Chapter 30: The Missing Shipment

Naya was already in the royal records room when the sun came up, papers spread across the table in the same order she’d left them the night before. The inconsistency she’d found still sat there waiting for her, the emergency code referenced in the forged authorization dated weeks before the system had ever been officially announced.

She brought it straight to Ronan.

"Show me," he said, and she spread the documents across his desk, walking him through the dates line by line until he saw exactly what she’d seen.

Going through the shipment records together, they found something else. The forged order hadn’t been written to steal the entire shipment. Only a portion of it was actually missing. The rest had arrived exactly where it was supposed to, which meant whoever had done this needed the bulk of the delivery to go through normally, so nobody would think to look closer.

"That’s not carelessness," Naya said. "That’s planning."

Ronan’s expression told her he’d reached the same conclusion.

Rather than sending guards, he took her to the distribution office himself. Naya noticed the shift immediately, how naturally he’d folded her into the investigation rather than leaving her to wait for results secondhand.

The distribution officer was visibly nervous the moment they walked in, his hands fumbling slightly with the ledger he pulled from the shelf. Ronan asked straightforward questions about the shipment’s route, and the man answered carefully, almost too carefully.

Naya caught something Ronan didn’t. The officer kept referring to the emergency program as "Her Majesty’s system," a phrase that had never appeared in any official document. She’d only ever heard it used once, in an early planning conversation with Evelyn, long before the system had a name at all.

Someone had access to those early drafts.

She asked to see the physical shipment records. The officer hesitated, glancing toward Ronan as though hoping he’d intervene and end the conversation there.

Ronan started to speak.

"Let me," Naya said.

She questioned the officer herself, pressing gently but persistently until he admitted the missing portion of the shipment had been redirected to a small settlement near the border. The location existed, technically, but it wasn’t registered as an official emergency recipient anywhere in the crown’s records.

Ronan’s expression sharpened immediately.

"We should go there," Naya said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I don’t know what we’re walking into."

She held his gaze. "You said we’re partners."

He was quiet for a moment, something shifting behind his eyes. "Then we’re going together."

They rode out that same afternoon, and what they found at the settlement wasn’t what either of them expected. Instead of stolen supplies hoarded somewhere for profit, they found a cluster of families living in modest homes at the edge of crown territory, thin and worn but alive in a way that told its own story. An elderly woman approached Naya first, taking her hand and thanking her before Naya could correct the assumption that she’d personally arranged the delivery. A younger woman told her, voice trembling, that her child would have died without the medicine that arrived only days earlier.

Naya stood there absorbing it, the weight of what she was looking at settling slowly. Someone had broken the royal system, redirected supplies without authorization, forged a document with her name on it.

But not for profit. For these people.

"If we punish whoever redirected these supplies without fixing the system," Naya said to Ronan as they walked back toward the horses, "they’ll simply do it again."

"So what would you change?"

She thought it through as she spoke. "A limited emergency category for unregistered settlements. With oversight, with documentation, but with a path that doesn’t require someone to forge my signature to get medicine to a dying child."

Ronan studied her for a long moment. "You realize you’re asking me to change a system you created two days ago."

"Yes."

"And admitting it wasn’t good enough."

"Yes."

Something close to a smile crossed his face. "Good."

Before they left, something else caught Naya’s attention. The families hadn’t received generic supplies. They’d received exactly the right medicines for their specific illnesses, matched with a precision that couldn’t have come from a random redirect.

"Who submitted the original emergency request for this settlement?" she asked one of the officials traveling with them.

Nobody had an answer. There was no official request on record at all.

Naya turned that over in her mind the entire ride home. Someone had known what this settlement needed before the royal system itself had any record that they existed.

The journey back was quiet for a long while, the horses moving steadily through the fading afternoon light. Naya finally broke the silence.

"Why did you believe me?" she asked. "In council. Before you had any proof."

Ronan didn’t answer right away. "Because I’ve watched you," he said finally. "You could have taken advantage of your position by now. You haven’t."

"That’s a low standard."

"It wasn’t the standard I used before."

Naya let that sit between them. It wasn’t an apology, not exactly, but she understood what it meant, the quiet acknowledgment that he’d once measured her entirely against Elara’s shadow and had finally stopped.

She didn’t forgive everything he’d put her through in those first weeks. But she understood, at least, what he was trying to say.

By the time they reached the palace, an aide was already waiting with a report that made Ronan’s jaw tighten the moment he read it. The missing shipment wasn’t isolated. Three other royal deliveries had disappeared over the past month, all of them routed to poor or unofficial settlements that had no formal standing within the crown’s system.

"Someone has been doing this for a while," Naya said, reading over his shoulder.

Ronan’s expression hardened further as his eyes moved down the page. Then he stopped, his finger resting on a date near the bottom of the report.

The first missing shipment had occurred weeks before Naya had ever become Queen.

Whoever was behind this hadn’t started because of her.

They’d been manipulating the crown’s supply system long before she ever set foot in this palace.