of data.
She gave him data.
She described symptoms she didn’t have. Fatigue that went beyond what her actual condition produced. Dizziness. A heaviness in her chest that she framed carefully enough to suggest deterioration without being specific enough to be tested against objective findings. She watched him write and she calibrated the performance based on what she saw him write.
The report that went to Rowena’s desk would reflect concern.
That was step one.
Step two required more patience.
She had asked for paper and something to write with. The request had been framed as wanting to put affairs in order, which was consistent with the picture she had been painting of her health and which no one had reason to deny a woman they believed was declining. The paper had arrived the next morning with a pen and the particular satisfied expression of staff who had done something they considered compassionate.
What she wrote was not the settling of affairs.
She actually wrote to Drake.
Not a long letter. She didn’t need length. Drake knew the situation, knew the timeline, knew what his father had asked of him with his last words in that garden. What he needed from her was timing and specific instructions for the window she had identified.
The competition was coming.
She had been following the preparations through the TV in her room and one source she still had inside the household, a person so carefully placed and so consistently unremarkable that Rowena’s thorough dismantling of the staff network had passed over them entirely. Not a steward. Not anyone whose role brought them into contact with sensitive household information. Someone whose job was quiet and physical and who had been there before Alice had even arrived, recruited slowly and patiently over years because Alice had always believed in building things that lasted.
The letter left the mansion through that channel the same afternoon it was written.
The competition would bring every major figure in the region into one location. Security would be spread across an enormous venue rather than concentrated in a small space. Movement during the event would be constant and the noise would be continuous and attention would be pointing in one direction.
Alice had spent her entire career identifying the gap between where attention was pointing and where it wasn’t.
The competition was a gap large enough to walk through.
She folded her hands in her lap after the letter was gone and looked at the wall of her restricted room and allowed herself, for the first time in weeks, something that was not quite a smile but was in that direction.
Rowena had been thorough. She deserved credit for that. She had dismantled Alice’s network with a carefulness and patience that Alice would have admired in different circumstances. She had taken apart every visible structure and sealed every obvious exit.
But Rowena had been looking for what she knew to look for.
She hadn’t found everything.
Rowena was at her desk reviewing correspondence when Gabriel’s document arrived, it was a plain file, and had plain handwriting, nothing that announced what it contained.
She opened it.
Gabriel was careful with his language even in communications she was the only person intended to read. Short sentences. No names where a description would do. No specific locations where a general direction sufficed. They had established this practice early and it had served them well.
The first line settled something in her chest.
Corby had been captured.
She read it twice. Then she sat with it for a moment and let the weight of it land properly.
Manager Corby had done more harm than good. He had been in that role for years before she had understood what he actually was, and identifying him had taken longer than she would have liked precisely because he was so good at appearing to be nothing.
He was captured now. Which meant the network had lost its coordinator. The pieces still existed but they would be slower and less connected and more likely to make mistakes without someone organizing the flow between them.
She moved to the second part of the letter.
Drake was still free.
Gabriel’s people had tracked him to the outer districts, a credible trail, close enough to suggest they were narrowing it. Then the trail had stopped. Not gradually, it was the trails stopped when someone moved on naturally, but abruptly, in a way that suggested the person had been warned and had changed direction intentionally.
Someone had definitely warned him.
Which meant someone connected to Alice’s network was still active and still communicating with Drake and had not been identified yet.
She put the letter down and looked at the window.
She thought about the competition. About the timing of it, the size of the venue, the concentration of people and attention and noise. Without being told, she knew Alice hasn’t repented yet. That woman had spent her entire life being evil, of course wouldn’t change just like that.
She thought about the gap between what Alice showed and what Alice was.
She got up and went to find Kasper.
She found him in the east corridor and told him to double the watch on Alice’s rooms and to have every item that had left the restricted area in the past week reviewed, including things that seemed insignificant.
She told him she wanted the identity of every staff member whose background went back further than three years re-examined.
Kasper listened without interrupting. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
"You think she’s already made contact with someone outside," he said when she finished.
"I think she’s been planning since the day we put her in those rooms," Rowena said. "And I think the competition is the window she’s identified." She paused. "Make sure our people at the venue are briefed separately from the main security coordination. I want our own eyes there that aren’t connected to the official arrangement."
"Done," Kasper said.
She walked back to her study.
She had a competition to prepare for and a threat she hadn’t fully located and a grandmother who wasn’t willing to give up. She just couldn’t inform her that she was joining the competition. This was the Alpha King’s way of rewarding families with good kinship.
There were other several competitions, but she preferred this one, the toughest one.
